Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

Earlier this week, I was on Comic Book Club Live and co-host Alex Zalben noted how happy he was to see Cypher appearing in Charles Soule and Matteo Buffagni's Hunt For Wolverine: Weapon Lost series. That reminded me of an amusing story about how it came to be that Cypher was killed off in the pages of New Mutants. So I figured I'd share said story (I referenced this in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed from literally over a decade ago, but it was actually in a different context, debunking a different rumor about why Cypher was killed off).

Cypher's story began in, appropriately enough, New Mutants, specifically New Mutants #13 (by Chris Claremont, Sal Buscema and Tom Mandrake), where we meet Kitty Pryde's new computer buddy, Doug Ramsey...

You have to love Doug's adorable hacking outfit. It's like if Alex P. Keaton was a computer hacker!

New Mutants #13 was also the issue where Kitty and the New Mutants have a little bit of a rift between them going back to Kitty's "Professor X is a jerk!" tirade from a year earlier when he suggested putting her with the New Mutants.

So anyhow, Doug is soon Kitty's regular pal in the pages of Uncanny X-Men, like in Uncanny X-Men #180 (by Chis Claremont, John Romita Jr. and Dan Green)...

Colossus, meanwhile, is all, "Oh man, this is bogus, my 14 year old girlfriend has a 14 year old guy friend now, I'm never going to get her to continue to be interested in our age inappropriate relationship any more! He knows computers and everything!"

Kitty goes along with Doug on a trip to Emma Frost's Massaschhuessts Academy, which had human students mixed in with some hidden mutant students, as well. This, of course, turns out to be a trap for Kitty Pryde, as Emma knew that Kitty was pals with Doug and would travel with him. It was Kitty'd bad luck that this took place during Secret Wars, so the X-Men were not around to help save her.

Luckily, the New Mutants save her and Doug is none the wiser that they were ever in any danger.

Of course, this being the X-Men and, particularly, this being Chris Claremont, Doug turns out to be a mutant, as well!!

In New Mutants #21 (by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz), the team reveals their mutant identities to Doug and also tell him that HE's a mutant, as they need him to communicate with the technological life form that they just met named Warlock. Doug handles it relatively well, to be frank...

Within a few issues, Doug is just part of the team...

The problem was, though, that Doug's ability to understand any language (including computer languages) was something that work pretty darn well in today's highly digital age, but back in the mid-1980s, it was seen as a bit of an esoteric power and it was definitely not something that was very VISUAL, so very often, they would have Doug merge with Warlock to form a sort of "Douglock" being with more powers, like in this bit from New Mutants Annual #2...

Note that in that issue, he had a bit of an age inappropriate relationship of his own with Psylocke. Anyhow, the key thing, though, was that due to his esoteric (for the time) power and his lack of a very strong visual, fans HATED him. They disliked him so much that Louise Simonson, who took over as the writer on New Mutants from Chris Claremont, did something drastic...

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As she explained on USENET back in 1999, when reflecting about Doug "I know you’ll find this hard to believe… there was a write-in campaign from LOTS of readers who hated him and thought he was boring and wanted us to get rid of him. Preferably…they wanted him dead. We got LOTS and LOTS of these letters.

So I decided to call these readers’ bluffs and do exactly what they were asking for. (On the other hand, I never kill a character without knowing exactly how I’m going to bring them back…if I so choose. It is comic books, after all! With Doug/Cypher, the way was obvious.) Sooo…"

And so, in New Mutants #60 (by Simonson and artist Bret Blevins), Doug ended up taking a bullet from the villainous Animator that was meant for Wolfsbane, who Doug had recently started dating...

This is how messed up this was - no one even noticed that Doug was dead in the comic! It wasn't until PAGES later that they were, like, "Hey, Doug? Doug?" and noticed that he had been dead this whole time...

In a delightfully disturbing bit a few issues later, Warlock couldn't understand what they mean with Doug being "dead," so he kept trying to merge with Doug's corpse...

That's so bleak!!

By the way, in Wizard's X-Men special for the 30th anniversary of the X-Men, Louise Simonson also mentioned how much the artists she worked with disliked Doug, as well, "He wasn't fun to draw. He just stood around and hid behind a tree during a fight... Every artist who ever did him said 'Can't we kill this guy?' We would get letters from fans about how much they hated him. We never got any letters from people saying they liked him until he was dead."

As Simonson noted above, this being comics, of course Doug came back. Peter David did an interesting new take on the character as part of the short-lived All-New X-Factor, and now Charles Soule is doing another sort of take on the whole Cypher concept in Weapon Lost...

He's certainly come a long way from being a guy that was killed off as a sort of a challenge to the fans who kept asking for him to be killed! 1988 was a bad year for fans wanting young superheroes dead. They got Jason Todd and then they got Doug Ramsey.

Of course, they're both back now! So it's all good, bloodthirsty comic book readers of 1988!

That's it for this installment! If you have any ideas for interesting pieces of comic book history, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!