Thoughts

The fact that Comic Book History is now so full of retcons and resurrections can make reading old comics slightly weird. You end up reading a story which has been undone, or recontextualised maybe even more than once. When you go back do you try and read it with all that future knowledge? Or engage with it as what it was at the time of publication.

There is no single retcon that poses that question quite as hard as the final of the Dark Phoenix storyline. Reading the issue its the tale of Jean’s attempt to recover control her Dark Phoenix persona, a personal story about a character with a long backstory in comics.

Later on, *all* that gets junked. This isn’t Jean, so the latter retcon tells us. It hasn’t been Jean for a while.

And bluntly, re-reading this issue that retcon still stinks.

It stinks because it blunts this story in the fundamental way it is interesting. I mentioned the absence of an internal monologue for Dark Phoenix as she rampages through the cosmos, but in this issue its back. And it tells us the story of a human terrified by their powers and what it will become. Her ability to maybe stand a chance to stop this transformation are the focus of this issue – her family, her friends, her lover. It’s those personal ties that are at the heart of saving her.

And none of that really works if you buy the later retcon that this isn’t really Jean. Claremont is at his most melodramatic and sentimental in this issue, but if you don’t keep an actual human drama at the core of the story, all of that heavy emotion just becomes silly.

So on the re-reading of this story, and I think with this blog, I will try and stick with the story we’re being told as my key reference point. So when judging this, I’m judging this as a story about Jean. Because, for the reasons I’ve given, it works as that story. If I were to try and judge it with the knowledge of how Marvel retcon this story, its a strangely empty experience.

Fun Panel

Sometimes you’ll never top the first page.

It was a Product of its Time

Nothing dates comics more than appearances from “real world” figures at the time of release. Rooting the comic in the contemporary at the time, but also very quickly making it seem from another time.

Political figures are especially strange because alongside the cameos of “real life” politicians, comics will also create fake Presidents/Prime Ministers/Senators for the purposes of stories. Creating a list of political leaders of Marvel nations would, I think, create a convoluted contradictory mess.