{"id":11250,"date":"2025-07-24T22:44:30","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T21:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11250"},"modified":"2025-07-24T22:44:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T21:44:30","slug":"phoenix-13-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11250","title":{"rendered":"Phoenix #13 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>PHOENIX #13<\/strong>
\nWriter: Stephanie Phillips<\/strong>
\nArtist: Roi Mercado<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Java Tartaglia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino<\/strong>
\nEditor: Annalise Bissa<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know, I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the scene-by-scene format, especially now that the post-Krakoan books have been around long enough to build up a bit of continuity. As with the last time I did this, I’m going to use the story page numbers, since Kindle still can’t count.<\/p>\n

Page 1.\u00a0<\/strong>Flashback: <\/em>Jean raises Nathan<\/em> Summers.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an original (and largely generic) scene which takes place somewhere during the 1994 miniseries\u00a0Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix<\/em>. It’s attempting to set up Jean and Cable’s relationship without getting too far into the weeds of 90s continuity. For anyone not familiar, however:<\/p>\n

Nathan is the child of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, who was a clone of Jean. In\u00a0X-Factor<\/em> #68, Nathan is sent into the far future so that the Askani can save him from a techno-organic virus; after some back and forth, it turns out that he returns to the present day as Cable to try and avert that future timeline. In\u00a0Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix<\/em>, Scott and Jean are brought forward in time to that future and wind up spending several years raising Nathan as his adoptive parents, though Cable only discovers this later on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-5. <\/strong>Cable fights Phoenix and Kel.<\/em><\/p>\n

“That’s part of the fun, Redd.” <\/strong>Throughout the issue, Cable refers to Jean by the name she used as his adoptive mother – presumably to appeal to their family connection.<\/p>\n

“When Sara found me, I was a resistance fighter… nothing more. Now? She unlocked my true powers…”\u00a0<\/strong>This is recapping a flashback from the previous issue, in which Kel was a soldier in “the Thales Civil War” who found Sara when she plummeted from the sky. In that flashback, she touches his arm and he gains the ability to fire energy blasts. We don’t actually see Kel use his powers in the present day sections of that issue, and when he tries to use them here, they don’t work – to his evident confusion.<\/p>\n

The story doesn’t make clear what’s going on here. It might be that the whole flashback was a fabrication (given what we’re told later on), but it could also be that Cable shot Sara at the end of the previous issue, and while she’s recovering, her effect on Kel fades.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-8. <\/strong>Cable takes Phoenix away.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cable claims that Sara is a projection of Jean’s own memories, and later scenes seem to indicate that he’s telling the truth.<\/p>\n

Sara evidently doesn’t believe this claim, and it seems we’re to take it that she genuinely recalls the version of events that she gave us last issue. Cable says in the next scene that she’s “not lying”.<\/p>\n

“Get the twins.”\u00a0<\/strong>The twins are evidently Vex and Rho, who accompany Sara and Kel in their next scene; we saw them with Kel in Sara’s origin flashback in the previous issue. We’re told later that Vex is a tracker and Rho a teleporter.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-15.\u00a0<\/strong>Cable convinces Phoenix that Sara is fake.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cable considers the key distinction between himself and Jean to be that he can set aside sentimentality, which is broadly fair enough – but a little ironic given that his last story was the\u00a0Love and Chrome<\/em> miniseries. Perhaps he’s learned his lesson from that story, where he was trying to mess with the timeline to save a woman he loved.<\/p>\n

“We’re in the future… a future.”\u00a0<\/strong>This version of the future seems to be a zombie wasteland. Jean’s immediate reaction is to dismiss it as one of the Marvel Universe’s many, many alternate futures, which is fair enough, because that’s how these things normally work. Cable claims that Sara makes this an inevitable future, though the mechanics of that are hazy at best.<\/p>\n

“A psychic blast was sent throughout the universe that was so powerful even I could feel it in the future.”\u00a0<\/strong>We saw Cable sense this in issue #11.<\/p>\n

“I sent out a wave of psychic energy to keep the powers of the Dark Gods from spreading…” <\/strong>This is footnoted to issue #10, which was the issue where Sara first appeared. It would make more sense if it referred to issue #9, where Phoenix decides to draw the Shadow Realm to herself by “creat[ing] a fracture in reality so vast, it will draw the Shadow Realm’s energy to me like a predator smelling blood”. But Jean also said in issue #11 that the first message from Sara came “right after I released the Phoenix Force into the cosmos to stop the shadow realm from spreading”, so apparently the reference to #10 is correct.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the claim here is that while fighting the Dark Gods, Jean “connected [herself] to the universe”, which in practice means a piece of her becoming separated from her and gaining an independent existence. This fragment is apparently her memory of her sister Sara, and becomes the Sara Grey that we’ve seen over the last two issues.<\/p>\n

Since this is an event which time travellers can detect in the future, there’s no particular difficulty with the idea that Sara was brought into existence at some point in the past, though that would leave some awkward questions about how she took so long to make contact with Jean. It’s also possible that Sara and her back story were retroactively inserted upon her creation, changing the world which is now “Greyhaven”. That would fit with the end of issue #10, where Sara claims that “When I felt that blast of light, when I saw the great shape of the Phoenix in the sky, I knew I was right to never stop looking”. It makes a lot more sense for Sara to\u00a0remember<\/em> a previous search than for her to have actually carried it out and failed.<\/p>\n

If Sara’s creation did simply transform a world to accord with her new backstory, then undoing it might be a problem, because last issue’s flashback described it as a war zone. It seems much improved in its current form. Sara also claimed that the people of Greyhaven had searched her out; if she’s retconned the world around her, then that begs questions about who these people are.<\/p>\n

On being reunited with Sara in issue #11, Jean said that “I’ve reached for you so many times, Sara. But all I’ve found are memories, echoes, dreams”. That line becomes ironic with hindsight.<\/p>\n

“You’d have me kill an innocent person…” <\/strong>Cable never actually says that he wants Jean to kill Sara, and as Jean points out, Cable himself evidently wasn’t shooting to kill at the end of last issue. He’s slightly evasive about why that was, suggesting that he didn’t want to risk turning Jean into Dark Phoenix. But he’s very clear that he wants Jean to take action about Sara, and the implication seems to be that he wants Jean to reabsorb Sara – simply killing her might not actually solve the problem.<\/p>\n

“The White Hot Room was falling apart around me…”\u00a0<\/strong>In issue #11, Phoenix finds that something is blocking her connection to the White Hot Room (the art shows some sort of fracture), or possibly attacking the White Hot Room itself. She then gets rescued by Sara and, as she acknowledges here, swiftly loses interest in the whole plotline.<\/p>\n

“I ignored the inaccuracies in her story.”\u00a0<\/strong>I covered this in some detail in the post for the previous issue<\/a>. Suffice to say that Sara’s account of how she had wound up in outer space accorded with the broad strokes of established continuity but with serious timeline problems.<\/p>\n

PAGES 16-19.\u00a0<\/strong>Sara, Kel, Vex and Rho try to follow Jean.<\/em><\/p>\n

The idea seems to be that Vex’s tracking powers have correctly identified Jean’s location, but failed to allow for the fact that Cable took her forwards in time.<\/p>\n

The In-Betweener.<\/strong> This is one of Marvel’s 1970s cosmic abstract entities, with the character redesign he received in\u00a0G.O.D.S.<\/em>. He’s one of the weirder abstract characters, broadly embodying balance between opposites. He describes Sara as “between reality and imagination”, which is presumably why she’s of interest to him – that and her connection with Phoenix. He previously appeared among the cosmic entities accompanying Eternity in issue #5, but didn’t get any dialogue there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHOENIX #13 Writer: Stephanie Phillips Artist: Roi Mercado Colour artist: Java Tartaglia Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Annalise Bissa You know, I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the scene-by-scene format, especially now that the post-Krakoan books have been around long enough to build up a bit of continuity. As with the last time I did […]<\/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-11250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11250","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=11250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11252,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11250\/revisions\/11252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}