{"id":9604,"date":"2023-11-17T22:02:31","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9604"},"modified":"2023-11-17T22:02:31","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:02:31","slug":"jean-grey-4-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9604","title":{"rendered":"Jean Grey #4 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/814IrYnDoL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-9605 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/814IrYnDoL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/814IrYnDoL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/814IrYnDoL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg 284w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><strong>JEAN GREY vol 2 #4<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Ashes to Ashes&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Louise Simonson<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Bernard Chang<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colour artist: Marcelo Maiolo<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Design: Jay Bowen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Assorted Jean Greys squabble over who gets to touch the Phoenix Force.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 2. <\/strong><em>Jean is surrounded by other Jean Greys.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is where we left off last issue. Leaving aside the two Jeans who are shown only in silhouette, the other Jeans on page 2, from left to right, are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Jean in her costume from the 2018\u00a0<em>X-Men Red<\/em> series.<\/li>\n<li>Jean in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #100, just before she becomes Phoenix.<\/li>\n<li>Dark Phoenix.<\/li>\n<li>The Goblin Queen.<\/li>\n<li>Late 1960s Marvel Girl<\/li>\n<li>Time-travelling &#8220;Silver Age&#8221; Jean Grey from\u00a0<em>All-New X-Men<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Jean Grey from the Morrison\/Quitely\u00a0<em>New X-Men<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Because everyone&#8217;s dead!&#8221; &#8220;Not quite&#8230; Not everyone. Hope&#8211;&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>Jean is starting to recall that the mutants were being slaughtered by Orchis immediately before her death in\u00a0<em>X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023<\/em>. She knows that Hope survived because she saw her briefly last issue, in events shown in more detail in\u00a0<em>Immortal X-Men<\/em> #16.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 3-4. <\/strong><em>The other Jeans explain the high concept.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Obviously, all of the other Jeans are fragments from her memories (though Goblin Queen makes a point of reminding us that she&#8217;s a clone and therefore not entirely &#8220;real&#8221; to start with). The Phoenix then pops up to assure us that, nonetheless, all of this is real in a sense within the White Hot Room.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5. <\/strong><em>Silver Age Jean Grey yells at Jean.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;I saw a dozen realities and my gut said &#8211; forget them all!&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>I&#8217;m assuming that&#8217;s the radio-edit sense of &#8220;forget&#8221;. Anyway, this is the version of time-travelling Silver Age Jean who we saw in issue #1, where the alternate reality element was for the X-Men to keep their memories of the future on returning to the past. There&#8217;s a suggestion that these are scenarios that actually played out in some sense within the White Hot Room.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure what younger Jean means when she says that she saw a &#8220;dozen realities&#8221; before returning home &#8211; it might refer to her own visit to the White Hot Room in\u00a0<em>Jean Grey<\/em> vol 1 #11, but that would be a very obscure reference.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 6-7. <\/strong><em>Phoenix yells at Jean.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Like the Silver Age version, Phoenix&#8217;s basic point is that Jean made the best available choices first time round, which is why all of her alternate realities were worse.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 8.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 9-11. <\/strong><em>Pre-Phoenix Jean.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Again, this is Jean in the dress she was wearing in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #100 (after Wolverine cut it off at the knee). We get a recap of issue #2 and another explanation of why Jean made the right calls in the first place and should stop second-guessing herself. It&#8217;s an attempt to exonerate her of the worst consequences of the Phoenix by showing that she couldn&#8217;t have made any better choices.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The D&#8217;Bari<\/strong> were the race whose planet was wiped out by Dark Phoenix in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #135. The retcon by which Phoenix wasn&#8217;t strictly Jean Grey was always intended to exonerate Jean of moral responsibility for that &#8211; while keeping the emotional weight of the story by having Phoenix still be Jean in a sense. &#8220;Unfortunate&#8221; might be thought a slight understatement for planetary-scale genocide.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;They found your true body cocooned beneath the sea and awakened you.&#8221;<\/strong> In\u00a0<em>Avengers<\/em> #263 and\u00a0<em>Fantastic Four<\/em> #286.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 12-14.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Madelyne Pryor.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Madelyne appears first in her wedding dress from when she married Scott Summers in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #175, then as the techno-organic version of the Goblin Queen which appeared in issue #3&#8217;s alternate version of Inferno.<\/p>\n<p>After pointing out that Jean&#8217;s attempt to alter Inferno was, again, not an improvement, Madelyne returns to her origin story as explained in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #241 and suggests another possible departure point. Per that story (and the remainder of Inferno), after Dark Phoenix died on the moon, Phoenix tried to return its portion of Jean&#8217;s soul to her, but Jean rejected it because of the awful things it had done. So Phoenix used it to animate Madelyne Pryor instead. Madelyne points out that Jean could have simply accepted the Phoenix&#8217;s offer the first time round (and then, oddly, throws in a reference to the alternate timeline from issue #2). And this time, Jean gets the point quickly enough that this wouldn&#8217;t have been a better outcome either, at least in the sense that Madelyne would never existed and, by extension, Cable wouldn&#8217;t have existed either.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 15-16. <\/strong><em>Jean remembers the Hellfire Gala.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A basically straight recap of Jean&#8217;s death in\u00a0<em>X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023<\/em> as her mind clears.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 17-18.\u00a0<\/strong><em>The Phoenix itself talks to Jean directly.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Phoenix spells out rather directly that it has been steering Jean to self-acceptance by demonstrating to her that different choices would have led to worse outcomes, and that the bad things that happened in her life were ultimately beyond her control.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 19-22. <\/strong><em>Jean sees Exodus and Hope fighting &#8220;Apocalypse.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is a continuation of the scene from <em>Immortal X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#16, though we know in that book that this isn&#8217;t the real Apocalypse, but something that forms part of the desert\/exodus scenario in which most of the Krakoans are trapped. However, since the Phoenix itself is perched on Jean&#8217;s arm here, this Apocalypse presumably isn&#8217;t himself the Phoenix.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Immortal\u00a0<\/em>#16 scene simply ends with Hope reading Jean&#8217;s mind and asking what the White Hot Room is, so this is a continuation. Jean apparently makes some of Phoenix&#8217;s power available to Hope via Hope&#8217;s power-copying ability. Presumably, we&#8217;ll see more of this in <em>Immortal X-Men <\/em>#17 next week.)<\/p>\n<p><b>The Kaballah. <\/b>Exodus apparently does know what the White Hot Room is, and draws a parallel with &#8220;Tiphareth, from the Kabbalah.&#8221; This refers back to\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #108 (1977), where Phoenix stops the M&#8217;Kraan Crystal from destroying the universe; the accompanying narration refers too the kabbalistic Tree of Life and says that &#8220;the heart of the tree, the catalyst that binds these wayward souls together, is Phoenix. Tiphareth. Child of the sun, child of life, the vision of the harmony of things.&#8221; As best as I understand this stuff, Tiphareth has general associations of glory, harmony, compassion and so forth.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;No longer am I the woman you knew&#8230;&#8221;<\/strong> Jean ends the series by calling back to her line from when she debuted as Phoenix in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #101, the suggestion apparently being that she&#8217;s come to terms with her choices in life and her connection to the Phoenix, though with a rather more equivocal identification of herself\u00a0<em>with<\/em> the Phoenix.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 23.\u00a0<\/strong>Trailers. This is the final issue of the miniseries, so we&#8217;re directed to next week&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Immortal X-Men<\/em> #17. The Krakoan reads FOLLOW THE FALL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. JEAN GREY vol 2 #4 &#8220;Ashes to Ashes&#8221; Writer: Louise Simonson Artist: Bernard Chang Colour artist: Marcelo Maiolo Letterer: Ariana Maher Design: Jay Bowen Editor: Sarah Brunstad COVER \/ PAGE 1. Assorted Jean Greys squabble over who gets to touch the [&hellip;]<\/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-9604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9604","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=9604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9606,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9604\/revisions\/9606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}