{"id":4033,"date":"2018-02-08T22:41:25","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T22:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4033"},"modified":"2018-02-08T22:41:25","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T22:41:25","slug":"phoenix-resurrection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4033","title":{"rendered":"Phoenix Resurrection"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might think that\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection<\/em> – or\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey<\/em>, if you must – would form a good companion piece to the\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> review one post down. \u00a0After all,\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> was an entire series devoted to setting up this book.<\/p>\n

In fact, the most jarring thing about\u00a0Resurrection<\/em> is how irrelevant\u00a0it makes\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> seem. \u00a0That book devoted months to establishing the ghost of the original Jean as a hard-ass mentor for the younger Jean, determined to prepare her younger self for the coming of the Phoenix. \u00a0What we get here is Jean as the everywoman innocent, living in a fictional small town created for her by Phoenix, as it tries to prepare her for host duties. \u00a0If it wasn’t for a couple of passing references, you’d think writer Matthew Rosenberg was completely unaware that Jean Grey<\/em>\u00a0was even out there.<\/p>\n

This is, shall we say, annoying. \u00a0But let’s take the series on its own terms.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In one sense, the point of this story is clear: get Jean from point A (dead) to point B (starring in\u00a0X-Men: Red<\/em>). Use the Phoenix as the device to get her there, and then clear it the hell out of the way. \u00a0And fair enough, that’s the remit. \u00a0But does it do anything beyond that?<\/p>\n

We’re firmly in the “less than the sum of its parts” file here. \u00a0A weekly release schedule means a bunch of different artists, though there are at least big names. \u00a0Issue #1 has Leinil Francis Yu, who does a rather good leafy suburbia. \u00a0Weird things are happening in Jean’s home town – two kids are found floating unconscious, bleeding, and floating off the ground. \u00a0(The art doesn’t sell this very well; judging from the script, they ought to be a lot higher up, and on a first reading it’s easy to miss the fact that they’re floating at all.) \u00a0Fearing the return of the Phoenix, Kitty rounds up a bunch of X-Men and, in time-honoured crossover style, packs them all off into teams to investigate possible leads.<\/p>\n

Some running around ensues, but it’s largely busy work to keep the cast occupied for a couple of issues while the main plot develops. \u00a0The hook is that each team encounters villains who are meant to be dead, these dead X-characters also making up most of the inhabitants of Jean’s little world. \u00a0Rosenberg deserves credit for trawling for the obscurities here, instead of reaching for the old standards – Seamus Melloncamp is a pretty minor bad guy to dust off.<\/p>\n

Jean’s world is one of those familiar picket-fence, old-style diner locations that used to signify “a more innocent age” but now signifies “something terrible beneath the surface”. \u00a0She’s a waitress, and she seems oblivious to the strange things happening around her; they start gently with Madrox as a neighbour, but by the end of the series the place is on fire. \u00a0At the same time, Jean is unsettled by bad dreams about the Phoenix, and she’s certainly bothered about that.<\/p>\n

This dreamlike creepiness is the book’s strongest feature, and the various artists get the atmosphere nicely. \u00a0It’s probably a good thing that Jean’s plotline doesn’t really come into focus until issue #2, because Carlos Pacheco draws that one, and his clean lines are especially suited to this schtick. \u00a0Joe Bennett, on issue #3, is alright as well – a bit heavy handed on the melodrama, mind you. \u00a0Ramon Rosanas, in #4, pushes us into full-on surrealist nightmare, and gets the need to keep Jean understated as she fails to notice the book burning around her. \u00a0And then with issue #5 we get Yu back, but by then everything’s on fire and it’s time for Jean to tell the Phoenix to get lost.<\/p>\n

Where all this seems to be heading, though, is a fairly conventional showdown in which the Phoenix tries to persuade Jean to be its host, and Jean turns it down and gets it to go away. \u00a0Phoenix keeps trying to push the idea that with cosmic power, Jean can remake the world the way she wants, and bring back all the people who died in her life. \u00a0When Jean dismisses most of that as illusion, Phoenix wheels out Cyclops – apparently the real Cyclops – for a reunion, but in a pleasant twist Jean simply takes the chance to give him a proper goodbye, and then lets him die again. \u00a0That’s very well done. \u00a0So, for that matter, is an earlier scene where the X-Men decide to pick the member who’s best suited to get through to Jean, and go for Logan – to the obvious distress of the\u00a0young<\/em> Cyclops.<\/p>\n

Still, this all boils down to Jean telling the Phoenix that she needs to feel pain and loss because that’s how life is, and the Phoenix is trying to shield her from the things that make life worthwhile, and you get the drift. \u00a0And she tells the Phoenix to forget about her and leave, and the Phoenix just kind of does, which is something of an anticlimax.<\/p>\n

None of this really seems to be about very much; the Phoenix is serving here just as a well-meaning alien that needs to stop obsessing about Jean and find out what it’s really meant to be doing. \u00a0But there are a lot of good bits in this, and it does at least set out to send a clear message that this is meant to be a fresh start for the Jean Grey character, without Scott, and (now that it’s served its function) without Phoenix. \u00a0We’ll see how long that lasts, but it’s a mission statement for a baggage-free Jean, and that’s something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might think that\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection – or\u00a0Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey, if you must – would form a good companion piece to the\u00a0Jean Grey review one post down. \u00a0After all,\u00a0Jean Grey was an entire series devoted to setting up this book. In fact, the most jarring thing about\u00a0Resurrection is how irrelevant\u00a0it makes\u00a0Jean Grey […]<\/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-4033","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\/4033","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=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4034,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions\/4034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}