Godel x Uzumeri #8: Body and Soul, I’m A Freak (X-Men 132-138)

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Uzumeri: Yo yo yo! This is Addison Godel and I’m David Uzumeri; we’re reading through Chris Claremont’s legendary run as the writer behind the X-Men. This week: the Dark Phoenix Saga!

Godel: IN THESE ISSUES: The X-Men attempt to infiltrate the HELLFIRE CLUB. Unfortunately, they are taken down by the club’s Inner Circle, including WYNGARDE, who succeeds in his plan to mentally turn Phoenix into the BLACK QUEEN. The X-Men turn the tables, but Phoenix has been permanently unhinged; as DARK PHOENIX she goes on a cosmic rampage.   The Shi’ar place her under arrest as a threat to the universe, and the X-Men fight for her life – but in the end Jean chooses SUICIDE rather than risk becoming Dark Phoenix again.

SUBPLOT WATCH: Sebastian Shaw discusses SENTINELS with US Senator Robert Kelly.  That’s it!

It probably goes without saying, but this is one of the most famous X-Men stories ever; it virtually defines the Claremont/Byrne run and has been referenced dozens of times, even without counting the numerous and extremely confusing revisions to the Phoenix continuity following Jean’s return from the dead in 1986. But how’d it read for you?

Uzumeri: Well, the thing about the Dark Phoenix Saga is that it really isn’t the clearly-delineated arc people like to pretend it is. There’s definitely a very clear momentum over the course of these six issues, but it’s all very dependent on plot developments from months or even years earlier.

Godel: It’s nice, given that we opened our whole project in tribute to the idea of LONG term runs on comics – Jean became Phoenix during the Ford administration, and the story finally wraps in 1980.

Uzumeri: And I’d honestly forgotten about the methodology of Jean’s death. I remembered her actually getting iced by Shi’ar troops or something. No wonder Cyclops becomes a huge sadsack for years; he’s basically forced to watch as she blows herself away, right as he was getting his last-second burst of hope.

Godel: Totally.  As long as we’re there, we should go ahead and talk about the bizarre backstory of #137, whose last six pages (and the script throughout) are a last-minute replacement, by editorial edict.

LEFT: “Untold Story.” RIGHT: #137, as published.

Uzumeri: I’m aware of the generalities of this, and I’ve also read the lost pages that they scrapped for the rewrite – but we might as well go into it. Please, describe!

Godel: Okay. The whole thing is a study in how a long-term run on a serial isn’t always the execution of a taut master plan from beginning to end. Going through the month-by-month brainstorming for individual issues, a story the creators thought was cool in 1976 gets supplanted by one thought up in 1977 or 1978. The original original plot, the one Claremont was shopping around the office back around #101, was just that Jean would become a cosmic-level character, and ultimately become evil.  The X-Men would have this new villain, one with a personal edge since she used to be a hero.  It’d be really interesting to reread the whole run with that plot in mind.

At some point, though, Claremont and Byrne cooked up a different story, wherein Jean would temporarily become evil, leading to the events we see here. Then, in the original ending to #137, Jean gets her powers lobotomized out of her through Shi’ar SCIENCE, and goes home. She would be normal, but have to live with the guilt of what she did.

This would then lead to the real climax of the story, when Magneto would offer her powers back and she would make this existential, heroic choice not to take them.  So the story we just finished reading was, in the mind of the creative team, just one climax along the way to the real finale.  Or at least that’s what they claimed later.

Uzumeri: Oh, wow. That’s really interesting, I wasn’t aware of that wrinkle… it makes a lot of sense, and fits in with the themes they’ve been going with so far.  They  did manage to basically put that existential choice into the death though.

Godel: Right. So Jim Shooter, EIC (who hadn’t been following all this), saw the make-ready and did a double-take: this woman has killed five billion people, and now she just…goes home?

It’s like Inglorious Basterds, the idea of Christoph Waltz being able to just settle down in New England and say howdy-do to the neighbors every morning. Shooter couldn’t abide it, hence the last-minute rewrite.

Uzumeri: But the thing about the story is that it’s never very clear who did what – is Jean the Phoenix?  Are they different personalities?  Or is the Phoenix actually a higher-level entity that’s possessing Jean? How much culpability does she actually bear?

Godel: I was struggling with that on this read.  I mean, it’s such a “classic” that you don’t normally look at it that closely? But it’s really unclear whether this is The Exorcist or The Empire Strikes Back.

A great thing to read is the Phoenix: The Untold Story one shot from the mid-80s, which includes a roundtable with the creative team, basically revealing that none of them actually agreed on this either:

Jim Salicrup: My original view was, I think, more along the lines of The Exorcist, where, whatever was happening, it really wasn’t her anymore. In the movie there’s this little girl who’s taken over and several people get killed, but by the end, when the demon’s gone no one thinks, “Let’s kill that murderous little girl.” You know?
Chris [Claremont]: But, you see, therein lay part of the basic conflict. Was the Phoenix inherently separate from Jean, was it a separate entity that moved in on her…?
Jim Salicrup: I still don’t know.
Chris: Or was it a part and parcel of her, herself…?
John [Byrne]: That’s not what I thought. I thought of Dark Phoenix as a tenant, which is why I had no problem having her waste a planet, then just sucking her out of Jean, having Jean just going home on her normal merry way.

Uzumeri: Ahahaha, yeah, you can tell there that Claremont was trying to make it really ambiguous, and Byrne was going for the straightforward hero narrative (what a surprise – John Byrne rejecting shades of grey??)

It’s interesting, actually, how much this all mirrors Magneto’s internal conflict in “Planet X” many years later.  Morrison makes a ton of callbacks: Logan finally going through with killing Jean, Magneto having a similar apocalyptic bout of insanity, even the ending on the Blue Area of the Moon with the Phoenix reborn in the future, right where Jean committed suicide in this very issue.  (And my absolute favorite detail, the really sloppy graffiti of “THE WATCHER IS A DIRTY BALD CUNT” on the walls.)

Godel: ahahahahah, i never noticed that!

Uzumeri: They cut it off like right before the beginning of the C but you can tell, it’s absolutely hilarious.

Godel: But you’re right – it’s almost like Morrison is going back and writing yet a third ending to this story.

Uzumeri: There’s also the argument that this is really a story about addiction, obviously a big thing in “Planet X.”

Godel: Definitely – all of the stuff about how it feels good to use her power and so on.

Uzumeri: What’s weird, though, is that Morrison’s version of the Phoenix never really fits in with the progression explained here. Is it just that Jean’s got more experience and can now contain the power?  And that’s not even getting into the absolutely mystifying 1986 retcon that tried to show Jean and the Phoenix weren’t one and the same, an idea that I believe Kurt Busiek came up with half as a joke, and was horrified to actually see used in a comic.

Godel: Yeah, it’s a gigantic mess basically. The story ginned up to make X-Factor viable, unveiled (of course) in Byrne’s Fantastic Four, is that Phoenix was a general-purpose cosmic entity who posed as Jean while her body was left to recuperate in a cocoon.

From Classic X-Men #8 (1987), script by Chris Claremont, art by John Bolton & Glynis Oliver.

Whereas here it’s at least plausible that Jean is a person who taps into huge powers,  gives into the temptation to use them wantonly, and nearly loses her humanity.

Uzumeri: It’s difficult for me to figure out where Claremont’s idea of the Phoenix ends and where my more modern conception begins. In the current books, the Phoenix isn’t just a general-purpose cosmic entity, it’s this big Shi’ar dirty secret that’s possessed tons of people before – remember that ridiculous Phoenix Final Fantasy Sword from Ed Brubaker’s run?

Godel: I was trying to forget it. I’m not sure when exactly that all came in, but even in the original story, the Shi’ar do have some sort of prophecied fear of this happening.  So there is room to wedge all that in, not to say that it was a good idea.

Uzumeri: And the Shi’ar/Brubaker thing is totally different from Morrison’s conception, the Phoenix as fifth-dimensional cosmic doctors.

Godel: Then there’s the relatively tidy Ultimate X-Men version, which (IIRC) conflates the Shi’ar and Hellfire Club together as a goofy cult with a bunch of bird-themed phoenix prophecies that they foist off on Jean.  Man.

I do see Shooter’s problem with the original ending of 137, but if he’d been willing to let the damn thing play out til 150, he probably would have gotten a better story – there was reader mail complaining about the abrupt finish, which is funny considering how much the story’s been canonized.  Of course, he’d already let the thing go on for years.

Now that we’re all thoroughly confused, let’s take the comic on its own terms, as published. It’s 1980, we’ve just finished reading #137; what’s the verdict?

Uzumeri: Dude, this was awesome.

It’s Event Comics in the sense that every issue has some Shit Going Down.  Part one: Let’s go fuck up the Hellfire Club. Part two: Oh man, we got our asses handed to us, now it’s time for Wolverine to go absolutely berserk and kill tons of people in a CCA-approved comic. Part three: Oh shit, Jean’s the Black Queen! Part four: Oh shit, Jean’s Dark Phoenix! Adios, Asparagus People! Part five: Oh hey, Xavier fixed the Phoenix! At least this is over… Part six: Oh holy shit, she’s dead.

Godel: Plus the big action set-pieces with the Hellfire Club, Dark Phoenix, and the Imperial Guard!

Uzumeri: It’s just nuts, absolute A-class balls-out superhero comics.  It’s got melodrama, it’s got pathos, it’s got tragedy, pretty much every character gets a cool moment – this is The Iconic X-Men Story, and it’s easy to see why.

Godel: It’s almost like the constant revisitations of the Phoenix mythos aren’t so much because of the appeal of the Phoenix concept, but because of some sense that, in this story, the title hit a peak that others would like to reach.

It starts with the calm before the storm: the X-Men are visiting Angel out West to plan their next move, away from the mansion (which they fear has been compromised).

Uzumeri: Did I miss something regarding Xavier?

At about this point he starts to realize how badly he screwed up with the way he treated the team upon his return, but nothing really happens to spur him towards that.

Godel: I guess it’s following up that recent scene where he was a total dick to them in the Danger Room, combined with the foreshadowing scenes where he realizes he’s failed to adequately prepare Jean or control her power or whatever.

Also this issue: Cyclops and Phoenix make out on a mesa! No spirit fox or rain of blood though.

Uzumeri: “Make out.” I wonder if Claremont and Byrne intended for Jean’s increased amorousness to be a result of the Phoenix addiction. I mean, only bad girls like sex, right?

Godel: Oh, for sure – remember when she visited that club in the Dazzler issue and was like “I’m sensing some horrible thoughts, but a part of me doesn’t mind them at all”?

Uzumeri: A twentysomething having sex with her long-term boyfriend? JEZEBEL!

Godel: And, of course, if we want to talk about SEX and BAD GIRLS in this book it’s not really hard to find because, um, the Black Queen.

Uzumeri: Dude, John Byrne has some problems with women.

Godel: Gee, you think so? I mean, no beef with S&M, but, lord, this costume design. Plus Storm being rendered, through Wyngarde’s illusions, as an 18th century slave girl. I wonder if that was even in Claremont’s idea of the plot.

Uzumeri: I mean, Claremont certainly has his kinks and fetishes, but it’s really telling that his one big CRAZY WOMAN story was at the height of collaboration with Byrne.

Godel:…we might have to come back to that one.

He generally deserves credit for loading up the team with interesting and complex female characters, not to mention very powerful ones in contrast to  minor-leaguers like the Wasp or (at this time) the Invisible Girl. But he does do one or two more crazy woman plots, with Rachel Summers being the most glaring example.  But there might be more going on there.

Uzumeri: Aw, that’s disappointing. It’s such a trope now, just having a female character go evil and crazy with the barely-suspended logic of, well, you know, WOMEN, AM I RITE? And looking at Phoenix, it seems like this basically started the depressing subgenre of Crazy Women Superhero Epics. How many times have they pulled this shit to Sue Storm? Starting with John Byrne?

Godel: Byrne did come up with MALICE (not to be confused with the X-Men villain), basically Sue Storm cosplaying the Black Queen.

It’s DeFalco who really runs that into the ground though.  Again, I think in most cases the male-hero version of this plot goes entirely in the other direction: the character learns to master his great cosmic powers, and to wield them with weighty, macho responsibility. I could be forgetting something really obvious though.

Uzumeri: Heh. Well, Magneto in “Planet X.” That’s a male character completely losing their shit and control over their powers.

Godel: Right, but Morrison’s whole point was that he’d always been an evil terrorist psycho, so it wasn’t really surprising that he would do evil stuff. It was just the thin veil of rationalizations and lofty rhetoric about weighty responsibilities falling away thanks to drug abuse.

Uzumeri:  I guess I heard it happened in Peter David’s Captain Marvel run, but I’ve never read that.

Godel: How about Hal Jordan? Although if I remember right, that also got retconned as him being possessed by a cosmic entity.

Uzumeri: That’s exactly what happened. Although in Geoff Johns’s version, the idea is that Hal Jordan is SO BADASS that ONLY HE could overcome the Fear of Parallax. (I can’t believe all of this shit is going to be in a major Hollywood movie this summer.) But yeah – “Emerald Twilight” is basically Dark Phoenix Saga with a dude.

Oh!  Superboy Prime from Infinite Crisis – basically the same thing, except with FANBOYS, AM I RITE? as the logic.  He shows up after 20 years of exile, still sixteen years old, and since he couldn’t get laid or grow up he basically got his fanboy jones out, whining about how everyone wasn’t the REAL Aquaman or the REAL Green Lantern.  And then went completely mass homicidal.

I know we’re totally off topic here now but there’s this great/awful/great/not sure which scene where he shows up at the Kent farm and is like “Hey, Ma! Hey, Pa! It’s cool, you don’t have to live with this lameass clone Superboy anymore, I’m here! The REAL Superboy!”

Godel: hahah, wow

Uzumeri: And Ma and Pa Kent are like “ooo…… kay, crazy person.”

Godel: See, I like that, because they’re writing a definitely unhinged person with their own defective, psychotic view of reality. Compare to the scene where Jean comes back home to her parents and it’s written as a normal human being, fighting the side of her that (a) can read their thoughts and is thus paranoid and crazy and (b) just went out to eat planets for a week and thus considers them totally beneath her level.

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Which is a great scene!  But it doesn’t join well with the idea of a psychic parasite/possession. On the other hand, that idea gibes better with the person in 101 suddenly spouting a bunch of lofty cosmic-being stuff about FIRE AND LIFE INCARNATE! etc.

Uzumeri: I like how her her dad is all I CAST YOU OUT! after Jean acts all weird, but then as soon as the fight’s over he runs outside to ask if she’s okay. He’s really, really bad at being scared of mutants.

Godel: Maybe someone filled him in the details off-panel. I guess what I really like is the weirdness of how she’s acting – if she didn’t have cosmic powers this would be a schizophrenic going home and flipping between “Yay, it’s mom!” and “SHE’S JUDGING ME, THEY’RE ALL AFRAID OF ME”

Uzumeri: You almost expect them to go through Jean’s childhood room and find a series of pulp adventure novels called THE ADVENTURES OF THE PHOENIX: it was ALL IN HER HEAD!

I mean, the thing about #101 is that her dialogue is so deliberate, her costume so randomly new, that it being a spontaneous decision makes no sense.

Godel: Meanwhile, we haven’t talked about the first big sequence here, the botched raid on the Hellfire Club.  Plus the proper debuts of Sebastian Shaw, Donald Pierce, and Harry Leland.

Uzumeri: It’s weird, since two of those keep getting recycled ad infinitum, but I don’t remember a damn thing about Harry Leland.

Godel: SPOILER ALERT, this is not the last we’ll see of Leland…but there is a good reason he doesn’t show up these days.

Uzumeri: …annnnd I just spoiled myself before you typed that. So…yeah. Readers: Don’t Google “Harry Leland.”

Godel: My favorite thing about Leland is that I suspect Claremont went “I’ve got an idea for a guy who can make you really heavy! What should he look like?” and John Byrne went “I’ll make him FAT!”

Uzumeri: Ha! For some reason, I always think of Shaw as equally girthy, which makes no sense considering his power set and the fact that he walks around this issue like a ridiculous Adonis. Byrne just LOVED drawing Shaw’s chest hair.

Godel: Byrne, or possibly Austin, but yeah, totally.  At this stage, the Hellfire guys are somewhat interchangeable, personality-wise. Shaw has an extra round of arrogance and there’s a leadership rivalry with Wyngarde, so he’s the alpha male type. Actually, that’s basically his personality through to this day.  Backing him up is a woman who may be Tessa, much later to join the X-Men as Sage, although her inaction here is hard to square with Claremont’s 2001 retcons in X-Treme X-Men, establishing that she was actually a mole for Xavier the whole time.

Pierce, for his part, will later get fleshed out better as an anti-mutant bigot, although why he’d then be on this team is a mystery.

Uzumeri: Yeah, I remember Pierce’s bigotry from Young X-Men and the Necrosha stuff, so why is he teaming up with three mutants? Why is Wyngarde even here, for that matter? Do they know he’s Mastermind, or has he tricked them into thinking he’s a noble gentleman? I’m pretty sure Mastermind didn’t come from old money.

Godel: That’s a great question. I love the idea that the Wyngarde persona was actually ginned up as an act of social climbing.  He’s much more interesting as a wannabe than just an evil MIND CONTROL dude.

Uzumeri: At the same time: The visual appearance of Jason Wyngarde was originally based by artist John Byrne on that of British actor Peter Wyngarde, who played the leader of the Hellfire Club in an episode of The Avengers. 

Godel: ahahahahahhahaha

Uzumeri: That’s that Claremont/Byrne Originality Machine comin’ ’round again, kids. Take a look at Emma Peel in that episode.

Godel: So… yeah, it turns out this whole sequence is basically uh, “borrowed” from an episode of Avengers. That’s how you get classic stories, folks!

Uzumeri: Yeah, this seems pretty heavily lifted, but it’s different enough outside of the trappings – for instance, it looks like this was just a disguise, and not her being mind controlled. Still, I had no idea it was this referential.

Godel: Jean’s outfit definitely is kicked up a notch, though – like, it seems modeled on actual BDSM fetish stuff, it’s a proper corset, the laced-up boots…

Uzumeri: Honestly, Jean’s outfit — it almost seems tame to me now.

Godel: To be fair, this is an envelope-pushing cheesecake design from 1980, and you and I came into comics around 1990 when there was waaaaaay more skin on display.

Uzumeri: You’re an eight-year-old boy in 1992. Do you get your first erection from (A) Mary Jane Watson, (B) Emma Frost or (C) Psylocke? Note: there are no other options.

Godel: If you’re a Marvel reader, anyway.

Uzumeri: Dude, DC was staying away from sexy ladies as hard as possible in that era.

Godel: There was also this thing called “Image Comics” that might be up your alley.

Uzumeri: Also, the Black Queen outfit is sort of dulled by familiarity, since it’s become so iconic in recent years. Especially that issue of (here we go again) New X-Men where Scott goes back to the Hellfire Club and it’s a strip bar where a chick makes herself look like Black Queen Jean to turn Scott on, but it doesn’t work. Still the best issue of X-Men ever written.

Godel: It’s way up there, agreed – is that the one with Trucker Sabretooth? Great stuff.

Uzumeri: Yeah, and Logan and Scott’s drinking competition. I also just love the idea of the sort of ruined Hellfire Club desperately trying to hang on to business by selling to the lowest common denominator.

In any case, these are all issues filled with great design elements and stuff, even if a lot of the content is completely pervy.

Godel: The thing is, if you’ve got mind control, S&M is actually totally redundant. Like, mind control should be the superpowered metaphor for S&M, you don’t need the physical and visual trappings, although obviously Byrne’s approach is going to sell a lot of comics.

But if Claremont had decided early on to really push the psychological games, even the eroticism, without putting Cyclops in a ruby quartz gimp mask…I mean, it might still be kind of weird, but I can’t imagine that the “mind control/S&M” thing would be such an albatross over his writing career at this point.

Anyway, as the saga moves along, Wyngarde is able to turn Jean into the Black Queen, culminating the months of buildup that we discussed last time, and the X-Men are all handily defeated, with Wolverine swept away in the sewers and presumed dead. …. OR IS HE???

Uzumeri: Wolverine, survive a brutal deathtrap? Unthinkable! That panel ends up being pretty hugely homaged and reproduced, most famously (I think) by Whedon in Astonishing X-Men.

Astonishing X-Men #15 (2006). Art by John Cassaday and Laura Martin.

Godel: That was great.  I wonder if someone’s ever done a collection of homages to that scene….it’s really great and it really pays off, as you were saying the other day, the buildup over years of this run.  You’ve just been waiting to see Wolverine go off with no restraint.

Uzumeri: It’s the kind of thing that, at the time, I probably would’ve never thought I’d actually get to see. Byrne frames all the shots in the subsequent issue so that it’s unmistakable that Wolverine is straight up killing fools, but at the same time he blocks all the gore, which is certainly the antithesis of later approaches.

Godel: It’s amazing – you really don’t even see him doing that much, but it’s basically the first solo Wolverine story ever, so there’s a lot of pent-up energy going into that surprisingly PG-rated rampage. Another thing going on here (which we’ll come back to next time) is that – surprise! – Jim Shooter had an ethical objection to Wolverine killing all these people.

Uzumeri: It’s really astonishing how much Shooter intervened in the runnings of his books.

Godel: Well, we’re getting a couple of high-profile examples here; he claims in the same sources that he wasn’t a big day-to-day meddler, since there were just too many damn books crossing his desk anyway. But things he had a really strong objection to, he’d come down on.  I read an interview with him in the contemporary fanzine The X-Men Chronicles where he says he’d pushed Claremont to do a story where it turns out that all the people Wolverine “killed” were actually just maimed, and Professor X has to send them checks every month.

Heroes don’t kill!  But… if they do critically injure someone there should at least be some consequences.

Uzumeri: Oh man, you can’t be serious about that. That’s amazing.

Godel: Yup.  So anyway, yeah: Wolverine’s rampage, the Hellfire Club rematch, the first fight with Dark Phoenix…This was all pretty well-done action comics stuff, some solid action work here, and kind of tough to pull off since Jean is so clearly out of the X-Men’s league.

Uzumeri: Byrne does great work here – that opening splash of #135 is fantastic, with the explosion becoming the title like that. I’m a total sucker for titles/SFX/any lettering being incorporated into the art properly.

Godel: Plus Phoenix crushing the Steranko logo on the cover! It’s left all cracked up on 136, which is almost too cutesy once you notice it.

Uzumeri: I also love the little cameos of people going “OH SHIT” when Jean Phoenixes out. “This is really serious, guys! SPIDER-MAN thinks so!”

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Godel: Yeah, I love that, a classic Marvel move. For #137 they go all in and have the Watcher show up.

Uzumeri: If I ever write a Marvel book, I’m going to have the Watcher showing up at the most inappropriate moments.

Godel: “Potato chips are too greasy, let’s get Pringles.” “I AM CALLED…THE WATCHER! FOR EONS IT HAS BEEN MY FATE TO MERELY OBSERVE AND NEVER TO ACT, THOUGH ON THIS DAY IT TEARS AT MY VERY BEING TO REMAIN SILENT!”

Jean blowing up the Blackbird kicks off the final, cosmic-level act of this arc, as we shift to Dark Phoenix and the Shi’ar as the antagonists.  #137 is the double-sized showdown with the Imperial Guard, now with some additions to Cockrum’s original lineup.

Uzumeri: Additions that kind of blow the entire Legion of Super-Heroes thing out of the water, too, which is unfortunate.

Godel: B-b-but it means they get to name two guys B’nee and C’Ccil! Y’know! Like BEANY AND CECIL!

I love this Imperial Guard fight just because it’s so doom-laden.  Half the issue is the X-Men reflecting on their likely imminent deaths, and even on whether they want to be fighting to save this intergalactic genocidal maniac friend of theirs. And the fight itself just goes sour from minute one.

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Uzumeri: There’s a sense of palpable dread hanging over the team right before the big fight. Claremont wants you to be scared for these people, and to think that any one of them could kick the can in this issue. Jean’s death is only obvious in retrospect; it could have just as easily been Cyclops to kick the bucket, or even Logan. Which is weird, since none of this is how the story was originally intended.

Godel: Yeah, it was supposed to be the death of nobody.  But it’s one of the best “and tomorrow we do battle” type setups in the whole series.

And, I guess just to make it more epic, Angel and the Beast are along for the ride.

Uzumeri: You know, it wasn’t until reading #138 that I realized something about this entire fight, something that was really, really bizarrely missing: Where the fuck was Bobby Drake? Where has Bobby Drake been this entire run?

Godel: You’ll remember him bailing on the group along with the others back in #94 – but since then he hasn’t so much as popped up for a phone call.  Maybe Claremont just didn’t like the character?

Uzumeri: I mean, it seemed like Claremont was jumping through hoops to bring the original band back together for the Blue Area fight, but Iceman’s just nowhere.

Godel:  He was available – his previous committment was the Champions but that wrapped in 1978; all he was appearing in at this point is Amazing Adventures reprints of Lee/Kirby X-Men . There’s no reason he couldn’t be in this story.   Both Angel and Beast are here for sort of plot-based reasons; I would accept a big hoop-jump to get Iceman in.

Uzumeri: Claremont never really touches him ever, does he? I mean, doesn’t he stay pretty much below radar until X-Factor?

Godel: He’ll pop up in a guest spot in a little while, after which he’s attached to Defenders until basically the start of X-Factor, so he would have been off-limits anyway.

Uzumeri: And then he’s on the Gold Team for Claremont’s three issues with the unified roster? So yeah, we’ll never see Bobby as an X-Man really.

Godel: I can see not wanting to write him! Until Lobdell hit on the idea of him being the Mutant Underachiever, Iceman lacked a unique character hook.

Uzumeri: He still does, really. Every new writer always seems to go, “yeah, I have no idea what to do with Bobby.” I know Fraction said that in interviews a few times.

Godel: People tried to do stuff riffing on that underachiever plot, or his developing powers (Austen), but it’s hard for it to really go anywhere; if he really does step up his game, then A) the story is over and you’re back to a generic character and B) he’s now way TOO powerful a la Phoenix.

Uzumeri: I did forget Mike Carey – that affair with Mystique was brutal.

Godel: That was great, but it was great as a soap plot – – it doesn’t solve the problem of what you do with Bobby Drake generally. I guess I should read over Simonson/Simonson X-Factor before I really judge, he gets tons of panel space there.

Uzumeri: If nothing else, you’re guaranteed gorgeous art.

Godel: So, to wrap this up: X-Men 138 is the funeral issue, which is not included in the Dark Phoenix Saga trade because it’s actually a recap issue, possibly a way to buy time since their plans for the next year of stories had just gone up in smoke.

Uzumeri: But it did recap a bunch of stuff I wasn’t aware of. They really should have just called this issue “Professor Xavier is a Jerk!,” but it’s not like Claremont didn’t get to use that later.

Godel: Actually, that’s astute, because this is Claremont giving his read on the 60s stories.  It’s a chance to update the backstory by showing, for example, that the characters notice Professor Xavier being a jerk, which I don’t think was always established in the original stories.

Uzumeri: Like, 90% of it is just him talking about “secret project”s that meant he had to fake his death. Do they ever reveal what these secret projects are, or was he just jerking off?

Godel: The big one, according to the original 60s retcon, is that he was going into hiding to prepare for the invading alien Z’Nox. But really, Roy Thomas just killed him off and then changed his mind a couple years later.

Uzumeri: I also love the part where Scott talks about things getting darker, right around the time Neal Adams and Jim Steranko show up.

Godel: This issue is interesting just for the fact that it exists. You would never put this out now, because there are trades, and the comics are easily available.

Uzumeri: Uh, did you read Invincible Iron Man #500.1?

Godel: ….no, but now I think I really don’t want to.

Uzumeri: It’s actually pretty clever, since the entire thing is narrated by Tony at an AA meeting.  But it’s pretty much a recap issue.

Godel: Another thing: the readership for X-Men had basically doubled since it was relaunched, so you figure most of the people reading the Claremont/Byrne run knew as much of the 60s stories as you do. Fanzines used to cover some of that gap in reader knowledge, I guess.

Uzumeri: Most of the time now you’ll see recaps done with those “saga” things in the back by interns.

Godel: Still – eighteen pages of illustrated captions, interspersed with a couple of new scenes at the funeral… it’s a lot to take. The only really important thing that happens is that Kitty shows up at the mansion on the last page.

Uzumeri: Well, and Scott bails.

Godel: Oh, yeah! I forgot about that just because I know he eventually comes back. We might talk about that more next time, since obviously it changes the team dynamic. Given that he’s gradually moved up from “epic loser” to “kind of cool leader guy” in recent stories, I mean.

Uzumeri: Yeah, he’s a character I’ve come to really like, but the version here isn’t much like the version I enjoy in the stuff coming out now. I’m looking forward to the other characters getting more of a chance to shine. I assume Beast and Angel don’t stick around either?

Godel: Beast heads dutifully back to Avengers, but Angel will last through the next year of this comic. It’s an awkward fit, I think…. the characters actually talk about that, so it seems intentional, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Uzumeri: That’s a shame about Beast. I guess I keep forgetting how long he stayed away from the X-franchise for the most part, at least until X-Factor.

Godel: Yeah! He actually has a really long non-X resume, which I think makes him being in Secret Avengers make sense – he adds life to any team, and he’s not so tied to X-stuff that he seems out of place somewhere else.

Uzumeri: The thing about Secret Avengers is that it makes sense that he’d bail on lame-ass Utopia, too. I liked him sending the letter to Hope as well. He feels just as much at home hanging out with Steve Rogers and fighting the good fight, and I can totally see that.

Godel: He’s a happy-go-lucky acrobatic superhero – he wants to be out superheroing. And he’s also the intellectual/philosopher, so he has good, character-sound reasons for not wanting to be part of the current X status quo.

But, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that’s it! The Dark Phoenix Saga!

We still have a couple more Claremont/Byrne stories before we leave the most famous period of the run and head into slightly less-homaged territory. IN TWO WEEKS: Alpha Flight! Days of Future Past! Demons on the loose! And NIGHTCRAWLER GOES TO HELL!

Uzumeri: Meantime, next week we tackle the first five issues of Grant Morrison’s landmark run on JLA. Four issues of space invaders, and one issue that is a lot like Urasawa’s Pluto the more I think about it…

Godel: ‘Til next time!

“Did he pop three claws…or only two?”