{"id":4030,"date":"2018-02-06T23:43:31","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T23:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4030"},"modified":"2018-02-06T23:43:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T23:43:32","slug":"jean-grey-7-11-psych-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4030","title":{"rendered":"Jean Grey #7-11 – “Psych Wars”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, now we know where this was heading: it gets replaced by\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>, a fourth X-Men title (and bear in mind two of the other ones are fortnightly), starring a revived original Jean Grey. \u00a0At least in terms of the plot mechanics, the point of all this was to set up\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection<\/em> and get her back into circulation. \u00a0We’ll get to\u00a0Resurrection<\/em> shortly, but let’s deal with\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> first.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the most frustrating books are the ones that have plenty of good stuff but don’t stick the landing. \u00a0And there is plenty of good stuff here. \u00a0Dennis Hopeless and his main artist Victor Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez are strong when it comes to the character details that make characters feel rounded and believable, even when they’re doing something utterly divorced from human experience. \u00a0There’s a reassuring sense of (most of) this taking place in a recognisable real world. \u00a0Issue #8, which revisits the Morrison-era New X-Men\u00a0<\/em>school, looks fabulous. \u00a0Even when the characters decamp to the middle of nowhere in issue #9, at least it feels alive. \u00a0There’s some grounding for the giant cosmic bird to play against, and where the basic imagery of fire can look like a big thing.<\/p>\n

It’s not even that\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> is all detail and no big picture. \u00a0The shape of all this is clear enough: the younger Jean understandably wants to escape her fate of becoming Phoenix (and then Dark Phoenix). \u00a0But she keeps getting dragged back towards having to prepare for that fate, not only because the Phoenix itself is coming for her, but also because the ghost of the original Jean Grey is hanging around trying to prepare her. \u00a0It’s set up to be a coming of age story, then, in which young Jean faces down her unwanted destiny and comes out the other side. \u00a0And it plays rather cleverly with the idea that she isn’t the real Jean Grey; she’s certainly keen to insist that she’s not what everybody else means by “Jean Grey”.<\/p>\n

But does all this come across? \u00a0There’s the problem.<\/p>\n

The basic plot of these issues – technically “Psych Wars” starts with issue #8 but the real break point is at the start of issue #7 – sees ghost Jean trying one last push to ready the teenage Jean for the arrival of Phoenix. \u00a0Older Jean has always felt out of \u00a0character in this series, all the more so because she’s written more typically in Phoenix Resurrection<\/em>, but I guess we have to read her behaviour in this series as a mix of frustration and desperation. \u00a0So her idea is basically to raid the mind of Emma Frost to recover a small sliver of the Phoenix which Emma has been holding onto since\u00a0Avengers vs X-Men<\/em>, on the vague notion that this might work as some sort of innoculation or something. \u00a0This doesn’t go especially well, and Emma ends up tagging along as they try to calm down the younger Jean.<\/p>\n

Phoenix itself then shows up and Jean spends most of an issue taking her last stand against it, while the ghost Jean has a try at persuading the firebird to hold off until Jean is old enough to handle the power. \u00a0At which point Phoenix simply announces that it doesn’t accept this as the real Jean, and kills her. \u00a0That’s a genuinely good twist, one I didn’t see coming. \u00a0She’s not dead, of course –\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> wouldn’t stand for it – so the final issue of the series is an epilogue with her in the White Hot Room, basically visiting a series of former Phoenix hosts before having a brief showdown with the Phoenix itself and getting restored to life.<\/p>\n

Which… is not altogether satisfying. \u00a0There’s a bunch of issues here. \u00a0It’s the sort of thing that comes close to being complexly layered, but just feels confused.<\/p>\n

Let’s break it down. \u00a0There are other characters running around in these issues but we’re mainly concerned with the two Jeans, Emma and Phoenix itself. \u00a0For the older Jean, this seems to be a second chance to get Phoenix right; for some reason she seems to think that the young Jean is uniquely qualified to wind up as the new long-term Phoenix host, at least giving the right priming. \u00a0For the younger Jean, the Phoenix is more representative of the destiny she wants to escape.<\/p>\n

For Emma… \u00a0Hmm. \u00a0Well, Jean’s\u00a0spent most of this series meeting various Phoenix hosts who were, in varying degrees, supposedly traumatised by the experience. \u00a0Part of the book’s problem is that to buy into this idea takes a lot of reader charity, as it’s simply not how any of these characters have been written elsewhere. \u00a0Dennis Hopeless has tried very hard to reassert the awfulness of an encounter with the Phoenix, but when your story is based so directly on past continuity, you don’t really get to define your own terms in that way. \u00a0If anything, the horror of an encounter with the Phoenix might have been easier to sell without so many largely unscathed former hosts wandering around the book. \u00a0But at any rate, Emma is the only character in this book who seems to regard her experience with Phoenix positively. \u00a0Which could<\/i> be interesting… but doesn’t seem to develop into anything.<\/p>\n

Phoenix itself is not really a character so much as a symbol. \u00a0And again, we run into the question: a symbol for what? \u00a0Marvel’s cosmic pantheon is, shall we say, prone to literalism. \u00a0It’s big on anthropomorphic abstractions, with names like Death, Eternity, Love, Order and so forth. \u00a0Phoenix has never really fit into that mode, and quite what it is has always been a touch vague. \u00a0Sometimes it’s a kind of all-purpose embodiment of life and passion. \u00a0Sometimes it’s a more prosaic cycle of death and rebirth. \u00a0Sometimes it’s just a big scary thing because we all remember Dark Phoenix Saga, right? \u00a0Sometimes it’s an emblem of X-Men history and general X-Men-ness. \u00a0Go back to the original Chris Claremont scripts and you’ll find some stuff about kaballah – but none of this uncertainty was really a problem for him, because it served the story very well for Phoenix to be something unintelligible, ungraspable, and beyond human capacity. \u00a0(And religiously non-specific.) \u00a0In that context, the vaguer the better. \u00a0But that’s not really what we’re doing here.<\/p>\n

Here, Phoenix seems to be mainly the cycle of death and rebirth, which ties in somewhat with the history-repeating nature of continuity; but it’s also sort of generally ominous and terrible, and what (if anything) it actually\u00a0wants<\/em> or\u00a0is<\/em> beyond A Thing That Wants Jean is never fleshed out. \u00a0And there’s a nagging feeling that the death\/rebirth stuff is more a useful Jean-reviving device than anything else. \u00a0The final issue is profoundly unsatisfying, because there’s at least a certain symbolic logic to the idea of Phoenix killing one Jean in order to bring about the re-birth of the “real” one. \u00a0But killing the younger Jean and then bringing back both… that doesn’t feel right. \u00a0And it doesn’t seem to come out of anything in particular that happened in this series. \u00a0You have to wonder whether this was really the originally planned ending, or whether the plot has had to be awkwardly fudged to keep both Jeans in circulation going forward.<\/p>\n

The idea, I suppose, is that by choosing to go her own way and not be a repeat Jean Grey, the new Jean somehow renders herself unacceptable to the Phoenix and avoids her fate. \u00a0She can’t beat Phoenix, as such, but her choices can make her into somebody different, and take her down a different route. \u00a0Does that work? \u00a0Kind of, I guess. \u00a0But only kind of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, now we know where this was heading: it gets replaced by\u00a0X-Men Red, a fourth X-Men title (and bear in mind two of the other ones are fortnightly), starring a revived original Jean Grey. \u00a0At least in terms of the plot mechanics, the point of all this was to set up\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection and get her […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030","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=4030"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4032,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions\/4032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}