Yes... though there are still ways he could have affirmed a continuity between the two, if he had known about MGH in the first place, or his editors had told him.

New X-Men #139 “Shattered” (June 2003)



The Story: Jean Grey-Summers storms into Emma Frost’s mind, interrupting a psychic liaison she’s having with Scott Summers. Jean kicks Scott out. Everyone in the mansion feels the effects of Jean’s psychic rage one way or another. Then surprisingly, Jean tries to have a reasonable conversation with Emma. Only when Emma blows her off does Jean go all Phoenix. When Jean dives into Emma’s memories of childhood, suddenly Emma becomes contrite and pleading. Too late; it’s time for an episode of “This is Your Life, Emma Frost.” We meet her rich, domineering father; her sedative-addicted mother; her bohemian musician brother Christian who goes insane; her annoying sisters Cordelia and Adrienne. We see that Emma had neither her face nor her body going for, prior to plastic surgery. Emma rejects her family fortune and becomes a dancer at the Hellfire Club, using telepathy to make men desire her. Men including Sebastian Shaw, who takes her for his consort, and together they (really meaning: she through him) take over the Hellfire Club.



Just then Scott physically bursts into the room and insists that Jean read his mind. She learns that Emma did make a bedroom advance on Scott last year in Hong Kong, but Scott rebuffed her: “It’s Jean or nothing.” (Or Colleen, or Lee, or Maddy. If you can’t be with the one you love…)



Charles Xavier hobbles in too and tells Jean to chill out. Jean stalks off; Scott takes off on Logan’s motorcycle; Logan consoles Emma, who confesses that she isn’t just messing with Scott and Jean; she has sincerely fallen for Scott. Later that night, Hank McCoy drops by Emma’s room with a dozen red roses, a bottle of white wine, and a favorite book to give her… and finds her in diamond form, on the floor, in about 100,000 tiny pieces.



My Two Cents: You like X-Men as a superhero soap opera? You get it, man! Finally Grant Morrison grants us the Jean/Emma confrontation I was expecting a year ago when Jean first found out that Emma had propositioned her husband. Jean’s rage is understandable, and I am puzzled that Morrison seems to be casting her as the bad one due to Scott’s defense of, “We were only thinking; we didn’t do anything physical.” All the X-Men seem more disturbed by Jean showing Phoenix powers than they are by Emma’s sexual aggressiveness which generated the temptation which led to Scott betraying his wife. Even Logan is taking Emma’s side against Jean. What’s up with that? Are they all just that blasé about telepathic adultery? I am firmly on the side of “telepathic infidelity is actual infidelity;” emotional affairs can be just as damaging as physical ones. Don’t go there, kids. One challenge Jean has: She works with only guys. Where are Storm, Psylocke, Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, Stevie Hunter, Moira McTaggart, Rogue, or any of the other X-women? She needs somebody to hang out with besides Emma “Ice Queen” Frost even when Emma isn’t fomenting divorce.



Last issue, Emma and Scott were physically in the mansion's rose garden while their minds were in a boudoir. This issue, they are physically in Emma’s bedroom. I attribute this minor continuity gaffe to the change-over in artists; this issue is by Phil Jiminez, who was probably working on it at the same time that Frank Quitely was drawing the previous arc. It is way more compromising to put Scott physically in Emma’s bedroom.

Along the same lines, Jiminez has his own ideas about what the mansion looks like. It's not X-shaped anymore...



... and its library has a large bay window.



Emma says that she used telepathy to manipulate Sebastian Shaw into making her White Queen. Is this a retcon?



True to the episode title, all sorts of things get shattered in this issue: Jean’s composure, Scott’s marriage, the X-Men’s unity, and most notably Emma’s entire body. Jean is too obvious a suspect, which maybe gives her the perfect alibi. Hmm…

I agree that Scott was reprehensible toward Maddie. If editorial was so desperate to get the old gang back together in X-Force, then Maddie should have suffered a tragic accident.




I don't think Morrison is casting Jean as a villain. Morrison does seem to be writing Logan and Scott as seeing Jean as the villain, though, and I'm not sure why. Jean already did try to talk to Scott about Emma once that we saw, and he was super-sarcastic and implied he'd had sex with Emma, which we now find wasn't even true. That was the point at which I expected Jean to do the things she did in this issue, a year before she actually did. Putting the best face on Jean's situation: She feels estranged from her husband and fears talking about it will just anger him, so she lets things drift along without trying to rock the boat, until matters come to a head that simply can't be ignored. This at least rings true to how real life marriages can fracture. The "activation energy" of trying to fix it is too hard, and the prospect that the attempted fix will actually break things for good is too scary, so instead of doing the hard thing sooner, the couple settles for a sliding status quo that actually makes inevitable the divorce that they both would rather have avoided. (I am happily married to my first wife, by the way, but I have seen the lives of lots of other people.)

"But they were thinking about it" is a little different in this scenario than in real life. In our world, we might identify different points on the spectrum of a particular man-woman relationship becoming adulterous:

1) Not at all. The two may be work colleagues or neighbors, and might even be appreciative of each other's personal and physical attributes, but it's strictly intellectual.

2) An unpursued desire. Perhaps thoughts of "If I was with him/her..." that are never acted upon, due to dedication to the actual spouse, the ramifications of following that line of thought, etc.

3) An emotional affair. No sexual activity, but a level of intimacy develops that supercedes and damages the relationships that each has with their respective spouses. Time is spent on this relationship that detracts from other obligations.

4) Physical/sexual intimacy. "Nuff said about that.

In our world, "I was just thinking about it" would be level 2 here. It might in some senses be even praiseworthy to become aware of a tempting attraction on which you don't act. (Better for peace of mind not to have the attraction at all, though.) Carly Simon has an insightful song called "We Have No Secrets" whose topic is "I'd rather not hear about all the other women that pursue my husband, even though he stays faithful."

But Scott and Emma are not "thinking about it" in that level 2 sense. They are at a level 3.5 that only exists in a world with telepathy. They are emotionally intimate and are experiencing the mental effects of sexual intimacy without actually touching physically. Scott knows it was more than just a wistful, passing daydream. "Emma and I did something stupid," he says.

Now, that doesn't exonerate Jean. She invades Emma's deepest thoughts and (as I neglected to mention in my plot summary) causes Emma to relive the experience of 16 million mutant minds crying out their death throes at Genosha. Emma was traumatized by that the first time around, and it's certainly no piece of cake this time either. So OK, I can buy Emma getting some "Are you OK?" from her teammates, even though she's getting the comeuppance for her own bad behavior. I just would have expected somebody to be equally concerned about Jean -- not just in an "Uh oh, if she gets mad, Phoenix will manifest and murder us all" bu also in a "Wow, Jean, Scott and Emma done you wrong. Let's go get some ice cream and cry" way. Which again gets back to Jean's lack of female friends in the mansion, even though surely a boarding school with 150 students has adult support staff that we never see.


That may be. And there are some upcoming moments with Hank and Jean that will be relevant to her side of the story...

New X-Men #141 “Whodunit” (July 2003)



So... someone likes the film The Terminator.

The Story: Lucas Bishop returns to the Xavier Institute from his prison visit to find Sage fallen in the grass out back, spouting nonsense. Her computer-mind has suffered a partial memory wipe. They investigate the abandoned house with dozens of large and full egg sacs hanging from the ceiling. Bishop also finds a handgun, presumably the one used to club Sage and shoot Emma Frost with a diamond bullet.



Charles Xavier and Beast do not buy Beak’s claim to have shot Emma Frost, partly because he can’t give any convincing details. He blurts out that he has “made Angel pregnant with monster babies,” which explains the egg sacs in the old house. According to Beak, when Angel was out shopping with Emma, she confided in Emma about the pregnancy, and then for unclear reasons Angel got worried that she and Beak would be expelled over the pregnancy, so Beak shot Emma. But where would he get a diamond bullet? Out in the woods, we get closer to the truth: Beak was lying. Angel's hand held the gun that shot Emma in the face, but Angel can’t explain her own motive clearly, since Emma was being nice to her lately. And once again, where would she come up with a diamond bullet?



Jean Grey-Summers, helping Beast to re-assemble the zillion diamond fragments of Emma, has another bombshell: Beast’s memory of going to the opera on the night of the murder is false. And he was “there” with the telepathic Cuckoos, who are nursing a recent grudge against Emma for the death of one of their number. Are they the guilty ones? Jean uses Phonenix-power to fuse Emma back together, and Emma awakens screaming the name of her assailant:



Esme Cuckoo is packing her bags, leaving the other three Cuckoos behind as she plans to “scrawl my name across the world.” Bishop and Sage confront Esme at the mansion gate, but she’s powered up by the Kick drug and easily immobilizes them. She won’t say whom she’s going to meet, but “You’ll all find out soon enough.” This causes Sage to remember that her assailant could not have been Esme; it was a man over six feet tall. Who?? Hey, where is Scott Summers? Thus does Morrison set in motion the final act of his time as New X-Men writer.



My Two Cents: OK, Morrison is smarter than I thought, again. A few issues ago, I asked how Angel had time to discover her pregnancy after just a few days elapsed during the Quentin Quire story. Beak has the answer: Due to her insectoid mutation, “There is a life cycle of, like, only five days between the sex and the birth.” This is the sort of “non-crime-fighting ramifications of mutations” that I’d like to see more of.

Esme Cuckoo says that she's going to "dye her hair" so that she doesn't resemble Emma any more. This brings up the question of what her real hair color is. We saw two issues ago that Emma's real hair color is not blonde, but a mousy light brown. Do the Cuckoos dye their hair to match hers, or does it just happen to already be the color that she's chosen? (Emma's hair changes color from arc to arc as well, sometimes a normal blonde and sometimes platinum blonde or even white.) Maybe Esme's hair is naturally blonde so she'd have to dye it to change it, or maybe she just doesn't want to wait for it to grow out; she wants to look different now. Yet when we see her again down the line, she has a different hairstyle, yet still blonde. Ah well, she's a teen girl. She'll probably want something different tomorrow. Morrison shows no interest in explaining the Cuckoo's origin. I wonder if the origin given us by later writers is what he intended. The Cuckoos do eventually dye their hair different colors to make them easier for the reader to distinguish, which obviously detracts from their creepy clone shtick.

While putting together their 100,000 piece diamond Emma puzzle, Jean and Hank share their feelings. Hank considers Emma his outpost of high culture at the school. The problem with having rarified tastes is the lack of someone your own age (i.e. not Charles) with whom to enjoy the finer things in life. It's the same reason a Logan/Mariko relationship would be unlikely to survive long-term. Or an Emma/Scott relationship, for that matter. She'd want to go to the ballet; he'd rather watch baseball and The Big Bang Theory.

Jean, meanwhile, is apparently mollified enough by Emma's current predicament to help bring her back from the brink of death. She even uses "Scott needs you" as a way to wake Emma up, knowing that those words will trigger a strong emotional kick-start for Emma's consciousness. This is fine as far as it goes. Now Jean's in a real predicament. What would happen next in our world is that Jean would tell Emma, "I raised you from the dead. Thanks for helping my husband with his issues. No thanks for getting emotionally entangled with him. Get out of this house, and never return." But that won't work with Scott and Emma, because physical distance won't prevent their psychic liaisons. So maybe that wouldn't really work, but physically separating them would at least be symbolically satisfying. It seems to me that Morrison has written himself into a bit of a corner. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a one-shot story, not part of a series, so it could afford to have things end tragically for its protagonist as a result of her bad choices. But whether by Morrison's choice or Marvel editorial's choice, Emma stays in the X-Men even after all this. That fact ought to be a really big deal, but Morrison fails to follow the plot thread, and it never comes up again until... well, we'll get there, won't we!



It’s hard to write a good detective story, meaning one in which the assembled clues lead the detective to deduce the identity of the culprit. By that standard, this is not a good detective story. All of Bishop’s work turns out to be incidental, unearthing Beak and Angel’s secret but not the would-be murderer of Emma Frost. The short version of this mystery is “Beast pieces Emma back together, and Jean heals Emma, and Emma names the culprit.” It would have been nice if Bishop had at least discovered the fact that the opera had been canceled that evening. He could have confronted Beast with that fact, and they could have confronted the Cuckoos while Jean was resurrecting Emma to separately arrive at the same truth.

However, while not a good detective story, this was still a good story involving a detective. Morrison used misdirection effectively several times before revealing whodunit.

Yup. Good catch. I meant X-Factor, not X-Force. I get X-asperated by all the similar-sounding team names when I try to X-plain them!

I think Maddy later became the "Goblin Queen," but I had stopped reading comics by then.  For me, her most memorable moment will always be this:

That was after my time, but I believe it was essentially a rebranding of what New Mutants had become after Rob Liefeld introduced all of his ridiculous new characters like Cable, pushing out most of the original team. I have actually developed a Liefeld-o-meter scoring system by which you can see how high any particular one of his cover illustrations scores:

Tiny head: Yes/No
Oversized Muscles: Yes/No
Oversized Gun: Yes/No
Gritted Teeth: Yes/No
Wrestling Headgear: Yes/No
Pouches: Yes/No
Garter: Yes/No (often used as a belt for pouches)
Absent Feet: Yes/No (when present, usually tiny and melted-looking)



So this cover gets a score of 7/8, lacking only gritted teeth. (You could count several items multiple times each if you wanted, including wrestling headgear.) Note that the team contains only Cannonball from the original squad, having substituted Feral as the team werewolf, even though Rahne Sinclair is a perfectly good existing character for that slot.

Well said. Maddie was not intended to be a Jean Grey clone; Chris Claremont created her to give Scott a happy ending of sort. Her looking like Jean was a red herring, othing more.

Then because of the X-Factor fiasco, she was turned into a copy, who was then corrupted by the demon Nastirh to become the Goblin queen. As if turning her into a villain absolved Scott of dumping her in the first place!

What a complete fosterclock and character assassination the whole thing was.