HAVOK
Real Name: Alex Summers
Height: 6'
Weight: 175 lbs.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Blonde
Group Affiliation: X-Factor
Powers: Plasma Bursts
First Appearance: Uncanny X-Men #54, March 1969

The younger brother of Cyclops, Havok's earliest memories are those of he and his brother being pushed from a doomed plane by their parents. Equipped with the only parachute in the plane, their survival seemed certain, but the chute failed to open. Cyclops saved them when his mutant ability manifested for the first time, using his optic blasts to slow their descent. Their parents presumed dead, the two were carted off to an orphanage, where Havok was adopted almost immediately. But even this did not free him from Sinister's interference, and the villain toyed with and tested his mettle at an early age.

Armed with the formidable power to absorb cosmic energy and release it as concentrated plasma blasts, Havok could be a deadly foe in battle. But like his brother, he found himself unable to control his mutant ability and has ever had to wear special costumes to control the power housed within his body. His super-hero career began when the Living Pharoah kidnapped him for his mutant abilities, thinking to use him as a pawn. The X-Men rescued him from the villain's influence and he joined the team for a short time. Long enough to meet Lorna Dane (Polaris) and fall in love. When the new team of X-Men rescued he and his teammates from the Living Island, Krakoa, he retired with her to live out a normal life. He rejoined the X-Men when Polaris came up missing, having been possessed by the entity Malice, of the Marauders. Tormented by the fate of his love, Havok began to despair of his luck in life. Indeed, no other X-Man has been mentally manipulated to villainy and moved to switch sides as often as Havok.

He went up against Polaris several times alongside the X-Men, and each time, she nearly killed him, Malice's control was so complete. But this was not the only grievance in Havok's life. Ever feeling that he lived in his brother's shadow, the sibling between he and Cyclops was prominent everytime they met. This, coupled with his loss of Polaris and the lack of control over his powers, seemed to send him into a downward spiral. His judgement impaired, perhaps, by these events, his first true betrayal of the X-Men came when he joined forces with Madelyne Pryor, Cyclops' former wife and the Goblyn Queen. After her death, he stayed with the X-Men, but with a decidedly more jaded view. His second fall from grace came when Psylocke tricked the X-Men through the Siege Perilous, believing that they would not survive if the remained in Australia. The good and bad within his soul weighed, he was judged by the Siege Perilous and dropped where the magical device felt he belonged and would do the most good. The fact that he started a new life on the wrong side as a Genoshan Magistrate did not speak well of the intent within his heart.

The Genoshans were a group of humans who enslaved mutants in their homeland, the Magistrates the enforcers of this law. When the X-Men were brought to the island for a final showdown, he met Cyclops in battle and tried his best to kill him. Of course, he could not since their powers do not affect one another. Cyclops did everything he could to jar Havok's memories, to give him a sense of who he had been. In the end, Havok returned to the side of good, helping the X-Men defeat the Genoshans and the mastermind behind it all, Cameron Hodge. Shortly thereafter, he took up the role of leader of the new X-Factor team. Reunited with Polaris, who was now free of Malice's influence, everything seemed to be going well for Havok.

Then, the power within him ever hard to contain, he began to lose control of it. Shortly thereafter, he was captured by the mutant known as Random, who took him back to his present "employer", the Black Beast. A twisted version of this worlds Hank McCoy (Beast), he brainwashed Havok into joining his team of mutants and boosted his already incredible power. The Dark Beast's control seemed complete when he went up against X-factor, and his love, Polaris. He nearly killed her in the ensuing battle, and following that, he did his best to kill Cyclops as well. He joined the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants directly afterward, and led them for a time, seeming to have given in completely to the darkness in his soul. In truth, he was shaking loose of the dark Beast's machinations, and using the Brotherhood as a front to gather information on the Black Beast's plans. Still clinging to Professor Xavier's original dream, Havok's latest betrayal seems to have been done with the best of intentions.

He returned to leading X-Factor, and recently, he and the team sabotaged an effort by the Dark Beast to infect humans with the Legacy Virus. Quickly following that, though, the team witnessed what they believed to be Havok's death as he tried to stop one of the team members from traveling through time. Instead of dying though, Alex has found himself thrust into a strange parallel earth alongside X-Men who are much different from the ones he has always known. As he learns about these strange X-Men, pretending to be the Alex Summers they have always known, he desperately searches for a way home.


Strength level: Havok possesses the normal human strength of a man his age, height and build who engages in intensive regular exercise.

Known superhuman powers: Havok is a mutant with the superhuman ability to absorb ambient cosmic energy into the cells of his body, transform it in an unknown manner, and release it as waves of energy that heat the air in their path enough to turn it into plasma. (Plasma is a super-heated state of matter consisting of charged subatomic particles.) These waves will emanate from his body in all directions unless he purposefully tries to channel them in a single directions, usually along the length of his arms. Havok is himself immune to the intense heat he creates. Whether he is immune to intense heat from other sources is not yet known.

Despite past accounts, the energy that Havok releases is not truly a concussive force. When Havok strikes an object with the waves of intensity of hot plasma, the sudden vast jump in temperature will often cause objects to shatter, explode, or seemingly disintegrate, and an observer might therefore wrongly think that the object had been struck by a concussive force. Should Havok direct his energy at the lowest level, he can project it towards a human being and his target will suffer a severe headache but will not burn up.

Havok's body is constantly in the process of absorbing cosmic radiation. When each of his body's power-storage cell enclaves reaches its capacity, excess cosmic energy is thereafter absorbed and immediately re-emitted in negligible quantities. Upon the total expenditure of all his available energy, it takes Havok's body about 16.5 hours to recharge to its peak level. The act of concentration involved in releasing his energy in anything other than an omnidirectional wave is physically exhausting for Havok if he continues it over an extended period of time


Updated August 26, 1998

Havok has had guests since March 19, 1998





This history written by Onyx, please do not use without permission. Stats copied from Marvel Comics.