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Thanks to Panos Delinikopoulos for suggesting this column.

The Return of Jean Grey

I must grant Marvel considerable credit for the handling of the Jean Grey ressurection of the 1980s, for in the attempts to explain and clarify this matter, they may have outdone the industry in rendering a simple editorial cop-out into a baffling enigma within a mystery within a cesspool. Granted, this column deals with stories we expect to contain more than the average share of buncombe (hence the title "Revolving Door of Death"). However, in handling this one an unelected cabal of writers and editors have glued together a sticky mass of unbelievable yet morbidly fascinating nonsense so dense it threatens to collapse under its own gravity and vanish into its own even horizon.

While I pause for breath, waiting for the fumes to clear from my keyboard, however, I must consider this: that Marvel took over ten years of really trying to mess things up this badly. Therefore, perhaps I should mute some of my awe at the landscape of improbability and unpalatability that presents itself in the continuity of a character who wore the names Marvel Girl, Phoenix, Dark Phoenix, the Black Queen, and others. The story has grown to the point that a true aficionado would require many hard hours, swilling espresso and wake-up pills, to define where "Jean Grey" gave way to "Marvel Girl," et al.

Jean Dies the First Time

The whole problem began, innocently enough, with Marvel's reworking of the X-Men, primarily through the ingenuity of Dave Cockrum and Len Wein. The X-Men title had died of disinterest around 1972 or so after years of reprinting stories from around 1964 vintage. In this time, X-Men Angel and Iceman had appeared in numerous team-up stories and as members of the short-lived team the Champions; the Beast had turned gray and furry and then blue and furry and had found a long-term niche as comic relief in The Avengers; and Marvel Girl (Jean's original code name) and Cyclops had entered a cancelled comics characters' limbo.

Marvel resumed the X-Men book with a story that dealt with the disappearance of the original X-Men, at that time meaning those members who appeared in the last issues of the original title back when it contained original content (during the acclaimed Roy Thomas/Neal Adams run). The story involved a simple round up of token ethnic stereotype mutants (Thunderbird representing the most blatant two-dimensional character) and the rescue of the originals from a big, bad monster in the form of a mutant in the shape of an island.

This story left the team with X-men in the forms of their last printed version; for instance, Angel wore one of his seventies blue costumes, rather than the red-and-gold costume of the last original issues of X-Men.

Marvel Girl, however, hadn't appeared in print in so long that she still wore a cat's eye mask and miniskirt, characteristic of women's costumes in the high days of Marvel's Silver Age ascendancy. Her costume dated from perhaps 1967 or 1968, and required some kind of revision for its obvious anachronism.

Cyclops received some reworking (new, chunkier visor and more potant eye-blasts), so it seems only fair that "Marvel Girl" should receive some as well. Mainly as a storytelling gimmick, therefore, the writers of X-Men killed her at the end of issue #100 and revived her at the beginning of issue #101 after some improbable business about sacrificing herself to save the other X-men during a re-entry accident in a spacecraft.

Jean Comes Back

Jean's first death essentially involved an inter-issue cliffhanger that need not have any particular importance (for instance, some superbeings have powers activated by their deaths; other characters -- Spawn and the Spectre -- involve concepts requiring their deaths). At the end of one issue, Jean sacrificed herself for the sake of her peers; at the beginning of the next, she erupts from the waters in a new costume, with new powers, new name, and a new trauma to add depth to an underdeveloped character.

However, Chris Claremont and the lads at Marvel found in this death theme a few storytelling hooks that became the "Dark Phoenix Saga." Put briefly, a mind-controlling villain attempted to remake Jean as the villainous Black Queen, a complement to the equally wicked White Queen; but failed in this, and, in the process, woke up something nasty in Jean's mind. Soon Jean found herself in a struggle to control her personality as the darker aspect of her Phoenix persona took over and led her to gobble up stars for the power they contained.

This story became a real tear-jerker as Cyclops, Phoenix, and Professor X all played their parts trying to save Jean from herself; and, tragically, after she seemingly won the fight for her contested soul, she stood accused (accurately) of genocidal crimes and sentenced to death by Shi'ar extraterrestrials. At this point, the X-Men stood ready to fight the assembled might of slightly less than eight billion superheroes working for the Shi'ar.

Jean Dies the Second Time

This brings us to Jean's second death, or, really, her first meaningful one in the sense that a superhero(ine)'s death ever actually has any. Jean, well aware of the danger she presented and the crimes committed as Dark Phoenix, took her own life to prevent the return of her darker side. So, for at least one issue -- more so than the last time, after all -- Jean Grey would remain dead.

Chris Claremont (if I recall correctly who wrote this story) really worked the reader in the final stages of the Dark Phoenix stories. He taunted X-Men readers with the false hope of Jean's "cure" after the Black Queen / Dark Phoenix episodes, falsely promising a happy end to the torments through which he had gleefully dragged his cast for a long and successful string of books; then, with a logical turn (in essence, the antithesis of a deus ex machina) made readers realize that Jean would have to die after all, both due to the threat she posed even in her benign state and as atonement for the genocidal crimes she committed as Dark Phoenix.

To many readers, Claremont seemed to have delivered a knockout blow by this unhappy resolution, and, years later, feel some sense of betrayal at Marvel's selling out of this story line by resurrecting Jean a few years later. In a sense, Marvel made nothing out of a rare story with real impact. But at first, Marvel seemed to manfully stand by its decision to kill Jean Grey, thoroughly and permanently, dead with a tombstone and all the accessories.

Barring the occasional appearance of the "Phoenix force," if Marvel used it at all, Jean would remain dead for a fair span; possibly between 1981 and 1985, Marvel continuity allowed her death. In this, Jean outdid Superman (less than a year), but could not compete with long-dead beings like Wonder Man (12 years, then a few panels, then about two years, if no other "deaths" happened in that confusing span between 1976 and 1996).

Jean Comes Back Again

Jean came back again, though. At this point, she began to accumulate some of the most horrendous and unlikely baggage in her personal history, these involving a series of small fixes to explain inconsistencies, or providing story hooks for tales that might have best remained unwritten.

The betrayal didn't rest solely on the reversal of Claremont's story. Comics involve make-believe, and the saner readers recognize that no fictional story need remain permanent; from "she woke up and saw it was all a dream" to false memories to "alternate timeline" copouts, fantastical literature contains a repertoire of many tools for revising itself. No one should have felt too surprised, then, when Jean took back upon herself the burden of life; after all, her seventies revision had borne the name "Phoenix," after a mythological creature believed to replicate by dying.

Marvel certainly resisted temptation for the absolute minimum time (as established by Adam Warlock's first resurrection the month after his death) and patiently waited for X-Men/Teen Titans before bringing back some version of some component of Jean.

Therefore, when John Byrne, who sometimes enjoys tossing the occasional Jacobin monkey-wrench into established continuity (for still waters tend to stagnate), observers with some perspective need have demonstrated no surprise whatsoever. Jean Grey returned in Fantastic Four during Byrne's ride through that title.

Marvel had use for her, since it wanted to create a superhero team -- one may admire their innovation -- composed of the original X-Men in their original forms! This required some finagling, though, since the Beast had become gray, then blue, and furry, back around 1970 or so and had persistently remained in this more interesting state until editorial considerations temporarily compelled him to shed his fur, pointy ears, and fangs. Towards this end, Marvel dutifully brought back Jean Grey, "fixed" Hank McCoy (the Beast), reassembled their old school buddies Angel, Cyclops, and Iceman, stuffed them into some truly, truly horrible costumes, and dubbed them "X-Factor," a name awful enough that one should consider it trailblazing, in the same fashion as the trailblazing "mutant holocaust in the future" stories Chris Claremont wrote in Uncanny X-Men, ca. 1980, set the tone for an eternity of morbid mutant stories and the short-lived "new comics."

@#$%$ Complications

One might say: "Okay, she came back, and she's Phoenix again, right, but not 'Dark Phoenix,' right?" at this point. However, Marvel did not allow any such simple resolution for the hows and whys of Jean's return to the living. Consider these points that erupted in the X-canon relating to Jean's death in subsequent years of incomprehensible story arcs:

• Since something died, Marvel retroactively decided that 'Phoenix' and 'Dark Phoenix' represented manifestations of some cosmic force that had occupied Jean's body and saved her from death back around Uncanny X-Men #100; for no good reason, it took Jean's bodies and memories, but planted her at the bottom of a harbor in a cocoon for the Fantastic Four to find and revive years later.
• Since this life-force thing had cheated death before (by not really cheating death; see previous item), Marvel assumed it immortal and occasionally allows it to appear as 'the Phoenix force,' presumably the villain of the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover of the early 1980s.
• Since, at this point, we have a live Jean Grey who hadn't really died, and a fake Jean Grey who also hadn't really died, but no longer attempted to pass for Jean Grey, it had clearly become necessary for Scott Summers (Cyclops) to marry Jean Grey, but somehow this Jean Grey turned out a counterfeit, either as a clone (very original!) or an unexplained stochastic anamoly who amazingly resembled Jean Grey in all particulars, including powers. This third Jean Grey we may call Madeline Pryor.
• Since, for whatever reason, Scott (Cyclops) Summers decided he didn't like the Jean (Madeline Pryor) Grey he married out of happiness for the untruth of the death of Jean (Phoenix force) Grey, who hadn't, after all, really been his Jean (Jean Grey) Grey, Scott left Madeline, presumably to return to Jean. [By now, Cyclops had slept with no less than three separate Jean Greys, and remained unhappy; wisdom would suggest that perhaps he needed to pursue other conquests rather than follow this destructive course of attempting to sleep with every Jean Grey in the multiverse.]

• Since all this hoo-hah evidently hadn't furgled up things altogether adequately, the Wise Rulers of Marvel Comics decided that Scott and Jean (?) in the future had a child, who appears as "Cable" in his own title now. Cable came from one of the "mutant holocaust" futures (maybe) to escape something. Presumably he knows which Jean to call "mom."

Herein Lies the Lesson

It hardly escapes a critical observer that this convoluted, silly, self-contradictory, incomprehensible, stupid, unnecessary, concave-convex mass of tangled-up, wadded-up confusion represents a completely hopeless story thread, worse even than the unjustifiable Spider-Clone stories that fewer and fewer folks care to discuss any more.

This story does not represent anything anyone could understand, no matter how many back issues he purchased and read. DC's "Hypertime" represents something far more comprehensible than this, and readers damn that concept for its arcane way of twisting up a cosmos.

Put in brief, the eighties resurrection of Jean Grey represents a huge affront to the intellect, and one may hope that Marvel Entertainment resists the temptation to attempt to elaborate upon it further, or, indeed, discuss it at all. How many more Jean Greys would they require, really, to satisfactorily explain this nightmare to themselves?

Stories, after all, don't have to hurt.