CYCLOPS

Scott Summers said his vows to a woman wearing his dead girlfriend's face. Madelyne Pryor, an Alaskan cargo pilot, walked out of a plane crash alive on the very day Jean Grey died on the Moon, and when Scott met her in Uncanny X-Men #168 (1983) he was staring at Jean's identical double. He even asked her outright whether she was the Phoenix returned, and she punched him for it.

Mastermind then weaponised that resemblance, projecting a Dark Phoenix illusion around Madelyne to trick the X-Men into killing an innocent woman. Scott saw through the deception, the villain fell, and the wedding went ahead in Uncanny X-Men #175 (1983) — the title's twentieth-anniversary issue — barely seven issues after the couple's first meeting.

Years later, a retcon supplied the explanation nobody had wanted: Madelyne had been grown in a lab by Mr. Sinister as a clone of Jean, seeded into Scott's path so their child would inherit a formidable mix of Summers and Grey genes. That baby, Nathan, grew up to become Cable, and Madelyne's eventual discovery of her own manufactured origins drove her transformation into the Goblin Queen during Inferno.