I will now bore you on the subject of the Phoenix. Be warned.
Iteration 0
Originally, the transformation of Jean Grey into Phoenix in the space between Uncanny X-Men #'s 100 and 101 was meant to have happened thus:
Jean flies a space shuttle through a particularly deadly radiation storm. The shuttle's shielding is damaged. So she forcibly stows the other X-Men in a shielded compartment and pilots the ship down herself (having telepathically learned to fly off of somebody). The radiation storm does what all good radiation does in the MU: It gives her Real Ultimate Power.
The saga of Phoenix, then, is that by an accident Jean Grey became this incredibly powerful being, and what it did to her. As she channels greater and greater levels of TK she begins to lose it more and more, till she freaks out completely, flies off into deep space and munches on a few stars, including at least one with inhabited worlds.
She then comes back to Earth for a final showdown and, of course, the X-Men talk her out of it. Just when it looks like Scott has persuaded her not to eat everybody, Xavier steps in and mindblasts the bejeesus out of her, placing mental blocks over her power so she can keep it blocked forever.
Iteration 1
Except.
Iteration 0 didn't even make it out of Marvel editorial. The reason was that then Ed-in-Chief Jim Shooter insisted that Jean "has to die". Shooter's reasoning, back at the end of the 1970's, was that heroes don't kill. This was still pretty canonically enshrined in the MU in those days. And Jean wasn't just an accidental killer. She had wantonly destroyed an entire inhabited world. Simply getting a quick hypnotic addiction-fix from Chuckie and saying, "I'm sorry" would not be enough, Shooter felt. So he insisted that Claremont and Byrne end the story with Jean's death.
To be honest, he was perfectly right. If Jean hadn't died then no-one would look back on the Phoenix Saga as a particularly important or moving part of X-Men history. The willingness to put a character through so much trauma and turmoil, and then to end with a moment of (what was intended to be) genuine tragedy, is one of the things that distinguished X-Men from its competition of the day.
So right after Xavier's given her blocks, the Shi'ar empire show up and put Jean on trial for genocide. Xavier invokes the ancient rite of trial by combat to which all super-advanced interstellar empires must still adhere, and the X-Men are pitted against the Imperial Guard. The "arena" is the Blue Area of the Moon so that Uatu can step in to say pithy things at the end. Of course, the Impies club the X-Men down pretty savagely till only Jean and Scott are left, at which point Jean loses her shit, breaks through Xavier's wards and turns back into Phoenix. The X-Men wake up and fight her a bit more and then, fearing that she is about to kill her friends, she commits suicide with the last of her human will.
Jean Grey, formerly known as Marvel Girl, later known as Phoenix, was dead.
Iteration 2
Flash-forward to the late 1980's. Claremont was still toying with the "dark future" that he and Byrne had introduced in 'Days of Futures Past'. He brought back Rachel (a redhead of unknown origin from DofP who had mindswitched Kitty Pryde's adult self with her teenaged self in that original story) and had her physically return to the present day. In short order, Rachel was revealled as the daughter of Scott Summers and the Jean Grey of her world, who had become Phoenix but kept control of her mind and powers. Shortly thereafter, Rachel claimed the power of the Phoenix for herself.
Quite how this was supposed to work was anyone's guess. But it might be related to...
Iteration 3
"I sometimes think that in mutant heaven there are no Pearly Gates, merely revolving doors."
- Charles Xavier (written by Peter David)
Also in the late '80's the bright sparks in Marvel Editorial decided to add a third X-title to the roster of Uncanny and New Mutants. The title, X-Factor, was to feature the five original X-Men. Of course, Bobby, Hank and Warren hadn't been near the team in ages. Scott had left the X-Men (see below) so could be recruited. But Jean was dead.
Hey, no problem.
So this was where the meaty retcon comes in: Jean Grey, of a sudden, was not the Phoenix. Instead of being a human being granted power by an incomprehensible cosmic accident, Phoenix was now suddenly an energy being, a "celestial avatar". Turns out that she'd come to Jean during that gap between Uncanny #'s 100 and 101 and offered to switch places with her. It wasn't Jean's intelligence or power that attracted the Phoenix to her. No, in typical X-Men style, it was her passion for life, and her love for and commitment to her friends. So the Phoenix placed Jean's radiation-burned body inside some sort of cocoon and then created an exact duplicate of her flesh for itself to wear. The shuttle came down in Jamaica Bay. And then the Phoenix cheated on the deal. It burst out of the water, pretending to be Jean, and left the real Jean down there in her cocoon.
So now it wasn't Jean but some weird energy-being clone of Jean which had either tricked itself into thinking it was Jean or had forgotten that it wasn't Jean or maybe was just a really compulsive liar. And it was responsible all the time for everything the Phoenix did. So Jean, the real Jean, was still in her pod in Jamaica Bay, still Marvel Girl, never did any of those cosmic things, and could be fished up at leisure, morally exonerated.
We have Kurt Busiek to thank for this particular wonder of continuity.
Iteration 4
The other effect of the retcon, beyond ensuring that Jean had never been Phoenix, was to redefine the Phoenix as this energy being. People started talking about "Phoenix force" an unnecessary amount. And it wasn't clear how much consciousness the Phoenix had at different points.
This was important because of Madelyne Prior.
Before the Jean Grey retcon ever started, Claremont had decided to celebrate 25 years of X-Men (ca 1988) with a thematic reprise of the Dark Phoenix story. With this in mind, he brought back the villain Mastermind, who had been responsible for corrupting Jean and turning her into "Dark Phoenix" in the first place (long story). He also introduced a new girlfriend for Scott - Madelyne Prior, a woman who was an exact double of Jean. More spookily still, Madelyne was an amnesiac, having walked as the sole survivor from a burning plane wreck on the exact same night that "Jean" committed suicide on the moon.
Boy, the guys who wrote Dallas didn't know what they were missing.
Scott and Maddie met, fell in love, defeated Mastermind (who had of course ensorceled Scott into thinking Maddie was the Phoenix when, in fact, she wasn't) and got married. Scott left the X-Men and they moved to Alaska to work as pilots for some hauling firm. Shortly after, Jim Shooter (or possibly Ann Nocenti) called him up and mentioned that the 100% Real Jean was back, and going to be appearing in X-Factor. So Scott Summer did the shittiest thing of his life: Abandoned his wife and newborn son and went running off after the girl he used to crush on in high school.
My opinion
The trouble is that any one of these follow-ups to the original Phoenix story might have worked. In the manner of sequels, they wouldn't've been as good, but they were all passable ideas. But to have the energy being, the original Jean, the mysterious body-double and the future-daughter from alternate Earth all running around at the same time ... well, that was just asking for trouble.
There was just too much, and something had to give.
Iteration 5
Where Claremont had originally planned to go with Madelyne Prior I will never know. Maybe no-one will. But with Phoenix and Jean out there, it was decided she just couldn't take the competition. So Marvel turned her into a villain, then killed her.
It turned out that Scott had always been under the manipulation of a bad old villain named (brilliantly) "Mr Sinister". He was obsessed with Scott for various pseudo-mystical reasons, and 'cause he had a whopping vulnerability to Scott's optic blasts. How inconvenient. Sinister had long ago decided Jean Grey and Scott could produce the Perfect Child, so he swiped some of Jean's DNA to study. Then when "Jean" got herself inconveniently killed he decided he'd better go to his backup plan: He grew himself a clone of Jean and named her Madeline Pryor. ("Prior" -- get it???)
Now the clone (somehow) existed by the time when Phoenix committed suicide on the moon. The traumatised Phoenix entity left its (now defunct) mortal shell and set off to find and free the real Jean, returning to her the "life essence" and memories it had borrowed. Didn't happen though. Instead, the poor cosmic dearie got a bit confused and ended up finding Maddie, infusing her with a (comparatively small) portion of its power and a whole bunch of repressed memories.
Power and memories both then lay dormant for many years, until they were drawn to the surface by the whims of the almighty plot.
There were these demons, right, and... oh god. I don't think I can go through with this. Madelyne becomes eeeeeeeeeeeeevil, okay, dresses up in some extremely dodgy lingerie (designed by Silvestri, I believe) and starts calling herself "the Goblin Queen". Yeah, I know. This was the period where Claremont was unrestrainedly getting his perv on. She and Sinister fight the X-Men and X-Factor and at the end of the day, Maddie dies, but not before returning to Jean the "life essence" and memories that the Phoenix had borrowed all those years ago. Sinister gets blasted into component atoms by Cyclops (in a particularly graphic "flaying" visual by Walt Simonson, quite cool, really) and manages to stay dead for almost 3 years before Peter David brings him back in a bit part in X-Factor.
So.
Exeunt Sinister. Yay. Exeunt Maddie, and "Phoenix". And the one good effect of all this was in cleaning up an assload of loose threads. Jean finally has all the memories of all three characters. So she effectively is all three characters, but without moral stain. So Jim Shooter can let her live. And she can function in stories that would've required any of the three of them.
Iteration X
Now if they'd only left Rachel Summers alone....
To be fair, Alan Davis took quite a good stab at dealing with Rachel and the Phoenix during his run on Excalibur. But there was just too much crazy mojo flying around the MU in those days. Plus, the Lobdell era didn't do anybody any favours with regard to Phoenix either. This was where I stopped reading, so I can't really keep track of things, until...
Iteration Y
Thank God. Grant Morrisson writes X-Men, invokes "superconsistency" and throws out all of the above garbage. The Phoenixes (Phoenices?) now become a more caballistic version of the Green Lantern Corps, talk about crown chakras and operate in a wholly different way.
And we finally get a Phoenix who really is Jean Grey to boot; something we haven't had since Claremont and Byrne created this whole mess in the first place.... |
