{"id":11072,"date":"2025-05-16T21:49:27","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T20:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11072"},"modified":"2025-05-16T23:45:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T22:45:14","slug":"phoenix-11-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11072","title":{"rendered":"Phoenix #11 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>PHOENIX #11<\/strong>
\nWriter: Stephanie Phillips<\/strong>
\nArtist: Roi Mercado<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Java Tartaglia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Annalise Bissa<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHOENIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

The previous issue ended with Jean receiving a psychic message from someone claiming to be her sister Sara. Since then, Jean hasn’t had any further psychic contact with Sara, but she has had recurring nightmares about Sara being taken away by villains. The one we see features demons.<\/p>\n

Jean is certain that the woman she sensed was the real Sara, and somewhat irritated by Scott’s scepticism. She places particular importance on this not simply because it’s her sister, but because the rest of her family are all dead (having been slaughtered by the Shi’ar in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #467).<\/p>\n

When Jean meets Sara, she’s equally certain that it’s her real sister. But she acknowledges in narration towards the end that she very much wanted to believe this, and didn’t ask awkward questions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

She hasn’t visited the White Hot Room since Rise of the Powers of X.\u00a0<\/em>She claims to be worried that visiting might “disturb the peace those mutants have found there”. It’s not really clear why<\/em> she thinks that. Perhaps she worries that the presence of the actual Phoenix could destabilise the White Hot Room as a physical location where people could actually live. Or perhaps she feels as if the mutants of New Krakoa – as she calls it – wouldn’t welcome her presence, having moved on. Nonetheless, this story states fairly clearly that Jean could<\/em>, if she wanted, enter the White Hot Room and communicate with New Krakoa – well, aside from the fact that something is currently blocking her.<\/p>\n

Jean believes that she can find Sara from within the White Hot Room, because it “offers the Phoenix a connection to the very vertebrae of the stars”. Leaving aside the odd concept of stellar vertebrae, the idea seems to be that Phoenix is better able to scan parts of the universe that are remote from her when she’s in the White Hot Room.<\/p>\n

Something unspecified is attacking the White Hot Room, or at least Phoenix’s connection to it, and prevents Jean from entering it. She passes out moments after encountering this, and once she comes round, she’s understandably more preoccupied with the reunion with her long-lost sister. But whatever it is that she comes across, it’s apparently a threat to the White Hot Room and, by extension, New Krakoa.<\/p>\n

She has a Harry’s Hideaway mug, from the X-Men’s favourite bar in Salem Center.<\/p>\n

SUPPORTING CAST<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cyclops.<\/strong>\u00a0Even at this distance, he can sense that Jean is having nightmares over their psychic link. He’s\u00a0 openly sceptical that Sara is genuine, which he gets away with by pitching it as a “let’s not get your hopes up too quickly” thing.<\/p>\n

Sara Grey.<\/strong>\u00a0Jean says that Sara was “killed by the Purifiers” because she stood up for mutants. Back in X-Factor<\/em> #12, Sara did indeed make public statements in support of mutants, and her house was bombed by unidentified extremists. Sara wasn’t there at the time, though, and simply went missing (before allegedly being absorbed into the Phalanx). Since Sara’s body was never found, and Jean refuses to even believe that she was dead, she can’t literally mean that Sara was killed by the Purifiers, but it’s possible that they were assumed<\/em> at one point to have killed her (and certainly drove her into hiding). The Purifiers weren’t really a thing in the X-books in 1986 when Sara vanished, but Reverend Stryker’s followers date back to God Loves, Man Kills<\/em> in 1982, so – sure, they could be responsible.<\/p>\n

In this issue, Sara wears a black, white and gold costume with a red hood. It bears no resemblance to the olive green gown that she was wearing at the end of the previous issue, where the art suggested a more monastic setting.<\/p>\n

Despite Jean vouching for her, Sara is extremely<\/em> suspicious. When Jean asks what happened to her, she replies “Let me show you”, and then launches into a monologue that doesn’t answer the question at all. (Jean’s closing narration makes clear that this is deliberate.)<\/p>\n

Sara claims to have the “latent” mutant ability to unlock other latent mutant abilities. Presumably she means it was<\/em> once latent, because obviously it’s not latent now. Anyway, this is a reference to an alleged unused Chris Claremont idea. Deep breath…<\/p>\n

…Sara Grey debuts in X-Men <\/em>#136 (1980), but her first significant appearance is in the Phoenix story in Bizarre Adventures<\/em> #27 (1981). That story is better known for containing Jean’s origin flashback, but the flashback is merely incidental to a story about Jean and Sara being abducted by Attuma, who turns them ino water breathers to make them into bridal material. This goes predictably badly for him. At the end of the story, Phoenix restores Sara’s body to normal.<\/p>\n

When Marvel decided to reunite the original X-Men in X-Factor<\/em>, Chris Claremont opposed the plan to bring Jean back. According to CBR’s Comic Book Legends Revealed column (which doesn’t cite any sources for this)<\/a>, his\u00a0 rearguard action included a proposal that Sara should take Jean’s place. The idea was that Sara’s latent mutant powers had been triggered as a result of her experiences with Jean and Attuma, and that she in turn had the ability to activate other latent mutants – which could then fit with X-Factor’s initial “mutant hunter” gimmick. This story is clearly the source for the idea.<\/p>\n

Sara lives in what she describes as an “intergalactic city” full of mutants whose powers she has unlocked. Presumably these are alien mutants; there are precedents for this, such as Warlock (and besides, mutants in general are creations of the Celestials, who operate across the universe).<\/p>\n

The city is called Greyhaven, and she says that it was named after her by the inhabitants who came to her for help. According to her, these people had “always known they were different” but had been unable to access their mutant powers without her help. The inhabitants we see appear to be humanoid aliens in white and gold uniforms.<\/p>\n

Sara says that she “looked for” everyone in her family and “realised that I’m the last one left”. That suggests that she knew about the Grey family massacre. But in the previous issue she claimed that everyone had told her that Jean was dead. It’s hard to imagine her operating in circles where she has knowledge of the massacre but not of Jean’s survival.<\/p>\n

Equally unconvincingly, Sara claims that she knew that Jean would eventually come looking for her at the White Hot Room. She says that some of the psychics at Greyhaven helped her to access the White Hot Room and that “something went wrong”. She claims to have “removed your consciousness and brought you back here with me”, which would suggest that it’s not Jean’s physical body that has been brought to Greyhaven. That in turn casts doubt on whether Greyhaven really exists at all, and the curious symbolic final page only reinforces that doubt.<\/p>\n

Cable. <\/strong>He’s several hundred years in the future doing Star Wars type stuff, when he senses a change in the past. The obvious implication is that this is the incident at the White Hot Room, which took place in the preceding scene. Somehow or other, Cable can sense its impact and knows that the timeline is being altered.\u00a0 Quite how<\/em> he’s sensing it is unclear; presumably it’s meant to be something to do with his experience as a time traveller. He seems to think that this incident is so noticeable that even the thug he’s beating up ought to be able to sense it, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHOENIX #11 Writer: Stephanie Phillips Artist: Roi Mercado Colour artist: Java Tartaglia Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Annalise Bissa PHOENIX The previous issue ended with Jean receiving a psychic message from someone claiming to be her sister Sara. Since then, Jean hasn’t had any further psychic contact with Sara, but she has had recurring nightmares about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11075,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11072\/revisions\/11075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}