UNCANNY X-MEN #387: Cry Justice, Cry Vengeance!

Jean faces her past!

Originally Published December 2000

We begin with... roasted broccoli?

Sorry, I'm being insensitive, but yes, that is the destruction of the D'Bari homeworld as depicted lo those many years ago during the Dark Phoenix Saga when a cosmic manifestation of godlike power that looked like, but was not, I cannot stress this enough, the real Jean, devoured that world's sun and eliminated an entire race in a moment that went unnoticed in the first draft submitted to Marvel editorial but has had severe ramifications in the years since.

Our Jean, however, is more into less lethal forms of cuisine, like a nice hot pretzel.

She and her squad of X-Men are still in New Orleans, recuperating after their daring rescue of the trawler Arcadia (and its Captain Aleytys "Lee" Forrester [and Paolo.]) At their clandestine hospital, they find Everett K. Ross and Queen Divine Justice, associates of the Black Panther T'Challa, looking for Storm. Seems she has some old debts of her own to repay the King of Wakanda.

As they watch the three zip off in their invisible jet, Jean notes that all she got from stray thoughts was that T'Challa was in trouble. When Beast remarks that its's not great that Jean can just pry into everyone's private personal business whenever she wants, Jean shrugs that she learns to tune it out. The implications of the staggering amount of power they wield as X-Men causes Beast to play Devil's Advocate and question the whole Mutant Metaphor Thing.

But speaking of which, inside the hospital, the air rescue crew they helped briefly learns a lesson about prejudice given they were saved by do-gooder mutants. The X-Men share in the mutual-admiration society, touting the work of Real World Heroes.

Jean accepts some condolences on Scott's death from Lee, but when Rogue points out that she and Cable both had visions of the late Cyclops, Jean herself is struck with some kind of psychic emanation. She wishes the Prof were here to help her with it.

Instead, he is in deep space with his Skrull mutant students, known as Cadre K. He telepathically makes contact with Lilandra aboard her temporary base of operations the Starjammer (because of course she's on the Starjammer). 

The two wayward lovers argue all night over who has the right to do what and with which and to whose home planet -- it seems the Shi'ar and the other great powers of the galaxy have volun-told the Earth to act as a prison planet for the scum of the universe. Lilandra is against it but doesn't currently have the political power to overturn the order, but she's working on it.

After the call, Charles wonders whether it was right to abandon the X-Men to flit around in space with Skrulls, but you know what, abandoning the X-Men is kind of Charles' main move.

Anyway, back on Earth, the X-Men get attacked by the Mandroids of all things.

Rogue, Beast and Gambit make short work of the scrubs, but Jean moves to get the hospital evacuated, sensing there's more to this attack than some jabronis in outdated metal suits from the disco era.

And indeed she's right. Once Jean and Cable are isolated, Rogue learns by absorbing the thoughts of the lead Mandroid they were just a diversion that their target is... Jean!

Alone and with their telepathic power muffled, Jean and her stepson-nephew from the future's past fall prey to some familiar faces: Webwing, Hussar and Neutron, onetime members of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard!

On the psychic plane, Jean is able to combat Webwing; when she manifests the Phoenix effect, her foe recoils in sheer terror.

Jean is weirdly taken aback by this, professing not to know the extent of Dark Phoenix's deeds.

But if she had any doubt, she can just ask her true foe... Starhammer!

That's Hammer with an "H," not... yeah, sorry, I didn't mean it to be so confusing.

Outside, Rogue and the others join Cable in battle against the disgraced former Imperials, who have been exiled to Earth for treason. Say it ain't so, B'nee!

Inside, Jean does her one move and brings Starhammer to the astral plane, where she gets more than she bargained for when she is shown the sight of billions of D'Bari screaming in agony!

But like Shaggy, whose hit song was about to start climbing the charts, she asserts her lack of culpability.

Starhammer disagrees -- it was because of Jean that the Phoenix was ever unleashed, whether she was the one wielding its power or not. He lifts his visor to reveal himself as the final survivor of the D'Bari.

Thus, he takes his revenge, executing Jean summarily.

...but not really. Instead, he has been trapped in a psionic hallucination where he has obtained vengeance. Much like the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana hit of a decade later, it's the best of both worlds.

Jean stops to wonder if maybe on some level -- because she gave the Phoenix life in exchange for saving her friends -- she is to blame for all this. 

But there's nothing that can be done about it now, and instead she chooses to use the Phoenix name as a giver of life. And besides, they have more pressing concerns with this whole "Maximum Security" thing they're now embroiled in. Plus maybe Scott's alive??! It's worth looking into.

 

Further Thoughts:

On art we have Salvador Larroca, Chris Claremont's former Fantastic Four collaborator and future X-Treme artist. Opinions on Larroca are often divided, but I'm actually fond of the aesthetic of his work under normal circumstances. Here, however, for whatever reason, it just looks like what a comic book looks like, with no particular flare aside from the usual top-notch coloring of Richard Isanove.

When you need everything to look all orangey, think Isanove

Perhaps more noteworthy is the fact that Joe Quesada is now the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, making this the first X-Men comic without Bob Harras' name in the credits since 1988. There's no immediate change -- the "Maximum Security" crossover story feels like something Harras would have greenlit before being sent the door -- but Quesada would soon be making his editorial stamp on Marvel, and the X-Men, in a big way.

Boy, was Chris Claremont on the money in 1976 when he named that character "Phoenix," since the story can never, ever die. Here it is twenty years later and we're still just living in the world the Phoenix made. Chris himself had a propensity to dredge it up for years after its original resolution: to have characters reflect on it, to tease a repeat of its events. Then Jean returned and not only did the story not lose its potency, it increased, since now here was Jean, walking around, ostensibly not guilty of any crimes but certainly seeming like she was.

Inferno made for a clunky but comprehensive conclusion to this, with Jean, Phoenix, and for good measure Madelyne Pryor all sort of integrating: so that Jean was and wasn't Dark Phoenix, and she was and wasn't Madelyne -- but that's a complicated state of affairs and everyone always forgets it. For a long stretch of the 90's, there was no talk of Phoenix whatsoever outside of references to Rachel Summers in Excalibur, but then Steve Seagle opened the door for Jean to assume the role of "Phoenix" -- whatever that meant -- and so today, Jean is technically called Phoenix, but nobody's entirely sure what it all means.

In this story, as I pointed out, Jean appears to be ignorant of the full extent of Dark Phoenix's wrongdoing, which sort of contradicts what Chris Claremont himself had already written many years earlier. But sure, now there's no denying she knows what happened to the D'Bari. She's seen it, she's felt it. How Starhammer has access to a realtime recreation of the last moments of D'Bari, nobody knows, but, you know... space. Aliens. Technology. There's something there.

There is, and always will be, so much about the Phoenix to unpack that it may be impossible to do it justice, but this particular outing falls notably short on that, from the get-go. It feels weird and wrong that we have Xavier and the Cadre K Kids on the cover of this issue that could very well have been a strong examination of Jean's character. Imagine thinking that was the selling point of the issue.

This entire encounter is actually played fairly shockingly minorly, considering the implications of Jean's having to face her dark past. It comes out of nowhere with Starhammer as a very flimsy villain of the week. There could be a lot to examine here, with guilt and responsibility that the comic just doesn't, maybe can't, engage with, in its 22 pages. I'd just as soon they hadn't done it at all, and not because I'm sick of Phoenix stories after twenty years. If you're going to do one, put your back into it, you know?

But no, it becomes a very minor thing that just happens to be part of the backdrop of the linewide crossover Maximum Security, a half-baked premise about the Kree or whomever turning Earth into a prison. It's a big, comic booky swing, but it feels weird for the X-Men to be involved in it at this point even though, yes, they live on Earth and they have friends who are aliens. And reminding us that Professor X is boogeying around in space with Skrull Mutants, which is -- like the Neo's origins -- an unwelcome reminder that the Alan Davis run happened.