As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

PHOENIX #8
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX.

Despite what it says on the recap page, Jean isn’t in the Blue Area of the Moon, but in a floating fire cocoon in space, which Nova and Rocket Racoon are keeping watch on – they were on a planet last issue, but let’s assume they saw it shoot up into the sky and followed. The Blue Area stuff is all just a hallucination as Jean converses with the Phoenix itself. The recap page says that this was caused by Adani on purpose, but the actual story seems to be saying that it’s some sort of side effect of the Phoenix being “fractured” when Adani resisted giving up the Phoenix power, and managed to hold on to fraction of it.

In keeping with Rise of the Powers of X, this story takes the line that Jean and the Phoenix are, if not literally identical, at least two sides of the same coin. The Phoenix presents itself as an embodiment of the cycle of life.

The Phoenix re-stages X-Men #137 and the trial by combat on the moon that led to Jean killing herself to end the Dark Phoenix Saga. In this version, the X-Men fight Phoenix herself, instead of teaming with her against the Imperial Guard. Jean interprets this as a reminder that “all power comes at a cost”, though quite how it shows that, I’m not really following. The Phoenix, appearing as Dark Phoenix, seems to claim that it bonds with “a being of great power and will” (presumably Jean) in order to help them “rise beyond what they were”, the idea apparently being that the whole Dark Phoenix thing was in the service of a longer-term goal of helping Jean ascend in some way. Jean claims that she became Dark Phoenix because she opposed the Phoenix, thereby opposing her own nature, “and allowed the worst parts of me to become consumed by fire”.

There are a few issues with this, although whether they’re bugs or features depends on what you think the story is trying to do. As everyone knows, the Dark Phoenix storyline involves Jean casually committing genocide by wiping out an entire planet of D’Bari (in X-Men #135). In the original story, her get-out clause is diminished responsibility: she has more power than any human could control, and on top of that her psychic blocks are inadvertently overcome by Mastermind. When Jean was brought back from the dead, the explanation was that Dark Phoenix was never Jean at all, but the Phoenix Force taking her form – this was meant to absolve Jean from genocide on the impeccable ground that it was never her.

But post-Krakoa, Jean is Phoenix, so that excuse doesn’t work any more. And this story effectively dismantles her original excuse of diminished responsibility, essentially claiming that she could have controlled the Phoenix all along if only she’d been a bit more self-aware, and that the problem was her attempt to limit the Phoenix power, not Mastermind meddling with the blocks. The intended moral seems to be that redemption for the genocide of the D’Bari is impossible – which is fair enough, since decades of stories have repeatedly failed to resolve it to anyone’s satisfaction- and that instead Jean needs to embrace her past as a catalyst for transformation. (A less sympathetic interpretation might be that genocide is fine when it’s committed in the service of self-actualisation.)

Thematically, this calls back to the older, wiser Adani’s narration of the opening scene in issue #1, in which she claimed that “redemption, like an omnipotent deity, does not exist. Redemption is to be chased, never attained.”

Anyway, Phoenix emerges from her cocoon in a black and yellow costume (with a starfield effect) declaring that she’s the guardian of the cosmic balance.

SUPPORTING CAST.

Adani is hanging around with Perrikus again after all. She’s retained a fraction of the Phoenix power, and remembers the experience of having the whole Phoenix power as “freedom”. For some reason, when she loses control, her powers summon up a bunch of Brood for her to fight; another release of Phoenix energy makes them all vanish again. Perrikus concludes (apparently correctly) that her powers are driven by emotion and that she can achieve greater effects when she’s angry.

This seemingly prompts him to attack her in the hope of provoking a response; somehow or other, either she or Perrikus is able to control the resulting effect and make sure that it brings back the Dark Gods (a goal she seems perfectly happy to help with). In fact, she doesn’t seem that angry at the key moment, and instead she’s asking Perrikus to stop attacking her.

Rocket Raccoon and Nova are still hanging around keeping an eye on Jean. Neither of them has any idea what to do, but Nova’s solution is to wait and see, while Rocket just wants to shoot at the cocoon and see what happens – he regards it as something that has replaced Jean, at least initially.

Captain Marvel and Sif have left off panel since the last issue. Sif has apparently gone back to her station on the Bifrost, and Captain Marvel has gone to “help free the Galactic Council after Thanos’ attack”. We’re not told what happened to Thanos or the Warlock’s Eye (though presumably Sif took it back to Asgard), or who the Galactic Council are being freed from (presumably Thanos’s forces, acting on standing orders?).

VILLAINS.

Perrikus is very disappointed that Adani didn’t hold on to the Phoenix force. His main motivation in this issue, which hasn’t come up before, is to bring back the Dark Gods. At first, he thinks that he can use Adani’s power to do this by teaching her to focus, but then he works out that the trick is to make her emotional instead. As soon as the Dark Gods reappear, he stands in a group with them, facing Adani.

The Dark Gods. Adani and Perrikus refer to their home as “the Shadow Realm”, but in the original Thor storyline it was identified as “Narcisson”. I’m not aware of any story where the realm itself got lost or banished, although many of the Dark Gods were massacred by Desak in a subplot in Thor vol 2 #43, so it’s possible that Stephanie Phillips is reading that as a “fall of Narcisson” story, or simply that something happened to the place while Perrikus was in jail between Thor vol 2 #53 and Phoenix #1.

The Dark Gods who appear at the end of the issue are (left to right):

• D’Chel with the purple cloud
• Perrikus himself
• Adva (in yellow)
• Slototh (the black shape thing)
• Tokkots (with the wings)
• Majeston Zelia (on the right with the headdress)

They’re the same group that Adani dreamed about in issue #6, which was apparently a prophecy of this moment.

FOOTNOTES:

Page 2: Obviously, this is a loose re-creation of X-Men #100 (despite the footnote, it wasn’t actually called Uncanny X-Men at that point), where Jean sacrifices her life to pilot a space shuttle through cosmic rays while everyone else shelters in the back, and comes back to life as Phoenix.

Page 6: The fight with Thanos was last issue. The dialogue from Beast, and the line from Cyclops that straddles pages 6-7, are a truncated version of an exchange in X-Men #137, immediately after the X-Men are teleported into the Blue Area for the trial by combat. As Jean says, in the original version, they were fighting alongside her against the Imperial Guard. Cyclops’ other line of dialogue on page 7, once he starts looking for Phoenix, is original.

Page 10: Perrikus told Adani that “true power isn’t something you believe in, it’s something you wield” in issue #2. Phoenix “showed [Adani] that limitless power can come with immeasurable pain” in the previous issue, when Adani was exposed to Jean’s back story; Adani was linked to the Phoenix in the same issue.

Page 12: As Adani says, she did try to resist Jean reclaiming the Phoenix at the end of last issue.

Page 18: Jean “sacrificed myself because I thought it was the only option to control the power sof the Phoenix” when she committed suicide at the end of X-Men #137.