The Trial of Jean Grey
Ah, a crossover! “The Trial of Jean Grey” runs through six issues of two Brian Bendis comics – All-New X-Men #22-24, and Guardians of the Galaxy #11-13. If you really want to indulge Marvel, the first two chapters officially appeared in issues #22.NOW and #11.NOW. But let’s not.
This story has basically two points to make, and doesn’t need six issues to make them. Nor is it even particularly clear about the points it is making.
The central hook is that the Shi’ar discover that the Silver Age X-Men have been brought to the present day, and decide to put Jean Grey on trial for the crimes she’ll go on to commit as Phoenix. The X-Men and the Guardians of the Galaxy go to the rescue and it all climaxes in a big fight which, since this is a Brian Bendis comic, proves abortive. Then people talk at one another for a bit and go home.
There are essentially two points that this story needs to hit. The first is to hammer the point that the longer the Silver Age X-Men stay in the present, the further they continue to drift from established continuity. It’s not clear that this version of Jean will go on to become the Phoenix at all; instead, she seems to be developing weird high-end psi-powers of her own. The unspoken question, of course, is what sort of godforsaken paradoxes await if the Silver Age X-Men are transformed by their experiences to the point where the assumed mind wipe just isn’t going to restore prior continuity.
The second point is to have Cyclops meet Corsair and go off to appear in his solo series.
You may note that neither of these points has anything much to do with the Guardians of the Galaxy, whose plot function is essentially to be a taxi. In all fairness, I don’t read Guardians – nor does anything in these three issues persuade me that I ought to start – but it’s entirely possible that this story is setting up future conflict between the Guardians and the Shi’ar. Still, they’re shunted to the side for the big finish, even though it takes place in their book.
The main reason the Guardians are here, one suspects, is that they have a movie coming out and Marvel are determined to make sure their title gets all the support it could hope for. That’s a perfectly respectable motivation for doing a crossover, but it doesn’t translate into giving them much to do.
The dedicated nit picker could raise all manner of continuity problems here. For one thing, while you might expect this to be a “If you could kill Hitler, would you?” story, the Shi’ar never make any mention of that argument. Their case is simply that Jean committed mass murder, and even if it hasn’t happened yet in her personal timeline, it was still her. That, I suppose, plays into the point that history is being derailed.
But, point one, Jean wasn’t Phoenix. Phoenix was a copy of Jean, which is the whole reason that she was able to come back from the dead the first time round. Granted, that whole thing is a retcon hedged with fudges designed to preserve the emotional validity of the original story by claiming that in some meaningful sense Phoenix was still Jean. But there’s at least enough confusion in there that you might expect someone to at least raise the point. Doesn’t Jean herself know? She is meant to have knowledge of her future life, after all.
Point two, if the Shi’ar were genuinely concerned simply to punish Jean for the crimes of Phoenix, why didn’t they do anything about it at any point during the roughly twenty-year stretch between her first resurrection and her subsequent death? You could try to argue that Gladiator takes a different view of these matters from his predecessors as Shi’ar Emperor, but there’s nothing in the dialogue to really support that.
These problems would be readily solved if the Shi’ar’s stated agenda was simply to avert Jean becoming Phoenix by killing her first – but for whatever reason, the story just doesn’t want to go there. Or at least, it goes there only indirectly in the final chapter, where Jean makes a speech about how if it wasn’t her, it would have been somebody else, and they’d have gone mad too.
Trouble is, this isn’t true either. While Jean went nuts, and so did the Phoenix Five from Avengers vs X-Men, Rachel Summers didn’t. And another X-Men title right now is doing a story based on the fact that Quentin Quire goes on to be a Phoenix host who’s apparently sane and stable, an idea that was introduced in a crossover co-written by Bendis himself. If we’re going to pick and choose history for the sake of the story, could we at least still try and be consistent with the other X-Men comics coming out in the same month?
In theory there’s a decent story to be done with Jean coming to terms with what happened during the Dark Phoenix Saga, and people arguing about whether the upside of killing her outweighs the potential damage to the timeline. This is not that story. It’s a half-formed blather about whether Jean is technically guilty – a point in which Bendis doesn’t ultimately even seem that interested – married to an even less developed plot, and coasting on banter to fill the gaps. And even if it had been done right, it still wouldn’t have needed more than four issues. Pretty bad, frankly.
Time for the Silver Age X-Men to go home – or at least, start the year long process of sending at least most of them home.
There’s always the time travel paradox problems. The past timeline can’t be changed too much, or the X-Men wouldn’t have Bern pulled from the past in to the present day, which has to happen to make the changes that changed historical events.
Based on Marvel time-travel,, we know there would just be an alternate timeline created, and that the past really can’t be altered, not in the Earth 616 timeline.
One thing that was touched on was that the Shiar killed all of the Grey family…either in revenge or to prevent the Phoenix from manifesting in another member of the Grey family.
Since Jean wasn’t actually The Phoenix, and since we’ve seen non-Grey family members manifest the Phoenix Force, it wouldn’t make sense that the Shiar killed the Greys as a preventative measure.
So, if the Shiar killed the Grey family for revenge, you could say they wanted to kill this Jean just as punishment for the crimes of the Phoenix.
It’s just very confusing to think about, and the story wasn’t deep enough to warrant this level of over-thinking….
The idea that history can’t be altered has been contradicted so many times that it has to be regarded as no longer canon. It’s been a good quarter century since Marvel were regularly asserting it as a rule (and even then, they were having to rationalise away stories where it didn’t fit or which were plainly based on different assumptions).
Didn’t read this, but how is Corsair alive? He was killed in one of those miniseries which resulted in Hepzibah (or whatever her name is)joinimg the X-Men on earth when Brubaker took over Uncanny X-Men. Is there any explanation or does Bendis ignore his earlier death?
I hate “Jean Grey”.
Isn’t the Silver Age version “Marvel Girl”?
No?
That’s it: I’m recursively blaming all the out-of-character behavior, strange retcons, and unexplained plot holes that Bendis has written since coming to Marvel on the Original X-Men being taken out of their proper place in time and/or time (past, present, and future) breaking via the end of “Age of Ultron”…
I’ve now OFFICIALLY thought all of this through more than he has. I trust that my No-Prize has been wiped from existence en route to me?
Honestly, though, if you WERE going to cross over GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY with ALL-NEW X-MEN this summer, I feel that Bendis missed an opportunity to have them go back in time nonetheless (perhaps showing why they still need to stay in the present, however), if only to tie into the conceit of *both* of the franchises’ seasonal movies.
(Unless there’s some other “Days of Future Past homage in the books that I’m forgetting about? Having one in a crossover with the GotG would have been amazingly clever on Marvel’s part…)
“But, point one, Jean wasn’t Phoenix. Phoenix was a copy of Jean”
Does young Jean know that though? Do the Shi-ar?
“Quentin Quire goes on to be a Phoenix host who’s apparently sane and stable”
I believe it was hinted that Quire’s phoenix is different than the one in Jean Gray, maybe even weaker.
However is it in character for the gladiadot to just turn away from a fight he started like that? He had no reason to let them go other than fear and i doubt that is something a shi-ar emperor would ever do.
Also, even though All New X-Men is a terrible waste of money and natural resources, it made me realize where Bendis is going with all the broken-timeline and the inability of the young-original-X-Men to return to their time and I don’t know how i feel about it.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD
What I suspect is that Bendis plans to explain all this by exposing that when the timeline broke down during the age of ultron event, when beast tried to bring the young x-men to the present, they got split in half in a way and there’s two versions of them, one back in the past and one in the present. By doing it this way the original x-men can stay in the present forever and it could explain their future as shown in the Battle of the Atom crossover. The only problem with this theory is the scene where young Scott was killed and the old Scott started disappearing, but that can be explained away by saying that the two versions are linked and one cannot live if the other dies or something along those lines. And honestly I don’t know if I would like it if that were the case.
END OF POSSIBLE SPOILERS
(…just be sure to work a Winter Soldier appearance into a background scene in the past, and…I’ll shut up now!)
I think the reason they couldn’t go home is because the time stream created duplicates of them in the past. After Cyclops nearly died in part 1 of Battle of the Atom, I think the time stream created duplicate copies to protect the integrity of the timeline. Now, you can do whatever the hell you want with the original X-Men in the present with no consequences. The Shiar may even have recognized this. If they had found Jean guilty and executed her, the neutron galaxy would never have been sealed. The Shiar and or Marvel editors presumably aren’t that stupid, so maybe the Shiar know what the X-Men do not. Whatever. I thought it was an okay story.
But, in All-New X-Men #25, out this week The Watcher told Beast that he hates him. Such authentic character writing from Bend is. Unless that was a dream, why would The Watcher have wasted all those pages with pin-ups, instead of giving us an actual story? Makes you think, eh?
On the “Jean was not Phoenix” issue, its never been so clear cut. The Phoenix who committed the genocide was not actually Jean, but as per Morrison’s run, Jean is The Phoenix.
Regardless, if I remember correctly, it was Jean’s psychic cry that originally attracted Phoenix, and that led to the corruption by the Hellfire Club that taught Phoenix base human emotions. So, if Jean had not been there, events would not have happened like they did.
All-New X-Men is awful. Every issue is basically what Bendis did with Spider-MEN, emotional conversations that resolve nothing or advance nothing.
Guardians of the Galaxy is even worse. It’s about nothing. Nothing happens. I read 10 issues and can’t remember a thing that happens, other than one-liners repeating over and over and Iron Man fucking the only female character in the cast.
Along with the Corsair appearance, Bendis has been using Star-Lord all willy-nilly forever now, and STILL hasn’t explained or even hinted at how he got back from the dead. It’s rubbish, it’s irresponsible, and it’s a disservice to fans. Having him in the comics may be helpful to have alongside the movies, but there should at least be a hint that Bendis is going to attempt to fill his massive plot holes.
@Jamie Yep, people who like emotional scenes (that don’t necessarily have to follow continuity or even make sense) tend to like Bendis’ writing. Does not hurt that he gets good artists either of course.
If you’re not among those the best thing is to stop reading his books. I did.
I never said I was BUYING his books. 😉
I agree, Marvel time travel and Phoneix/Jean Grey suffer from a complete lack of consistency. Pick one, or come up with a new idea.
It doesn’t bother me that the Marvel Universe is inconsistent about the rules of time travel; that’s the sort of thing that would limit writers unnecessarily. And besides, the ending of AGE OF ULTRON provides an in-universe explanation for why screwy things can now happen with the timeline.
What DOES matter is that the story’s internal logic should hold up. That’s particularly so in comics. The plot of the Big Sleep doesn’t actually make sense – notoriously, even the film makers and the writer couldn’t work out who had killed one character – but it gets by because you only realise that problem when you’re thinking it over later. You can’t rely on that sort of momentum if you’re dragging your story out over a year plus. It needs to withstand collapse if the reader thinks about it between issues.
I really find myself getting irrationally annoyed by the way in which Bendis completely ignores continuity whenever it suits him.
Wait.
No.
It’s not ignoring it that is the problem. It is the way he almost seems to go out of his way to fuck things up. He makes a piece of continuity a central part of a storyline and then gets that piece wrong.
Corsair and Star Lord are both supposed to be dead/off the board. He brings them back but there is no explanation. The Death of the Greys becomes a plot point, but the fact that the Death Commandos were rogue is ignored, Rachel is ignored and Gladiator is held responsible. That’s before you go into all the niggly Unus the Untouchable bits, the weirdness around the sliding timeline etc.
Fuck it. Maybe they’re just all Skrulls.
“He makes a piece of continuity a central part of a storyline and then gets that piece wrong.”
I hope, for your sake, you never read his Illuminati miniseries.
The whole Mastermind/Jason Wyngarde appearance also added nothing to the story and made absolutely no sense.
@Niall — forget *them* being Skrulls, chances remains high that Bendis is a Skrull…
“That will show Marvel Comics for turning our brothers into cows! Mwahahaha!!!” ***furiously ignores continuity and characterization***
Three major plot holes that make this story dreck:
(1) Phoenix who ate the D’Bari not Jean Grey, but a clone.
(2) Lil Jean has not done anything wrong. She MIGHT do something wrong if she’s returned to her timeline and her memory is wiped. Even then, it’s not certain what’ she’ll do. Therefore, punitive or retributive justice is not really rational.
(3) Killing lil Jean for “preventative” purposes is preposterous because her possible sins as Dark Phoenix are a drop in the bucket compared to her possible heroism as Phoenix — (i.e. saving the ENRITE UNIVERSE by stopping the neutron star, compared to destroying a single planet of broccoli people).
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Paul, I was pretty disappointed in your lukewarm but generally favorable treatment of Battle of the Atom. You restored my faith when pinpointed both the plot problems and the writing deficiencies in The Trial of Jean Grey.
• Gladiator’s motives are inscrutable
• The “fight” never occurs.
• The GOTG are irrelevant to the story
• The interesting questions about culpability are totally ignored.
And so on…
My conclusion is that BMB has become an industry hack, churning out dross to please the fanboys. He used to write pretty good comics. I suspect he’s smart enough to write better comics. But he’s on the Marvel promotional ladder, and all he has to do is propose the “big ideas” and people will shell out money for his comics; nevermind that the execution is awful. So long as he keeps coming up with “big ideas” that sell well, Marvel will keep promoting him, until he’s sitting in the EIC chair. That’s where he eye is, and telling good stories is nearly irrelevant to that goal.
For the record, I read ANX and UNX in the store and spend my money on other books; I won’t pay for this dreck.
I think Bendis genuinely believes that he has reinvented the team book for a new era and that what his detractors see as a lack of basic craft is in fact mere failure to move with the times. And let’s not overlook that his solo books tend to be much better.
The point about the Death Commandos being rogue doesn’t greatly bother me. Since Gladiator evidently approves of what they did, there’s no particular difficulty with the idea that he’s claiming credit (on behalf of his Empire) after the fact.
However, what isn’t so excusable is the repeated insistence that Jean is the last survivor of her family, when Rachel is alive and well – particularly as RACHEL’s status as sole survivor was the whole point of the very Death Commandos story that Bendis is referencing.
Well, Bendis is writing too many books at the same time and that may be part of the problem. But the editors should be helping with all these issues and they don’t seem to be.
Anyway, I guess Marvel continuity isn’t like the DC one where everything has to be somehow explained, in Marvel it seems to be more of a guideline than the absolute backgroundand that seems to become more and more evident, especially considering the ages of all the characters
I think y’all are over thinking this one. This arc was nothing more than a means to keep the original five around longer. Cyclops will get his series, Lil Jean is a step closer to Xorn, and we got to see Lil Iceman interact with a talking racoon and say he felt like a princess. I’m not saying its good, but as fans are clearly enjoying the original five, Bend is doesn’t seem to have much interest in bogging his dialogue down with complicated plot logic. Let’s at least hope that Corsair’s reappearance is addressed in the Cyclops series. And not attritubted to time wonkery
Rachel Grey is really the elephant in the room in all this, as the writer bends over backwards to ignore her (or makes a joke of it, as in the first scene with young Jean and Rachel together!). It’s a nonsense; if Rachel is problematic, write her out. But if you keep her, address the issue and give her something to do. The characters are being twisted to fit the plot, rather than have the characters drive the action themselves.
Poor Rachel. She was so cool and tragic at the same time back in Excalibur.
Rachel _Summers_ was a cool character back in the day, but there’s just no place for her in the X-verse anymore. She no longer has a unique role to play and just serves to make it all the more convoluted.
She should never really have been brought back after Excalibur ended.
Right: the Rachel Summers plot hole is another one I forgot to mention above. Not to mention Cable and Nate Grey. Oh, and isn’t there another genetic clone of Jean wandering around…um…Maddie something or other? One who also has an affinity for the Phoenix Force?
BMB is right up there with Chuck Austen for worst X-writer ever.
I consider any comic book that Bendis writes to be post-canonical…. and in general, with some exceptions any Marvel Comic published after Avengers Disassembled to be post-canonical.
The exceptions include Brubaker’s run on Captain America but NOT AvsX.
So we are all commenting on this as X-Men fans. How horrible was it to buy this as a GotG fan? The characters you bought it for did nothing. NOTHING
Maddie isn’t a difficulty. There’s certainly no reason for any of the characters in this story to be aware that she’s recently returned from the dead. As for Cable and Nate Grey, I’m not sure there’s any reason Gladiator would know about their family background, if he’s even aware of them. Nate’s not exactly high profile on Earth, let alone on the other side of the galaxy.
I must admit I simply assumed that Corsair had returned in some random outer space story I hadn’t read. Apparently not, but since none of the characters in this story have any reason to pick up on that, I don’t particularly have a problem with leaving it to the CYCLOPS series to deal with – though it would have been nice to at least acknowledge the point, since god knows the story has enough pages to kill.
I’ve not even got to Battle of the Atom properly yet, but…
Would executing Jean even achieve anything, given her Phoenix-assisted ability to come back to life?
Which leads to asking – isn’t Phoenix no more anyway, as of AvX? But then I also don’t get how there’s a Quire Phoenix in the future, either.
One last thing – the O5 came forward before AoU, at least as best you can tell from when the issues came out and the issue numbers of tie-ins, so saying AoU screwed up their time-shift doesn’t work…unless you say the effect of AoU traveled backwards in time, or even happened everywhen.
@Tdubs, but do GUARDIANS fans actually buy Bendis’s pretenders to the title, though? As a long-time Marvel Cosmic fan, I tried reading some of it on my Marvel Comics Unlimited App and couldn’t recognize the characterization of any of the characters, much less figure out how they were supposed to have gotten to that point post-THANOS IMPERATIVE…
I’m just guessing that they all borrowed some of Adam Warlock’s weird cocoons and came out in new slightly different incarnations? 😉
Remember Cassandra Nova’s turn as a hero, in ‘Here Comes Tomorrow’? Quite a difference from her introduction in ‘E for Extinction,’ where she killed 16 million people.
By implication, I believe Morrison was saying, “The genocidal Phoenix was Jean after all. And that’s okay.”
Only one of many problems with Here Comes Tomorrow.
I’m 30, and started reading X-Men right before Fatal Attractions. I was drawn in by the animated series. I can relate to the idea of post-cannon. For me, everything ended happily ever after with Eve of Destruction (good idea bad execution although not Lobell’s fault). Magneto is dead, Scott and Jean are back together, Cable killed Apocalypse a few months earlier and the future is wide open with happy potential. Everything that came after is a take it or leave it for me on a personal level, depending on how much I liked the story. I find I have few complaints this way.
It’s more honoured in the breach than the observance, but is there a reason why this can’t be solved by applying the Gruenwald rule? It’s an unusual case since it’s usually invoked for people travelling backwards in time, but whether the X-men go back to the past or not, that’s basically what Beast did. So you just say that 616 is the universe that Beast left from, but the moment he arrived in the past he created universe 617, and then brought Jean-617, Warren-617, Scott-617 and Bobby-617 into the present of universe 616. Presumably universe 617 than splits into more alternate timelines, one where the X-Men never came back, and more for the various times they could come back, and what happens to them while they’re away.
@Dasklein83 — That’s how I felt after X-Men v. 2 #1-3 (the end of CC’s first run), and again after Here Comes Tomorrow (when Morrison finished).
It was sort of like the story came to it’s natural end, and it was time to start telling a new story.
@Ethan: We’ve already had a scene where the present-day Cyclops started to fade away when the teen version was about to die. Moreover, if you explain it all away by relegating the All-New X-Men cast to divergent versions of the characters, that’ll just come across as a massive cop-out. So even if it were technically viable as a continuity explanation, it would be disastrous from a dramatic standpoint.
even though i don’t put bendis beyond cop-outs, i suspect the duplicate theory is more possible. and it supports what they said at the beginning that nu-jean is the real jean, which she is in a way, even if there’s another version of her running arround in the past
When this whole idea runs out of steam and the next flagship writer comes along, the divergent timelines cop-out is what they’re going to go with no matter how many times they deny it up to that point for dramatic purposes. Forgive us for all skipping ahead, Marvel. Because no matter what explanation they come up with in the near term, the other one is going to supercede it in the long term.
I agree with the post-canon idea. Current continuity seems to start x-wise with Whedon, and avengers wise with Bendis. Anything that happened before is simply a guideline.
If that’s the case officially, well I’m fine with it, honestly. Just tell us straight up that continuity of past events may be changed to suit current stories.
And then get Bendis away from anything that has to do with continuity.
And NO MORE FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.
“How horrible was it to buy this as a GotG fan? The characters you bought it for did nothing. NOTHING”
If you’re a GotG fan, why are you buying that awful series to begin with?
The overall meta-plot has made little sense, but I have been enjoying Bendis for some of the character moments.
In Uncanny he’s done good work making Cyclops bearable again, and actually made me like the Cuckoos. I’ve also liked his Illyana and will give props for restoring the Kitty/Illyana in both Uncanny and All-New in a way that seemed realistic and at times touching.
So: enjoy Bendis on Uncanny and in the Kitty moments of All_Mew, but otherwise don’t see the returned X-Men as having added much of worth in themselves.
Also, is there a law of conservation of character destruction? Bendis has been redeemnig cyclops and illyana, but at the cost of making beast a total idiot…
“But, point one, Jean wasn’t Phoenix. Phoenix was a copy of Jean”
Everyone seems to have forgotten this, because no matter how you slice it… the “cosmic Phoenix entity posing as Jean” dilutes the emotional wallop of “The Dark Phoenix Saga”, which of course was meant to be the real Jean.
What’s even crazier is that Jean/Phoenix has never risen from the ashes like an actual Phoenix, or even returned from death. Due to the “cosmic entity” ret-con, Jean never died at all. Ever. (she’s dead now, and has yet to return)
It’s amazing that with a character called “Phoenix” the writers choose the most complicated path to bring her back to life. She’s Phoenix, she rose from the ashes of death, because that’s what a Phoenix DOES!
For all the guff the third X-Men movie gets, it was a much more elegant path to the Dark Phoenix saga with the “locked away personality” angle. That was sort of the original story… and the “cosmic entity” has done nothing but add needless layers of confusion and dilution.
@Bill Walko — Respectfully disagree.
The fact that Phoenix was a clone of Jean Grey does not dilute the power of the story to me at all.
What was most compelling about that story was the story of the moral struggle that Jean Grey went through to control and finally overcome the corrupting power of the Phoenix. Because the personhood of Jean Grey was exactly the same in the clone as in the original, it was still her struggle, and it was still a powerful story.
And from an outside perspective, even though it’s a clone, the X-Men (and the reader) have been living with that clone for months; some of her best character moments occurred after the Starcore crash. In some ways it’s the clone we (and Cyclops) are in love with more than the original. When she dies, it’s tragic because we love her for the friendship she’s has forged with the X-Men through her time with them. It’s irrelevant that she’s not the same character who fought Grotesk; she’s the one we’ve been following since Jamaica Bay.
@Paul
Ever since Bendis started writing GotG, it hasn’t had much of a storyline, instead it has been a vehicle for other ideas.
First, it was putting Iron Man in space. Then GotG touched on Thanos being back for a storyline event to be told in other books. The visit to Thanos was to reference time being broken in a storyline told in another book. GotG was used as a vehicle to introduce Angela to the Marvel Universe, in a story that could have been told with any other Marvel characters. Then the X-Men “cross-over” began.
As for a possible future Shiar storyline, Bendis has all but in name turned the “Guardians of the Galaxy” into the “Guardians of the Earth”.
@Niall
Bendis “addressed” Star Lord’s return. Not really, of course. But for the first few issues of GotG, Gamora kept shouting about Star Lord cutting some secret deal with Thanos for both of them to return. Star Lord refused to speak about what actually happened, and I think even Gamora stopped harping on it.
Worse, I think Bendis’s “time has been broken” storyline is in part his catch-all to handwave away whatever changes he wants to make or mistakes he might be caught it.
Bendis really is a weak and overrated writer. This is all made worse when he’s put on pre-established character team books, which play up his weaknesses the way that a solo new character book doesn’t.
I vaguely recall Quesada stating during A v X that they were retconning the retcon, meaning Jean had been Dark Phoenix afterall…..which completely screws up Jean’s return story.
So then is there any possible story that covers the Dark Phoenix Saga, Jean’s return story, Bendis’s run, Morrison’s run, and everything with Rachel Summers?
“I vaguely recall Quesada stating during A v X that they were retconning the retcon, meaning Jean had been Dark Phoenix afterall…..which completely screws up Jean’s return story.”
I can buy that “Jean Grey returned because the Phoenix entity is all about death and rebirth”. So in bonding with the entity, Jean is inextribly linked to this. She “rose from the ashes of death” one day in Jamaica Bay. ::shrugs:: works for mr.
The idea that Jean is so linked to the Phoenix entity, that she can actually rise from the ashes of death… that’s been a notion rattling around since (at least) Jean’s death during Morrison’s run. This is also supported by Morrison’s future-Jean resurrection story with the egg, I believe. And the idea that so many X-Men believed Hope might be Jean. And, the driving plotlines of PHOENIX: ENDSONG and PHOENIX: WARSONG.
I can even also buy, for continuity nerdists, that “the Phoenix entity made Jean believe Dark Phoenix was a Jean-avatar, because the thought of all those deaths on her conscience might be too much”, so the entity created the Jean-Phoenix-Avatar cover story… when in reality it was Jean all along. That makes the story of the Avengers finding her in Jamaica Bay still in “valid continuity”.
The Jean-avatar version of the Dark Phoenix Saga never worked for me, as the story was always about absolute power corrupting absolutely…. but I understand mileages may vary, Nu-D (and others)…