In today’s post, we pick up from the intense cliffhanger with which writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum left us in the final panels of the milestone 100th issue of X-Men, with the team’s space shuttle hurtling towards planet Earth, and its pilot, Jean Grey, about to succumb to what was likely to be a lethal dose of radiation from an intense solar flare. Back in July, 1976 it had been a two-month wait for fans to learn the fate of Jean and her fellow mutant heroes… but for the characters, naturally, it had been but a matter of minutes…
We’ll pause here just a moment to note that, while Cockrum was able to ink his own pencils for the story’s previous installment, he’s had to return the embellisher’s brush to Frank Chiaramonte for this one. And now, we’ll take just a moment more to make note of something your humble blogger missed in his coverage of X-Men #100 in May, but which several readers, including Ben Herman and Blake Stone, pointed out in their respective comments in different forums — namely, that the Geiger counter-evoking “TAC-TAC-TAC” sound heard by Jean Grey as her telekinetic shield failed in the closing panels of that issue (see left) calls back to a similar moment in Fantastic Four #1 (Nov., 1961) (see right; text by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and George Klein) — something that suggests that the heroine we’ve previously known as Marvel Girl was being exposed to the same sort of cosmic radiation that, fifteen years earlier, had forever altered the fates of astronauts Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and Sue and Johnny Storm. For the hyper-alert comics fan (which my then eighteen-year-old self most definitely wasn’t, half a century ago), the correspondence couldn’t help but raise the question: if these kinds of cosmic rays would give otherwise ordinary human beings super-powers, how might they affect a representative of Homo superior?
According to statements made by various of the creative personnel involved in shaping the early adventures of the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men in 1975 and 1976, a major reworking of Jean Grey had always been in the cards — despite her having apparently left the team at the same time as most of the other original members, back in issue #94. As the revived series’ original writer and editor, Len Wein, recalled for The X-Men Companion: I (Fantagraphics, 1981):
Chris [Claremont] was following a little bit of my scenario in the early issues. She was meant to come back in just a few months. The two of them [i.e., Jean Grey and Scott Summers, aka Cyclops] couldn’t stay apart and she was going to show up again [as part of the team]… With redesigned powers. We were going to revamp her not quite into what Phoenix became, but make her a different character, because we all thought she was a wimp, that she wasn’t worth it. We had to pretty much reconstruct Jean Grey as a character.
In the same volume, Dave Cockrum acknowledged that he, too, had considered Marvel Girl to be “a wimp”, adding:
I like female characters who support the group. If you’ve got a team of characters who have to go out and place themselves in danger, you don’t want one fifth of that group to be expected to be rescued.
Along with upgrading Jean Grey’s powers, Cockrum — one of the great character designers of his generation — was determined to give her a new costume, as well; interestingly, although the green-and-gold color scheme might seem to be a natural, lifted as it was from the character’s previous Marvel Girl outfit, it wasn’t what the artist had originally planned:
The thing that caused us difficulty with Phoenix was the color, because my original design was white and gold, an all-white costume with gold boots, gloves, sash, and all that, and I loved it. I still like it. And by this time I guess Archie Goodwin was Editor-in-Chief and we apparently were not allowed to introduce new costumes without the okay from Archie, and Archie didn’t like the white. He felt — and he may be right — that you would be able to read the next page through the costume. He may be right, but I snarfed and bitched and moaned and raised hell and stomped up and down the halls and Archie got adamant and he said, “No, use her original colors!” And so that’s what we were stuck with. And I was really miffed about it for a long time, and later on, as I recall, Archie told me if I wanted to I could change the color back to white if I wanted to, and by that time — several issues later — I figured, “Oh, hell.” [laughter] It was pointless. So she stayed with the green.
“But she is still alive.” Very true… although, as we’ll learn some nine-and-three-quarters years hence, the real Jean Grey, though indeed among the living, is actually still way down at the bottom of the drink — where she’ll remain for the next, um, nine-and-three-quarters years.
Your humble blogger is mentioning this “fact” mainly because, given the enormous (and continuing) weight of this moment in the history not just of the X-Men, but of the overall Marvel Universe, it would feel perverse not to mention it. That said, our main focus here is, and will continue to be, on the stories as they were originally produced and consumed fifty years ago, rather than on later continuity implants. After all, not only did we readers of July, 1976 not know that the OG Jean Grey had just now been replaced by the Phoenix Force — Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum didn’t know it, either.
In fact, if Cockrum’s 1981 recollections for The X-Men Companion: I were correct, neither he nor Claremont were yet quite sure just what had transpired, other than it had resulted in Jean now having a new codename, a new costume, and newly upgraded powers:
We agonized for a long time over the color [of the costume]. and once we figured out the color we agonized over what the hell she did. “Well, she can die and be resurrected with some super-power.” I don’t know if we made it all that clear to the readers, but we knew she died up there and recreated herself [#100-101], and later on we made it more clear, but beyond that it took us a long time to figure out exactly what she did, so we left her in the hospital for several issues, while we thought about it.
And so it is that the character whom both the cover and these first few pages have led us to believe will be at the center of this issue’s proceedings is about to exit from the story, at least as far as on-panel appearances are concerned — though she will of course continue to be much discussed by her co-stars.
Yeah, being able to make everyone forget you ever were some place is pretty darn convenient. Maybe too convenient, narratively speaking… though I don’t suppose we can blame Chris Claremont for playing fairly by the in-story rules he’d inherited from his predecessors. After all, he’s not the one that made Charles Xavier such a powerful telepath.
The above panel is a rare acknowledgement of one of the most ewww moments of the X-Men’s early history, calling back to the infamous scene in X-Men #3 (Jan., 1964) where Professor X silently confessed his secret love for his underage student. Not one of Lee and Kirby’s better ideas — but canon, all the same.
And here, with seven pages of the 17-page “Like a Phoenix, from the Ashes!” left to go, we segue away from the Phoenix plotline into a completely new story arc — well, OK, not completely new, given that we’d had a brief, foreshadowing scene in issue #99 in which we saw Sean Cassidy’s lawyer, the unfortunate Mr. Flaherty, murdered in cold blood by a shadowy figure who called himself “Black Tom” (and claimed to be Sean’s cousin, besides). So, we already know that the X-Men’s vacation in Ireland is unlikely to be “a good time” — or, at least, not entirely so — even if they as yet have no clue.
Having said that, there are no omens of ill fortune whatsoever on the page that immediately follows, which chronicles in succession our heroes’ flight from the U.S. to the Emerald Isle, their pleasant week sightseeing in Dublin, and their train ride to Ballina in County Mayo — at which point they rent a car to take them the rest of the way to…
In our X-Men #100 post, we discussed Chris Claremont’s penchant for adding to the backstories of the characters he’d inherited as the book’s new regular writer, and that pattern continues with his treatment of Sean Cassidy, aka Banshee. In his first appearance back in X-Men #28 (Nov., 1966), Banshee had been shown casually using his mutant powers to commit robberies — not exactly the kind of activity you’d expect from the wealthy heir to a castle. But, of course, people have all sorts of reasons for doing the things they do; and when Claremont was asked about this seeming incongruity in Sean’s background for The X-Men Companion: II (Fantagraphics, 198), his answer was simple: “He’s an adventurer; he’s a rogue.” Which is fair enough, I suppose. It’s just that it often seems in Claremont’s stories that every detail we learn about our heroes’ pasts makes them even more exceptional. And given that they’re already super-powered mutants, how much more exceptional do they really need to be?
Unaware that she’s being observed by shadowy, pointy-eared little people, Storm takes advantage of her seeming solitude to refresh herself in a summer shower she calls up right in the middle of her room. Afterwards, she dresses for dinner; and, a little before eight, Nightcrawler bamfs in to offer her the opportunity to be escorted by Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, or Groucho Marx, before finally setting his image inducer back to plain ol’ Errol Flynn. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the castle…
“Who Shall Stop the Juggernaut?” indeed? First introduced back in X-Men #12 (Jul., 1965), Cain Marko is one of our mutant heroes’ oldest and deadliest foes, despite not being a mutant himself. And who knows what this Black Tom Cassidy fellow has up his blousy purple sleeve? Finally, as long as we’re asking questions, what is the deal with Storm’s extreme claustrophobia?
All of these queries would of course receive answers in the forthcoming issues of X-Men… and, fear not, we’ll be getting to them in a future post here at Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books, as well. So stay tuned, X-fans!
Fifty years and two months ago, I never even saw X-Men #100 at my source for comics but fortunately I did find this one and it certainly was a milestone! Despite Cockrum’s misgivings over the colors of Phoenix’s costume, I liked it just fine and she got an aptly dramatic entrance. All very mysterious, with little hint of just how extensive Jean’s new powers would turn out to be — and at least thus far we should think of her as Jean rather than a doppelgänger as at the time everyone involved intended this to actually be Jean Grey seriously powered up. But, there’d be many bizarre and tragic twists and turns over the next couple of decades of chronicles of our not always so merry band of mutants.
Logan’s little scene of buying flowers and subsequent surprise to find the whole gang at the hospital awaiting word of Jean’s condition was rather intriguing, although this early incarnation of Wolverine seems much less worldly than later versions as filtered through reshaping by Claremont’s later X-collaborators, Byrne and Miller.
As to Banshee’s castle, um, well, ok, I have to wonder why it seems nearly every prominent European character in comics has to be related to royalty of some sort and heir to a majestic castle??? On second thought, I did do a search of castles in Ireland and it turns out there about 3,000 of them on the Emerald Isle and based on photos of them, many do look rather grand. I’m of Irish ancestry myself (as well as English and Dutch), but as far as I know it was through someone who migrated to North America in the 1750s and he probably didn’t live in a castle before he left Cork, Ireland, to try his luck in the colonies across the ocean. Anyhow, a castle does allow for more dramatic backgrounds and set ups than a ramshackle old home.
Got to hand it to Claremont & Cockrum at mastering the art of sequential dramatic cliffhangers in the style of Kirby’s stellar runs of old in the FF & Thor. They’ve now given us several in a row on the ANAD X-Men, keeping us anxious for 60 days at a time to see how it’ll get resolved — or 120 days if we happen to miss an issue! At any rate, the revived X-Men is proving to be among the best titles of the latter half of the 1970s and beyond.
I agree that Wolverine buying the flowers for Jean and then throwing them in the garbage when he sees that the rest of the team are also at the hospital visiting Jean is a great little character moment. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s one of those things that probably helped make the All-New, all-Different X-Men distinct from other mainstream superhero books and led to it eventually becoming such a runaway success.
Two different characters with beards in the same comic (Dr. McKay and Black Tom Cassidy) —- not a common sight in comics at the time, unless they had a common theme (hippies, Norse gods, or prisoners who were unable to shave, e.g.). But by 1976 with the hippie era over for several years, we began to see more bearded professionals in the mainstream. There was a time in prior decades that men were discouraged from wearing anything more than a moustache as facial hair on the job scene. These changes in clothing, hairstyles, and accessories in society were reflected in comics as well (the flairs and bell bottoms of civilian characters in ’70s comics were matter-of-fact then, but rather conspicuous now, and indicative of that particular era).
Love any chance to see a rocket, shuttle or airplane drawn by Dave, explosions too…I’m even willing to believe that Kennedy Airport became one of the most dangerous places in the 1970’s for my entertainment! Another month, another exploding vehicle!
Re-reading it now it strikes me that it really doesn’t take long for Claremont to turn the book into a ‘drama’ comic – it really is the team’s special powers and action dripfed that save the book from just being page after page of talking heads!
It’s endemic to the X-Men, isn’t it? Doesn’t Nightcrawler lament that they’ve lost another aircraft in *X-Men* #135?
How Green was My Goblin and How Dark was My Phoenix!
Kurt Wagner had a lot of fun with that image inducer before Wolverine persuaded him to discard it. (Since I read this story in *Classic X-Men,* I’m not sure whether the #101 original finds him playing with the device before Storm — great Groucho, guy! — before she asks him whether he thinks she’s pretty. Given that the Storm I first met had no doubts whatsoever as to either her abilities or to her attractiveness, I liked that uncertainty a lot.)
Being as curious as some incarnation of the Question, I went online and learned:
Kurt Wagner did not throw away or destroy his image inducer; he kept the holographic device. After losing a bet with Wolverine, Kurt walked through town in his natural blue-furred form. Realizing the public mostly reacted with curious interest rather than fear, he became emboldened and stopped relying on the gadget.
He still owns the device, but he effectively “discarded” its constant use, only pulling it out for emergencies when he absolutely needs to blend in.
As something of as Holmesian (or a Sherlockian, if you prefer), Dr. McKay’s quotation from *The Sign of (the) Four* reminded me of Holmes’s comment to Dr. Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of the short stories:
“You see, but you do not observe.”
Pretty hard on the man with the wandering wound, yet he remained “the one fixed point in a changing age” (see “His Last Bow,” which is chronologically the last Holmes story, taking place in August 1914) while in the twenty-one months I actively followed Claremont’s series in the 1980s, it went from Holmes to Tacitus as far as I was concerned:
“Where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
“Since I read this story in *Classic X-Men,* I’m not sure whether the #101 original finds him playing with the device before Storm — great Groucho, guy! — before she asks him whether he thinks she’s pretty.”
Yes, A.S., that’s in the OG version, too. 🙂
In retrospect, this is even more of a seminal issue than mostly anyone could expect back in the day.
Here, Len Wein and Chris Claremont make genuinely long-lasting changes not just to Marvel Girl and Banshee – two characters that they did not create and that were fairly simple until now – but also, somewhat less obviously, they take another firm step into a form of writing that strays further away from the predictability and occasional confort of done-in-one stories where status quo is king.
While it will take years (and the involvement of other writers) until it is (somewhat) firmly established that Phoenix and Jean Grey are in fact two distinct entities, the uncertainty about who exactly is this reborn Phoenix that used to be Jean Grey is will come soon and never truly go away and the consequences won’t be far behind.
There are plenty of IMO valid questions to be made about the wisdom and merits of this change, and they most certainly have not been resolved as of the current day. I have made some myself, sometimes with more than a hint of annoyance or frustration. I am certainly not about to say that the idea of Phoenix has consistently been used in the best, most interesting and most coherent ways imaginable.
Caveats aside, this is still quite the shake-up and it created long-term interest in seeing the resulting developments.
I also find the character bits interesting. At this time the character dynamics were more fluid. It is so rare to see Xavier stand up to Wolverine in later years, and even more unusual to see Logan shut up and do as he is told. While that is clearly Claremont and perhaps Wein experimenting a bit with characterization in ways that would not always last, it is also disturbingly realistic; people who do not know each other very well or for very long _will_ indeed often experiment with a few stances and responses before settling with some stable, predictable, somewhat confortable and familiar pattern of mutual interactions – even if that pattern is not necessarily reassuring or long-lasting. Generally speaking, the longer a role goes unchallenged the harder it is to actually question or change it – even if that role becomes more a matter of expectation than actual facts.
“The Origin of the Phoenix.” I wonder if Claremont and Cockrum or anyone else had any idea that the “super-sizing” of Marvel Girl/Jean Grey would have such a lasting impact. Doubtful. Jean’s future as Phoenix was something that grew slowly as Claremont had a chance to consider the ramifications of Phoenix’s power to both her sanity and to the Marvel Universe and as other writers came in and added their own touch to who she was and what she would become.
I think (and I’m just spitballing here) the reason Phoenix wound up being separate from Jean came about once Claremont decided to make her a mass murderer. Toward the end of her original run, Phoenix is wiping out whole star systems and I doubt Claremont and Marvel wanted a Marvel hero to be remembered as a killer. Making them separate not only solved that problem, but when Marvel higher-ups insisted that Claremont couldn’t “kill Jean off” having the two as separate entities made it easier for Claremont to “kill” Phoenix and “save” Jean.
Claremont is really starting to find his groove with these new X-Men here. I like Wolverine’s faux pas, thinking he was the only one who’d come to visit Jean in the hospital, but I don’t like the peremptory way Professor X denied the X-Men the right to visit Jean at the hospital and ordering them off to take a vacation. He might be the boss of them, but he’s not really the “boss” of them, you know? They can make their own decisions, and short of messing with their minds, the Prof can’t do anything about that.
Cockrum is also firing on all thrusters here. His new Phoenix costume is great (I like the colors) and the scene of the Starcore crashing is dramatic and exciting. If I’m not mistaken, X-Men was the only Marvel comic I was actively reading at this point in time, and I look forward to re-reading them with all of you. Thanks, Alan!
If I have it correctly – and I believe I do – the separating of Phoenix and Jean Grey was a young Kurt Busiek’s idea. He proposed essentially what ultimately happened in both the Avengers and Fantastic Four, setting the stage for her return as part of the newly launched X-Factor. I’m guessing a review of some of Tom Brevoort’s site (https://tombrevoort.com/) would confirm that.
There’s some question over whether it was Claremont or co-plotter John Byrne who was the one who was responsible for the Phoenix destroying an inhabited planet… but that’s a topic we can examine in more detail four years from now if Alan blogs about The Dark Phoenix Saga.
I’m fairly sure that was Byrne’s idea and apparently editor-in-chief Jim Shooter had no objection at the time but later mandated that Jean Grey had to suffer horrible punishment for the crimes committed by Dark Phoenix. I think Byrne liked the high drama of showing Dark Phoenix doing something Galactus was known to do but was never shown doing, aside from gobbling up the Impossible Man’s home-planet and getting very bad indigestion as a result. Shooter really should have had a discussion with Claremont and Byrne about the ramifications of that scene before it saw print. Of course, it was easier to demand the punishment of a B-level character. What if it had been Hulk who had inadvertently caused massive death in a published comic? Would Shooter have demanded that Bruce Banner be permanently punished for that and the Hulk essentially killed off? Or just ignored it because the Hulk was one of the company’s most prominent and profit-generating characters, or demanded some sort of face-save by having it turn out it had been someone pretending to be the Hulk who had committed the atrocity?
According to an interview with Chris Claremont in one of those X-Men Companions, he and Byrne knew they were sailing into some potentially stormy seas with the Dark Phoenix storyline. It had been his understanding that that then Editor Jim Salicrup had gotten the okay from Jim Shooter. Whether that didn’t actually happen or the Editor-in-Chief had a change of heart, I’m not certain about.
I do believe you’re correct about John Byrne’s mindset, Fred. As much as he liked the original X-Men, Byrne had no problem with killing off Jean Grey – something Claremont was loathe to do.
You also raise a fascinating question about how it would have been handled had the Hulk committed such an atrocity. Actually, that sort of did occur during John Byrne’s brief run on the series when it was stated that one of his rampages had led to hundreds of deaths. Maybe that was part of the reason the rug was pulled out from under Byrne on that series.
“…if Alan blogs about The Dark Phoenix Saga.”
Assuming we’re all still here four years from now, Ben, you can count on it! 🙂
X-Men #101? Hated it!
How could you not? I mean, you have this absolutely engaging story with a long-time character manifesting a new identity as well as the return of a classic old X-Men villain all captured with beautiful art from my then favorite penciller…and you have to wait sixty effing days for the next issue!
That’s why I hated it.
It’s funny to look back on that particular issue because while X-Men clearly ruled the roost as my favorite series, X-Men #101 came across as a bit of a disappointment. I say that because I really wanted to find out more about Phoenix and suddenly, we’re all ushered off to Ireland to face some villain who looked like a Legion of Superheroes reject and the distinctly powerful but otherwise unexciting Juggernaut.
Also looking back, these were the issues where Cockrum’s favoritism for Nightcrawler stood out with the character gaining more “screen time” then William Shatner on Star Trek. I also read in that same X-Men Companion how Claremont and Cockrum argued over this storyline as the writer wanted the castle to be a “smuggler’s den” with bogs and monsters and so on while the artist didn’t see the Juggernaut fitting into any of that. I would add that overall, this issue and the next were my least favorites of the initial Claremont-Cockrum tenure.
Which it still really nitpicking as there are so many delightful hints of what’s to come in this issue. Most surprising is that as good as all this is, it would only get better – much better – once John Byrne and Terry Austin came aboard.
Lifting my cherished Western Oregon State College alumni mug of coffee, a toast to Alan for another uncanny review!
Rick, you’re reminding me once again of how very fortunate I was to be able to read the initial 25 or so issues of the All New, All Different X-Men pretty much all in one go, albeit in black & white, when I got Essential X-Men Vol. 1 back in the early 2000s!
I still can’t believe I dropped that title with #108 when my subscription ended. But I’d quit collecting comics altogether. It was like, “Wow! This is outstanding! Oh well. No more comics for me.”
Thank goodness I didn’t want to read that English lit assignment and picked X-Men #129 up instead a couple years later.
I think we all have regrets. All these years later I still vividly remember how I picked up New Mutants #86 back in late 1989. At the very end of the issue at the bottom of the last page there was a promotional blurb showing a mysterious new character who would be appearing in the next issue. I was intrigued… just not intrigued enough to actually buy New Mutants #87. Well, next thing I know, the first appearance of Cable had skyrocketed in value, placing it waaaay out of the budget of my teenage self! 😡
Alan, thanks for another great retrospective.
So, once again, there’s a lot to cover here!
First off, Dave Cockrum does an incredible job with his penciling on this issue. I am just disappointed that Frank Chiaramonte is back on inks, as again his work over Cockrum just looks muddy. Still, that first page splash is magnificent. I feel we must also credit colorist Bonnie Wilford with how amazing it looks. Nice splash page with Cassidy Keep, as well.
Second, I’ve voiced my opinion in my comments on this blog before about what an amazing character & costume designer Cockrum was. So, I find his re-design of Jean Grey into the Phoenix to be really great. In regard to Cockrum’s original intention that Jean’s new costume would be white & gold, some of his initial designs for the Phoenix have been posted on Reddit…
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/2t1cjx/dave_cockrums_preliminary_designs_for_jean_grey/
Third, it’s no secret that Chris Claremont was *extremely* unhappy with Jean Grey being brought back from the dead in 1985 and with the retcon that the Phoenix had never been Jean in the first place. I don’t think it’s especially well known, but one of Claremont’s responses to this was his back-up story in Classic X-Men #8 (April 1987) drawn by John Bolton. In this story Claremont attempts to thread the needle over the whole “the Phoenix wasn’t really Jean” retcon by revealing that Jean’s soul was basically split between the actual Jean and the Phoenix Force when it took on her form & memories. So, in effect, they were *both* the real Jean. And that’s how I look at it in my own personal head canon!
Fourth, oh yeah, that whole thing with Black Tom Cassidy and the Juggernaut. That plotline only beginning here, but I do think giving the Juggernaut a partner in crime / best friend did eventually make Cain Marko a more three-dimensional villain. I agree with Alan that giving Banshee a family castle is a bit much, but I do think the eventual reveals about Sean’s history with his cousin Tom and Maeve, the woman they both loved, was interesting. But both of those things were still in the future. Guess I’ll have more to say about Claremont & Cockrum’s actual storyline in two months when Alan presents his thoughts on X-Men #102.
Hadn’t heard about Claremont’s take on the Jean Grey/Phoenix aspect before but that also works better for me than the alien entity mimicking Jean and placing the real Jean in a cocoon at the bottom of the sea (hmm, that sounds like Warlock’s schict).
Lost my copy of this in a house fire in the early ’80s. It was the first X-Men comic I owned.
t is a shame that they didn’t stick with Phoenix being a cosmic ray upgraded Marvel Girl but Byrne’s whim killing off the B’Dari can take the blame for that. X-Men is as well known for overly convoluted stories and retcons but what’s been done with the Phoenix Force is one of the worst to me. Heck, Jean would still be on Earth and an X-Man if not for that.
A few days ago, on the Back Issue Magazine group on Facebook, someone posted about Fantastic Four #286, the issue where Jean famously (or maybe infamously) returns to life. I posted the following comment…
Y’know, I really wish that Claremont & Byrne had just stuck with the original idea that Claremont & Cockrum initially had in X-Men #100-101 that Jean Grey merely got a huge power upgrade from the same type of cosmic rays that gave the Fantastic Four their powers. The whole thing about Jean merging with this ancient cosmic-powered alien entity called the Phoenix Force very quickly got complicated, and over the past four decades it’s become more and more convoluted. During that Avengers vs X-Men crossover a while back, when multiple characters became the Phoenix at the same time, I just threw up my hands in defeat.
You truly hit the nail on the head, Ben. The intent had been to ramp up Marvel Girl’s powers to a “Thor” level with her working alongside the X-Men in a manner similar to that same Thunder God with the Avengers. However, once Jean Grey did her bit with the M’Kran Crystal, all bets were off. She simply became too powerful for the team. While the buildup to and execution of the Dark Phoenix storyline is absolutely remarkable, in many ways its ultimate outcome with Jean’s death was the only legitimate way out.
This was the first “All-New, All-Different” X-Men I ever bought and even though I was dropped straight into the middle of things, I was captivated from the first page. I’d never seen any of the characters before apart from Jean, Scott and Prof X, but the new characters engaged me straight away. Claremont’s script was terrific, with clever characterisations and lots of genuine emotion and substance, and Cockrum’s art was just gorgeous, especially the Phoenix costume. I couldn’t wait for the next issue.
Unfortunately, I would have to wait well over a year, as the title promptly dropped off the list of those imported into the UK – I suspect to make way for the return of The Avengers, whose own Marvel UK weekly comic had recently been cancelled, or rather merged into one of its stablemates as was the practice at the time.
I hadn’t yet stumbled upon Edinburgh’s one and only specialist comic shop, and wouldn’t have been able to afford the advance import copies they offered in any case, so I had to go without until issue 108 (with the debut of the Byrne/Austin team) popped up in my local newsagent, and promptly captivated me all over again.
Thanks as always, Alan – this review brought back some great memories!
Yes Colin, I had a very similar experience. I’d found issues 96 to 101, was hooked and looking forward to what was coming next. Alas, as you mentioned 102-107 weren’t distributed in the UK. I scoured the newsagents in Aberdeen looking for them, but to no avail. I was delighted when 108 popped up but realised that I’d missed the LSH look a likes in the imperial guard.
Was the comic shop in Edinburgh the one on West Cross Causeway? I found it in ca 1980 when visiting my brother.
Aberdeen had to wait until 1981/2 to get a comic shop when Chris Gavin opened Escape Comics on King Street.
Yes, this review brought back many happy memories, thanks Alan.
UK mail order dealers saw the demand and were selling imported copues of 102 to 107 for gouger’s prices at the time. I was one of those who shelled out.
Storm’s mention of ‘unstabled molecules’ is intriguing. No use bolting the stable door when the molecules have escaped, I guess.
Oh this was good! I became a regular X-Men reader a few issues later and I lucked into back issues (like this one!) at a local used bookstore. I still have this, and I vividly remember the cover (and Phoenix!) but I’d forgotten that she abruptly leaves center stage after a few pages and we get swept up into other drama! “Do you think it would do any good if we said we were sorry?” Glimpses of Sean’s boyhood and how our heroes “blend in” were all wonderful touches! And the artwork is magnificent—that first look at the castle; wow! (For the record, it is never good news when the hero inherits a castle, title, land or anything else in another country in a work of fiction!) Again, thanks for the memories!