When Chris Claremont took over writing the X-Men reboot from Len Wein, he and artist Dave Cockrum discussed how boring Jean Grey was, so they decided to change her substantially. Dave Cockrum came up with numerous costume designs, as pictured below. He favored the white one on the far right, but Archie Goodwin pointed out that on thin newsprint, with a large section of white (unprinted) color, you'd be able to see the art bleeding through from the other side of every page. So Claremont and Cockrum went with the third Phoenix design pictured below, the one with the green and gold colors of Jean's previous Marvel Girl costume.



"White Phoenix" eventually did make it into print almost thirty years later though, on better paper with better ink. Grant Morrison's final story arc on New X-Men was a challenging read, loaded with symbolism. You can read my summary and explanation of it starting here. The short version is that Grant Morrison believes that the multiverse is real, and comic book characters live in an alternate dimension which authors subconsciously access and then write about. Morrison saw Phoenix as a trans-dimensional being, able to stand above it all in what he termed the "White Hot Room," a state of omniversal awareness.

In a form that he called "White Phoenix of the Crown," Jean Grey prevented a disastrous future (a future treated as an "infection" for which Phoenix was the cure) by remaking reality, causing Scott Summers to fall in love with Emma Frost upon Jean's death at the hands of Magneto.



The "of the crown" part of "White Phoenix of the crown" is a bit of Hindu philosophy thrown into the mix concerning chakras, energy points in the body which enhance consciousness. In his typical fashion, Morrison threw all of these high concepts up in the air and then fled the building (returning to DC as Chief Creative Officer) before they hit the ground, leaving the other X-Men writers like Chris Claremont and Greg Pak to make sense of what Morrison had done, and try to integrate it into the forty years of X-Men continuity that existed up to that point. 

The Endsong/Warsong story represents Greg Pak's contribution to that, trying to literalize Morrison's more symbolic and philosophical notions so that they represent actual persons in the Marvel Universe.  Thus, Morrison's "White Phoenix of the Crown" was a symbolic character in an imaginary future, representing the satori (state of expanded consciousness) promised by eastern religions. But Pak's White Phoenix seems to simply represent the most benign, healing avatar of Phoenix, as represented by the pure white clothing, rather than the dark red suit of Dark Phoenix or the green clothing most associated with Jean-as-Phoenix.

Similarly, Morrison' "White Hot Room" was basically Nirvana, a state of ultimate peace but also nothingness. Phoenix presumably returns to this state every time it ceases to manifest in the universe (as with, say, the original death of Jean Grey in X-Men #137).  But Chris Claremont concretized the White Hot Room as a dimension to which anyone might be sent, under the right circumstances, and have visions of all of their own alternate selves, as seen in this scene with Psylocke and Rachel Summers from the 2005 "House of M" storyline:




Personally, I would have just ignored Morrison's high concept stuff rather than tried to shoehorn it into continuity, just as they ignored Morrison's explanation of who Xorn was, his desecration and then killing of Magneto, his alternate explanation of Weapon X, etc.

rberman ... Thank you so much for the explanation of the various Phoenix's Costumes and now I have a good understanding of them. I really appreciate it very much ...

Phoenix: Warsong #4 (February 2007)



The Story: The Phoenix tells Celeste Cuckoo, her struggling host, that it has come to save everyone. The purpose of the Cuckoo project, a.k.a. Weapon XIV, was to create a massively multiprocessing hive mind with thousands of telepathic brains strong enough jointly to lobotomize every mutant on earth. Mindee and Phoebe are already hooked into it; now all that’s needed is Celeste, free of Phoenix, to complete the set and begin the mission. Instead, Emma hooks herself into the vacant terminal reserved for Celeste. Emma controls the Cuckoo hive mind to activate psychic dampers within Celeste’s mind to shut off the Phoenix. Yay! But as soon as Emma exits the Cuckoo terminal, Sublime uses robotic tentacles to pull Celeste into it, and the combined power of the hive mind appears to remove the dampers immediately, bringing the Phoenix-powered Cuckoos under Sublime’s control. Oops.



My Two Cents: In Claremont’s original Phoenix stories, the Phoenix was a non-sentient galactic force that imbued Jean Grey with cosmic powers. Then to bring back Jean Grey after her death, Phoenix was retconned into a cosmic sentience which incarnated in human form, imprinted with Jean’s personality, while Jean’s body was sequestered underwater. Then in Morrison’s conception, Phoenix was a separate consciousness dwelling within Jean, its agenda informed by her humanity. In Pak’s Phoenix:Endsong, even after the death of Jean, the Phoenix not only survived but was still imprinted with Jean’s psyche. Presumably that’s why Phoenix now shows an interest in saving mutantkind from Weapon XIV.

I see two warring anthropologies (views of humanity) at work here. Claremont portrays men as capable of good but also prone to corruption simply by exposure to power. We don’t have to be possessed by evil demons to be evil; the evil is latent within us already, and the combination of unsatisfied hunger and action without consequence can tempt even a virtuous X-Man to commit genocide. But the newer iterations of Phoenix have a lot more to say about the salubrious effects of Jean on Phoenix than vice versa.



This issue also confirms what we might have expected about John Sublime: He now exists only as an AI, not a person, like Armin Zola in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier film.

Phoenix destroys zombie Esme and Sophie as well; their presence in this story proves inconsequential, except as an opportunity to include zombies at a time when pop culture was big on zombies.

Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown #1 “Mexican Standoff” (December 1988)



Creative Team: Written by Walter and Louise Simonson. Art is by John J. Muth (for Havok) and Kent Williams (for Wolverine).

The Story: General Meltdown and Dr. Neutron, two unseen foes of Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev, spend several pages discussing the physics of a nuclear plant meltdown and then causing a meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a historical event of 1986 in which a late-night safety test went awry, and an explosion released radioactive material into the Ukranian atmosphere. In our story, this disaster was precipitated by bribery of nuclear engineers who didn’t realize the consequences of their new instructions until it was too late. (14 pages)



Alex Summers and Logan are on a Mexican holiday and have made a bet as to who can go the longest without using his powers. A bar fight is followed by an assault on their hotel. They steal a 1957 convertible to escape, and its call girl owner insists on coming along with them. She’s surprisingly (or perhaps suspiciously) unflappable in the face of bullets headed their way. (10 pages)



Car chase! The bad guys have laser rifles, and eventually Alex feels obliged to use his Havok powers to defeat them. This confirms his identity, which is what the “call girl” was waiting for. She plugs Logan with a half dozen bullets impregnated with Bubonic Plague. (9 pages)



Logan awakens in the hospital, sicker than a dog. He’s told that Alex died of plague. Recovering due to his healing factor, he staggers to the graveyard. Alex’s grave has the wrong scent, and sure enough, digging it up reveals only a pile of rocks. Who took, Alex, and why? (11 pages)



My Two Cents: This series was published under the Epic imprint. The cover is thick card stock that would seem to make a storage backboard redundant. It also doesn’t bend well; just opening the cover to read tends to put tiny creases in it.

The notion of two artists to handle two characters is unusual and at least in my experience is novel. The painted style looks as nice as it did on Muth’s work for DeMatteis’ Moonshadow series for Epic. Pastel earth tones predominate, in keeping with the non-superhero story and the dusty Mexican setting. Kent Williams makes Logan bizarre, clownish even with his hair tufts grown out into drooping jester horns.

Havok for me was one of those also-ran X-Men characters that never had a story to make me care about him, but Simonson is already turning that around in just one issue. We’ll see where this goes.

I've read very little of Morrison's X-Men, but a white Phoenix costume that saw print way back in 1990, way before his time. In the back story to Classic X-Men #43 (which reprinted the death of Phoenix as its first story), Phoenix appears in an all-white costume (not even any gold). It's an unusual story that appears to take place in some sort of afterlife.

Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown #2 “Tender Loving Lies!” (December 1988)



The Story: Logan realizes the bar fight last issue was a set-up intended to draw him and Alex into revealing their powers. One of the participants in the brawl sets Logan on the trail of its instigator. The participants were paid in Russian rubles. Interesting. Logan lures another attacker to his hotel in hopes of interrogating them. It works; he follows the trail toward Distant Haven, an abandoned coastal resort (14 pages)



Alex Summers awakens in a fake hospital under the care of Quark (but she calls herself Scarlett), a Gillian Anderson-looking psychiatrist who poses as a nurse, dosing him with hypnotic drugs and subliminal video footage of nuclear protests. She adds a dollop of sex appeal to the presentation as well, but so far none of it works. Also, Alex’s power makes him invisible to video cameras; he can only be observed directly. (12 pages)



General Meltdown and Dr. Nucleus are revealed as inmates at a Soviet asylum run by Quark. They discuss her mental instability and clearly have their own scheme aside from an alliance with her. She is apparently the same woman who posed as a call girl in Mexico. So… she’s a legit psychiatrist but also a field agent trained in firearms? Only in comic books, folks… (4 pages)



Quark plays a charade in which Alex must rescue her from a threatening C.I.A. agent. How romantic! This gets him to agree to travel to Poland with her in a creaky biplane. Logan arrives at Distant Haven just in time to get caught in a booby trap explosion that Quark left behind. Alex sees that distant explosion from the biplane as evidence that he should help Quark. (15 pages)



My Two Cents: Though separated, Alex and Logan are driven by a mutual conviction, grounded in past experience, that the other can’t possibly be dead. Each is more interested in helping the other than preserving himself.

Logan is playing a similar game to Steeljack in Astro City. His healing power specially qualifies him to play Human Target in order to smoke his enemies out of hiding. Alex on the other hand proves more vulnerable to human affection than he realized; the opportunity to help a beautiful woman play out a spy thriller is to alluring to pass up. She is the one telling the “tender loving lies” mentioned in the title.”



Is Alex Summers a biplane pilot? Scott Summers is a pilot. I thought Alex Summers was a geology grad student at one point. I also don’t have any idea what Alex’s relationship with Polaris was like at this point in the late 80s, but in this story he has no such relationship it seems.

Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown #3 “Duel” (January 1989)



The Story: Alex flies the biplane to Merida, where a private supersonic jet awaits. Quark has to do some fast talking to allay Alex’s suspicions about how she has all these resources conveniently at her hand. He ultimately buys her story, and they spend the plane ride from Mexico to Poland engaged in some activity for two people, such as Checkers. (ten pages)



General Meltdown practices his energy blasts and discusses how Havok somehow is the power to help him focus his energy more effectively. The plan appears to be to convince Havok to shoot Meltdown with a full-strength attack of his own. Meltdown is worried that Quark’s “Scarlett” nurse persona is falling in love with Alex Summers and may pose an obstacle. Dr. Neutron urges patience. (seven pages)



Wolverine follows Alex's trail to Merida, where he is caught in a taser trap set up by Quark. Her associates brainwash Wolverine to kill on their command. (fifteen pages)



In a Carpathian castle, Alex is surprised by insane Logan and is forced to kill him to save himself. He swears veangeance. (fourteen pages)



My Two Cents: A decent “rising action” leading to the titular duel. Logan even feigns sanity for a moment to draw Alex in for an attack. The relationship between Quark and Meltdown and Neutron is still poorly defined; we’ll see if the climax helps.

Kent Williams draws the loopiest Wolverine cowl you have ever seen, does he not?