Phoenix #12 annotations
PHOENIX #12
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Roi Mercado
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX
Jean doesn’t appear much in this issue, which mostly consists of Sara giving her account of how she came to be in Greyhaven. She appears briefly at the end, to look overwhelmed by her sister’s return, and to react to Cable’s entrance.
Jean also appears briefly as a child in Sara’s flashback, when she challenges Sara on deliberately throwing a baseball match. From Jean’s point of view, the significance of the scene probably lies mainly in the fact that she can verify it as a real incident. Well, if she does – it’s minor enough that she might think it’s something she doesn’t remember, and she doesn’t actually tell us that she remembers it.
SUPPORTING CAST
Sara Grey. So, as I said last time, the previous appearances of Sara Grey are not exactly extensive. But since this is Sara’s account of her life, let’s briefly run through her previous appearances:
- In X-Men Origins: Jean Grey (2008), after Professor X helps Jean to overcome the trauma that accompanied the emergence of her powers, Sara reacts with delight to her sister’s recovery.
- In a flashback in Uncanny X-Men #322 (1995), Jean says goodbye to Sara before leaving to join the X-Men. Sara knows that Jean is a mutant and that she’s off to be a superhero.
- In flashbacks in Bizarre Adventures #27 (1981), Jean and Sara rent a sailboat and get kidnapped by Attuma. Technically, this is Phoenix rather than Jean, though depending on how you read Rise of the Powers of X, there may not be a difference any more. Attuma turns Sara into a water breather but Phoenix just changes her back (which is apparently when Chris Claremont suggested that she might have become a mutant). In this version, Sara has only just learned that Jean is a superhero. Sara is married with children and worries about whether they might be mutants too. Phoenix erases Sara’s memories of superhero type things. Perhaps not for the first time, if you really want to square off all these appearances…
- In X-Men #136 (1980) – Sara’s first published appearance – she’s staying at her parents’ home when Dark Phoenix visits. Sara has learned that Jean is a superhero (again!) from her mother and, according to Phoenix, is worried about her kids being mutants. Quite why a married adult woman is staying with her parents doesn’t seem to be touched on.
- In X-Men #138 (1980), Sara is a background mourner at Jean’s funeral, accompanied by a man who’s presumably her husband Paul.
- In the framing sequence of Bizarre Adventures #27, Sara lays flowers on Jean’s grave and reminisces about that thing with Attuma – the mental blocks on that incident dissolved on Phoenix’s death. She describes herself and Jean as “as much best friends as sisters”. She refers to having an 11-year-old son called Tommy (though he’ll be called Joey in later stories). Sara is no longer afraid of the possibility that her children are mutants.
- In X-Factor #12 (1987), Sarah shows up on the news as a “pro-mutant spokesman”, and gets one line of dialogue about how it’s criminal to harass mutants by firebombing their homes. Jean hasn’t yet been in contact with her family since her return, and is surprised to learn about Sarah’s activities. She claims that Sarah is standing up for everyone “just like she did when I was a kid”, and worries that Sarah is making herself a target. Jean and Scott visit Sarah’s home to find her missing, and the house is then blown up by anti-mutant terrorists.
- Sara remains missing, though her children Joey and Gailyn show up in later issues of X-Factor.
- In X-Men #36 (1994), Sara very briefly appears as an alleged member of the Phalanx (or a Phalanx impersonates her, if you prefer).
And that’s it, until this storyline. Here’s what this flashback adds, although Cable shows up at the end to expressly cast doubt on the whole thing:
- Sara claims that she was there when Jean’s telepathic powers activated, which would be new.
- The baseball scene seems to be Sara’s new earliest appearance, coming before Jean’s activation. She throws a baseball game so that a girl who’s leaving town gets to win her last game, though she strenuously denies it.
- Immediately after leaving the TV studio in X-Factor #12 (and repeating her one line of dialogue from that issue), Sara is attacked by members of the Purifiers in an alley. The previous issue also blamed the Purifiers for Sara’s disappearance, and Jean appeared to know this already, though it’s not entirely clear how. As I said last time, the Purifiers weren’t really active around 1987 in publishing terms, but they did exist, so as a grass roots outfit with some degree of continuing presence, they’ll do for the role.
- The Purifiers made a deal to hand over mutants to Cameron Hodge, who in turn wants to turn them into the Phalanx. This is a bit more of a continuity issue, if it’s meant to be an accurate account. Sara describes Hodge as “One of the most vocal anti-mutant ‘activists'”, but she was hauled off the street in X-Factor #12, which is when Hodge was still posing as an ally of the X-Men. Even if Sara is kept as a prisoner for some time before this scene, Hodge is shown as a normal looking man, so either it’s before he was beheaded in X-Factor #34 (way earlier than any previous story linking Hodge and the Phalanx), or it’s after he becomes a Phalanx member and has shapechanging abilities (in which case Sara was held prisoner, apparently in the same clothes, for years of continuity).
- According to Sara, as she was absorbed into the Phalanx, it told her that Jean Grey was dead. This doesn’t really make sense. As noted above, when Sara was abducted immediately after X-Factor #12, she still thought Jean was dead. So it would hardly have come as news. Jean doesn’t die again until New X-Men #150 in 2003, long after the Phalanx stuff.
After all this stuff, Sara somehow crash lands meteor style on the planet Elarunn-7, eleven years into “the Thales Civil War” – she claims to have no recollection of how she got there. She quickly discovers her ability to unlock mutant powers, gives power to an entire rebel faction – she claims to be unlocking them – and helps them “take back this planet from the loyalist government that was oppressing them.” She skips over all this bit and doesn’t really address the question of why the planet has been renamed after her.
John Grey and Elaine Grey (the parents) have minor cameos in Sara’s flashback.
Captain Keldros Verrick. One of the rebel soldiers who found Sara when she crashed on Elarunn-7, and the first person whose powers she unlocked. She claims that he’s “remained one of my most trusted friends ever since”. He doesn’t seem to appear in the previous issue. In the flashback, his initial reaction to her is that she’s some sort of loyalist spy.
Cable. He shows up at the end to accuse Sara of lying and shoot her. In the previous issue, he was reacting in the future to some sort of catastrophic impact on the timeline, so presumably this is something to do with that.
There are multiple reasons an adult woman could be living with her parents:
1.)She had a bad fight with her husband and is staying with her parents until they can work it out.
2.)She lives far away from her parents now, so she is taking an extended vacation with her kids to see the family, but the husband has to work. Sara’s parents never redecorated her old bedroom, so she’s just staying in her old room.
3.)Sara and her husband are struggling for money. Sara and the kids go to stay with her parents, but the husband doesn’t get on with the in-laws, so he’s not welcome and is staying with a friend for a while.
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I wish a lot more stories ended this way. A time traveller shows up, shoots the problem, leaves with no explanation. It’s not “to be continued”. That’s just how the story ends. So many long comic stories could end so much more quickly.
she’s staying at her parents’ home when Dark Phoenix visits. …. Quite why a married adult woman is staying with her parents doesn’t seem to be touched on.
The only thing in UXM #136 that suggests Sara “lives”with her parents is that she’s sleeping there when Jean arrives. That’s easily enough explained if she actually lives far away and is home for a visit of several days.
“Technically, this is Phoenix rather than Jean, though depending on how you read Rise of the Powers of X, there may not be a difference any more”.
This week’s Giant-Size X-Men seems to rely on Dark Phoenix really being Jean, with the Phoenix Force leaving her during the story. How that works at the time Jean’s real body is at the bottom of the sea I don’t know.
“I wish a lot more stories ended this way. A time traveller shows up, shoots the problem, leaves with no explanation. It’s not “to be continued”. That’s just how the story ends”
Hard to imagine a truer thought on issue’s finale.
@Chris V: Sometimes it’s just an elf with a gun.
The worst thing writers ever did was to give the Elf with a Gun actual backstory and motivations.
Part of the reason why this is a big mess is the original stories are a big mess when it comes to Sara’s fate. In X-Factor 35, Nanny shows up with Sara’s kid and claims that Sara is dead. In X-Factor 40, Blob claims that Nanny sometimes lied about the parents of the children she kidnapped being dead. In New Mutants 78, the New Mutants learn Blob was lying about Nanny lying.
Finally, years later, in the Phalanx Covenant, Sara appears as a member of the Phalanx. We also learn that these Phalanx were created when Warlock’s remains fell into the hands of anti-mutant bigots after Warlock’s death in New Mutants 95, which was a crossover with X-Factor 60.
So the question is- where was Sara between X-Factor 35 and 60? Based on this issue, I’d guess that Sara was infected with the Phalanx before X-Factor 34, but the original experiment was relatively unsuccessful, which is why the scientists needed to analyze Warlock’s remains.
As a side note, how long was Sara held prisoner in the same clothes? Hodge first met Warlock in New Mutants 60, which was published over a year after X-Factor 12. That being said, I suppose that Scott could have mentioned Warlock while Hodge was eavesdropping and Hodge realized the possibilities of the technovirus as a weapon.
What was the point of having Sara kidnapped by the Purifiers instead of Hodge’s own anti-mutant organization, the Right? There’s a line of dialogue that tries to explain it as the Purifiers having made a deal with Hodge but it reads like Stephanie Phillips got the Purifiers mixed up with the Right and the editors caught it at the last minute.
Re: Sara thinking of Hodge as an anti-mutant activist- remember, X-Factor was publicly known as an organization that kidnaps mutants and Hodge was its publiicist. Jean never told Sara X-Factor was a scam before Sara was grabbed.
So what do we think Sara really is? A Phalanx?
A lot of people didn’t like that this issue mostly focused on Sara and hardly featured Jean. There really was no need to devote five and a half pages to Sara being captured and infected. First Adani, now Sara- Stephanie Phillips seems to like devoting page space to anyone but Jean.
@Dave- Breevort had this to say on his blog about Jean and the cocoon:
“how do you know that cocoon was even there before the Avengers discovered it? Since that Jean ended up revealed as just as much a vessel for the Phoenix as the one that died on the moon, I’d say that all of the backstory provided in that story is suspect at best.”
They should have a Cable month. Every comic that month has a story resolved by Cable bodysliding in, saying “bullshit” and shooting the antagonist.
I still say that’s what should have happened the day Apocalypse joined Krakoa.
The Other Michael-You’re not wrong. It does show the complete dichotomy between the world-views of the two authors though.
Steve Gerber, the quintessential existentialist: often times, bad things happen and there is absolutely no explanation for it. “You’re going through life, it seems as if everything is fine…then, one day, there’s an Elf with a Gun.”
JM DeMatteis, on the other hand, subscribes to a New Age quasi-optimist view that everything happens for a purpose.
He couldn’t come across a story like Gerber’s Elf with a Gun and leave the conclusion that, at root, everything is meaningless. He had to find some reason.
While I love JM DeMatteis as a writer too, Steve Gerber is right. Sometimes it is just an Elf with a Gun.
> “What was the point of having Sara kidnapped by the Purifiers instead of Hodge’s own anti-mutant organization, the Right? There’s a line of dialogue that tries to explain it as the Purifiers having made a deal with Hodge but it reads like Stephanie Phillips got the Purifiers mixed up with the Right and the editors caught it at the last minute.”
I suspect that there’s a group of readers who aren’t familiar with their comics history who would have objections to a hate group named “The Right” who appears in this issue to kidnap a woman. While that was the name, I don’t think we’ve seen them in decades (were they even named as Hodge’s goons during the “being back all the worst humans” X-Force Utopia run?) there’s not really a point they probably wanted to litigate over a few-page scene, especially when the much more evocative “Purifiers” were available.
@John- the Right were last seen in Hellions 17 in 2021. And there was no need to name the organization- they could have just been working for Hodge. It reads like someone got the Right and the Purifiers mixed up.
Aren’t there multiple Purifier organizations involved in the mutant books?
There’s the one associated with Stryker in God Loves, Man Kills. That’s the famous one, and I think it’s the one people are referring to above.
There’s also a group calling themselves the Purifiers that are connected with the High Evolutionary and showed up in the Evolutionary War in the X-Factor and New Mutants annuals. They’ve also got a religious leader, and he gets eaten by demons that Dani’s altered powers summon. These annuals happened during the period where God Loves, Man Kills was outside regular Marvel continuity, or at least it seemed to be.
Were these groups combined into the same one at some point? If not, as the latter Purifiers are more connected to the period where Sara was kidnapped, maybe it was them?
@Sam- But these Puriifiers had a cross on their clothing, suggesting they’re Stryker’s organization. The later Purifiers had a religious deputy leader but they were solely loyal to the High Evolutionary. Plus, the Evolutionary’s Purifiers weren’t after all mutants- they specifically let Empath go because the Evolutionary didn’t consider him dangerous.
Mark Gruenwald must be rolling over in his grave.
I love that Phoenix-cocoon explanation by Breevort, especially since it brings the original story more in line with Morrison’s version of the Phoenix. There’s something satisfying about messing with a Byrne retcon, too.
“They should have a Cable month. Every comic that month has a story resolved by Cable bodysliding in, saying “bullshit” and shooting the antagonist.”
God, that would be great. If ANYTHING could make me actually like Cable, it would be that. I swear I’d buy every issue.
It wasn’t really Byrne’s fault so much as Jim Shooter. Plus, it was a Byrne and Roger Stern ret-con using an idea given to them by a pre-pro Kurt Busiek. Claremont and Byrne’s original plans for Jean was that she would survive the end of DPS but without her powers. Shooter said that Jean had to die due to the fact she had committed genocide. So, the only way that Jean could be brought back is if the later writers came up with a scenario where Jean was innocent, hence the decision to split off Jean from the Phoenix.
Morrison’s version of Jean/the Phoenix was actually a return to Claremont’s original conception of Phoenix. Phoenix was Jean’s powers at the level they would have evolved to naturally, except she was exposed to cosmic rays during the X-Men’s flight into space, which supercharged her powers before she grew into them naturally. Hence, she was open to corruption, leading her to lose control of her powers. Morrison simply took Claremont’s idea for Jean’s evolution further.
Of course, Claremont had accepted that Jean was dead and moved on with Madelyne Pryor, so he was very angry about the Jean ret-con. The blame rests with Shooter though.
@Oldie: if not for this series, then definitely for Giant-Sized X-Men.
Its probably for the best , an IP franchise can become even much more interesting when its canon lore is a hot mess. After all, its works for Marvel’s own Distinguished Competition with their endless annual Crises , that all their fans complain about yet still keep on buying anyway LOL
@Michael – Ha. Well, Giant-Size needing to retcon the retcon shows what a mess it is.
And if they were going to alter the cocoon story that really should have happened at the end of Krakoa with its Jean/Phoenix origin stuff. Instead we get it in a mostly unrelated time travel story because they really wanted Legion to have the Phoenix Force for 5 minutes despite that causing a seeming contradiction. Not worth it.
Even before it was definitively established that Jean and the Phoenix are literally one and the same, it wasn’t difficult to reconcile that the Phoenix was behaving precisely as Jean would have — i.e. it copied her perfectly down to the most recent memory and believed itself to be her.
From that point, everything it does is what Jean herself would have done in the same circumstances. It doesn’t even remember being a cosmic entity until its Jean form is destroyed.
Simple and clean.
Approaching the situation with this as the premise, whatever happens with the cocoon Jean from this point is largely irrelevant. Whether it was left as a backup vessel from the moment the X-Men returned to Earth and Phoenix arose; or whether it was created after Jean/The Phoenix’s body was destroyed, and so it returned to the site of its most recent resurrection to be reborn, only for its newly created vessel to come to awareness and reject the most recent memories 9/10 of the way through the “upload/download” process, resulting in the fragmentation that lead part of The Phoenix to Madelyne’s inert body.
At this point, you can just say that the Phoenix basically cloned Jean, and the real Jean was in the cocoon while the Phoenix lived her life.
Thom H> I love that Phoenix-cocoon explanation by Breevort, especially since it brings the original story more in line with Morrison’s version of the Phoenix.
So, what about the idea of the Phoenix as cosmic eugenist appeals to you?