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.