UNCANNY X-MEN #175: PHOENIX!

The X-Men must battle... DARK PHOENIX?!?!!

Originally Published November 1983

We begin with landscaping.

With a little bit of downtime at the X-Mansion, the heroes team up to take down a dead tree using their powers for a little unconventional x-ercise. Storm laments that in bygone days, she would have sensed the tree's illness due to her connection with nature, but she's feeling a little off lately. No kidding.

Alas, this halcyon moment is interrupted by a bright flash of light, a familiar image in the sky:

That's Cyclops falling from the sky, in the classic posture of an X-Man plummeting to his likely death. Rogue and Storm are able to catch him, and once they are safely on the ground he brings some unfortunate news:

This is just about the worst thing the X-Men could hear, even worse than Storm's hairdresser being out of Mohawk wax.

The group confers in the Professor's office, where Cyclops relates the events of the last few days - how he was unable to quit the suspicion that Madelyne Pryor was somehow the reincarnation of Jean Grey, and that she could at any time become a cosmic being of destruction. Indeed, it does appear that Madelyne is the reborn Dark Phoenix, here to finish her work. Alarming to say the least.

The Professor is skeptical, and wants to use Cerebro to scan around and see what's what - after all, his psychic powers sensed no kind of abnormality, and he feels like Phoenix returning to life might have been on his radar. Unfortunately, when he switches on the machine...

He is promptly taken out of commission by some kind of electric feedback. As the X-Men examine what exactly is going on, Dark Phoenix herself appears!

Apparently having been riding around inside Cyclops' back. That's a new one.

The X-Men try a frontal assault on the planet-destroying entity, but it goes poorly.

Similarly, she turns Storm's lightning against her, and throws the super-strong Rogue through a wall. In fact, Wolverine won't even join the fight, sensing it's a hopeless proposition.

The X-Men reach out to their allies, the Starjammers, only to receive this haunting message...

And when they reach out to Captain America and the Avengers, they bear witness to a similar horrifying fate. From their front window, they witness what appears to be the Phoenix's complete (and ostentatious) destruction of New York City!

Later in the infirmary, Cyclops is infirm to say the least, clinging to life after whatever-it-was that Phoenix did to him; Nightcrawler cannot figure it out (he's not a doctor, he just runs the machines.)

Indeed, Cyclops has a full-on, true, out-of-body, "go towards the light" experience, which is heavy stuff for this here comic.

In the great beyond, Cyke searches for one particular soul, but encounters another, who tells him to turn back, as it is not yet his time...

Cyclops returns to his physical body, surprisingly alert and ready for action. He begins to put two and two and two together. Let's suppose Jean really is dead - who then could be behind this? 

Who has the resources, the motivation, and the modus operandi that fits with all of this?

Honestly proud of my boy Scotty for catching on.

"Ten minutes later" Cyclops joins the other X-Men to share what he has deduced, but they react less than warmly to his presence... calling him "Murderess" and asking if he has come to gloat about his butchery.

And so begins a very interesting sequence in which the X-Men believe they are seeing Dark Phoenix instead of Cyclops, ganging up on him accordingly. Which is great, if you're fighting Cyclops, but the direct approach has been shown to fail time and again with Phoenix, so I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish. In fact, it doesn't even go so well against Cyclops either.

Ah, that vaunted magic 1980's judo. Why doesn't anyone try this in UFC?

Cyclops gives chase through the mansion, knowing his only option is to get to favorable territory. Thus, he lures them to the Danger Room, which he has programmed into a facsimile of the Savage Land using the newly-redesigned hologram-based version of the space the debuted a few months ago.

Using a few of his tricks, he has already neutralized Kitty and Nightcrawler, leaving only the X-Men you see here to hunt him down and bring him to bear for Phoenix's crimes.

From elsewhere, Mastermind watches the proceedings, impressed at Cyclops' resourcefulness but still convinced his plan will be a success. And what is that plan? He explains to Madelyne that he wants to trick the X-Men into killing the innocent Madelyne, a moral blow from which they will never recover.

He goes on to explain that he has been laying the groundwork for months in various guises (the Oyabun, the Priest) as well as settling scores with some of his old colleagues like Emma Frost and, for some reason, Mystique.

As it happens, Madelyne looking just like Jean is a lucky coincidence - Mastermind was just going to use whomever Scott was dating at the time. Okay, sure. I would've been interested to see how this played out with Lee instead. Couldn't he have said he was inspired once he saw her resemblance?

I'll give him this though: this is the plan of a man who has gone insane after commining with the universe, desperately lost sight of priorities and wants revenge at all costs. A weird, complicated revenge.

Jason also takes a moment to trick Madelyne into kissing him as Scott, laughing about it and suggesting there's more sexual assault like that in store the longer this goes on. I hope that we, as a society, are past the point where it's cool to depict villains as basically rapists just because it's so dastardly. It's really not something most comics are capable of addressing to the degree it needs to be.

Back in the Danger Room, Cyclops takes his friends on a run through the jungle, setting traps along the way.

His big final move is to lure Rogue to a field of "Oz Poppies" and use their dust to briefly knock her out.

He takes her to Professor X in the infirmary, and has her absorb his mental powers, using what little knowledge of telepathy he has from his former rapport with Jean to guide her into seeing the truth and sharing it with the team. Gradually, they snap out of it...

Only for the real fake Phoenix to appear behind them!

Wolverine's senses catch on that Mastermind is in fact in the room with them, and Storm calls upon a biblical monsoon to flush him out.

The heroes take the villain into custody, and Scott discovers the body of Madelyne, possibly drowned. He administers mouth to mouth and...



Studio audience: Woooooooo!

Sometime later, Cyclops visits Jean's memorial (her body is dust on the moon, remember) and gives his final farewell (after all this time) talking about how much he loves and misses her, but now he has let himself love Madelyne too, and she represents his future, being that she is alive and all. He also appears to be dressed for a formal occasion...

Specifically his wedding!

As Madelyne prepares to walk down the aisle, we see couples old and new - Scott's grandparents, Kitty & Piotr, Banshee & Moira - sharing in the love these two have found. Understandably, Wolverine can't help but feel a little bitter thinking about the wedding he himself was supposed to be having last week.

And with the usual sentiments being read by the officiant, Scott and Madelyne are now pronounced man and wife!

Further Thoughts:

It's hard to believe we've read three years of comics since the Jean Grey sacrificed herself on the moon. And in that time she's hardly left the thoughts of our characters. Some people chide this but I think it's true to life. The grieving process can be a long one. And it's only fair that it be sealed up at last so that Cyclops can move on with his life. He has spent the last three years roaming, searching, flirting, sometimes back as a superhero and sometimes thinking about moving into space, in the wake of Jean's death. Now he's ready to settle down.

As it turns out, Madelyne really is just a normal woman with an uncanny but plainly coincidental resemblance to Jean; at least that's the idea the book is currently pushing. Any and all hints pointing to the Phoenix can be chalked up to Mastermind and his revenge ploy. Admittedly, I found Wyngarde's plans to be a lot more haphazard this time around. Some bits seemed exquisitely planned, some bits seemed to just be "whatever happens here, happens" and some seem to be in the realm of "How could he possibly have planned for this?" or "How is he supposed to be using his powers to do this?"

I thought maybe they were getting to the idea that his cosmic trip had increased the psychic abilities of his powers, but that's never really suggested, and basically implies that after that happened, he came back down to normal, albeit deranged with a thirst for revenge. (Who wouldn't be?)

But that all having been said, it won't be the last story in comic book history where you just need to take what is being presented for what it is, and the plot is perfectly enjoyable. Maybe a little low yield (all that just to hopefully trick the X-Men into killing one person? Yikes.)

It certainly helps that it's presented as a major league plot, with a long set-up and a big double-sized payoff issue. Part of the problem I had with he "Hellfire Gambit" two-parter in which Emma Frost stole Storm's body is that it was presented as just a sudden occurrence that could've been any week, a shockingly disposable use of the Hellfire Club that used up potentially months worth of storylines in two issues. (By comparison we spent almost a full year fighting the Brood??) I quibble with the details, but the presentation makes it feel like a genuinely Big Deal story, a worthy follow-up to that event.

To me, this is the Cyclops issue, as it should be. He is the main focus of Mastermind's attack, his romance with Madelyne is front and centre, and it falls on him to uncover the whole thing. More than that, he is presented as insanely capable, able to physically best all the X-Men in a quick tussle, lay traps that will outfox them in the danger room, and ultimately root out the real villain using some pretty quick deduction. Considering he doesn't always get to be front and centre of the book despite being the team's former leader, Cyke gets to go out looking like a champion.

Never forget.

This is why I always hated allegations that Chris Claremont made Cyclops look like a dork - as we know, Cyclops has been a dork since the 1960's, and Claremont actually does his best to make that a good thing.

Now that we know Madelyne is just a normal human woman, the gaps in her life seem all the more glaring. Allegedly she has no past prior to the plane crash she survived. Have she and Scott talked about this? Has he ever met anyone who knows her besides his grandparents? Has he met her family? Who exactly is walking her down the aisle? These are questions that could have a variety of answers, either settling the plot once and for all or adding to it, but are left blank. I guess you only think about them when you have a project on doing a close reading of every single X-Men comic ever written.

We are also saying farewell to our friend artist Paul Smith, who signed on to draw the X-Men for one year, and by gar he was going to draw the X-Men for one year. Even when the material he was working with was not the strongest, his sense of pacing and staging helped elevate the atmosphere of the X-Men comics to something very three-dimensional and real. Toward the end of the issue, he is switched out for new regular artist John Romita Jr., a rising star second-generation Marvel artist who had already established himself on Iron Man and Spider-Man - and who does a credible impression of Smith to bridge the gap here, but will show his own unique flare soon enough.