Ran across this piece of history from a more innocent time, aka the early 80s.

I finally saw the movie thanks to a free preview cable channel... it did help take my mind off other things but they really seemed to have taken the 'soul' out of the basic story, plus changed Phoenix's/Jean Grey's background significantly. It also contradicts X-Men 2 & 3 so I'm guessing this was part of some re-boot that ignores the first three? I've seen First Class, Days Of Future, two Wolverine movies, and Apocalypse so I guess those 'still count', but it hardly matters top me anymore, continuity is almost on a per film/book basis these days. It is not a terrible movie but definitely underwhelming as X-Men 3 also was. They need to have a hot young woman in a shiny tight costume be a hero then do something real bad and fight everyone until she discovers some guilt and heroically blows herself up like the Death Star rather than harm more others (even asparagus people), cure emotional aftermath, medals presented, and then 'the end'. The Hellfire Club isn't mentioned as being the Hellfire Club, and it's members seemed to be D'Bari aliens that took over random earthling bodies, their 'corrupting' of her is sort of a lost sub-plot and she has killed a fellow X-person before even crossing paths with them. No Wolverine anywhere removes the love triangle bit entirely. This is their second kick at this can and it will be three strikes you're out if they don't show that flame bird spectacle more than briefly I would say.

The comic is a classic almost in spite of itself... the ending was imposed editorially and I agree with the logic of it. I guess JB decided it was okay to rescue Jean Grey from the mess and I was glad to read the Avengers and Fantastic Four issues at the time (and as some of the last major comics I would read for a couple decades), and then it was his Hidden Years comic, set between #66 and Giant-Sized #1, that got me hooked back again in a roundabout way. I also really enjoyed the Lost Generation title of around the same time. I think with the attention the Phoenix got they would want to bring something of it back from the ashes... ideally I imagine it could've been like Venom, on it's own or copying individuals but not possessing them after what was revealed in the two part Avengers and FF story. Madelyn Pryor originally was someone that shocked people by her resemblance to Jean and didn't seem to have a past, I don't know why Claremont left that basis. I really hate that they later have Jean, post X-Factor and back in the X-Men, take up the Phoenix name and costume on what would seem a really really bad whim... no reason for it story or character-wise, and then I take it in some story after I gave X-titles up again she gets possessed by the Phoenix 'again for the first time' as it were. With all the future offspring thrown in, vampires and mohawks, demons from various hells and fishnet stockings, it's a flipping mess! There are short oasis of readable stability here and there; it's too bad Alan Davis couldn't have stayed longer, the hyping of Claremont returning had made me end my runs the issue before he starts (although I would've loved to get that '#100' with the Dave Cockrum cover). Even in Fanatatsic Four Claremont inserts some kind of alternate future offspring (of Dr. Doom and Sue Richards) and so I've become afraid that to read anything more of his will blemish the earlier runs I do sort of treasure if that's not too emotional a word.

My identifying character, the one you can imagine being yourself, would still be Kitty, it never was Jean Grey as much, but 'they' have really ruined both of them for me so I should avoid. I don't know Kitty anymore if she is a maths and tech genius, ninja, demon, and Shield agent. There went the normal kid with inner strength appeal to smithereens! Phoenix is a great power fantasy, glittering and sexy and all, but Jean Grey the mousey '60s Marvel token hardly ever fit with that, like it couldn't last as the power kept getting souped up. I would go back if it was normal Kitty and seperate Jean and Phoenix if I could, and I guess I can with the back issues, but so far not the movies.

Oh yeah, it's been great! I've been there from the first drawing. Big cliffhanger related to Phoenix at the end of virtual #9.

Yeah--I remember my roomate coming to the end of #133 and shouting, "Holy $#!T! Big trouble for the X-Men!" Then he handed to me and I read it and yelled, "Holy $#!T! Big trouble for the X-Men!"

Yes, I'd love to see this published, even if just as the raw but tight pencils it currently is. I had major deja vu during issues 7-9 in which the FF, X-Men, and Avengers team up to fight some regular house-sized Sentinels and also some human-sized ones whose shells secretly house captured mutants and make use of their powers:



Watch out for that "It's" vs "Its" error there, Vision!

Eventually I remembered a similar plot in Grant Morrison's DC One Million event from 1998 in which Vandal Savage captured several members of the Titans and put them inside suit-shaped nuclear bombs rocketing against various targets worldwide. In both cases the drama was about destroying the suits without damaging the people inside.

Is that the reason for the re-write? I had no idea. I had assumed it was the other way around, and that the new script was indeed new!

When reading "Phoenix: the Untold Story", I had been struck by how the new dialogue ill-fitted the original comic. Logan's feelings for Mariko at that point (issue 137) did not warrant that thought balloon... the two had dated a few times, tops, and their story would not blossom fully until the Wolverine mini-series from a few years later. I got the impression that Chris had altered the published story to better reflect the X-Men's status quo from the period in which P:TUS was itself published.

In the same sequence, Hank thinking about how his joke about leaving the Shi'ar ship was actually a ruse so he could call the Avengers sounded as if Chris had been told by a fan "hey, how come Hank didn't call in his colleagues for help?" and decided to provide an explanation. But that explanation, reasonable as it may be, goes against a long tradition of super-heroes never calling each other for help unless that was the plan right from the start; The Avengers usually don't call the FF when Ultron shows up and the FF don't call the Avengers when Galactus is in town. Not that it's a problem when heroes DO team up, of course, but nobody demands an explanation as to why they don't when, in the real world, it would make perfect sense.

I've lived with this storyline since it was in the the newest issues on the spinner racks in my early teens and I think it was a the only really logical thing to have a suicide ending... I was fine with it then, but I do remember a letter from a female reader saying it was sexist because Thor was powerful and didn't go nuts from it etc.

At the time I distinctly thought "phoenixes rise from ashes" and that she may be back... I was sort of conditioned to that anyway as a trope where Magneto or Doctor Doom or whomever would seem to have been pretty clearly killed with no escape, and then they would show up with some explanation in the future. So if I've just closed #137 let's say, and knowing many of the comments from all sides over the decades and the mess that things became, what would I want to see after the "death of Phoenix"... I would want there to have been some way Jean would be alive separate from Phoenix, but not quite as was written in Fantastic Four #286 from an idea by Kurt Busiek. In the first appearance and origin Phoenix says, as if announcing to strangers, "Hear me, X-Men! No longer am I the woman you knew!" Okay, so she is a creature possessing Jean Grey's body. The Kree gun that seemed to kill the combined creation could in fact have been more of an atomic splitter like Captain Marvel's negabands. So Jean Grey ends up in the Negative Zone ala Rick Jones (So the FF could still be involved in finding and recovering her). The Phoenix entity could have been zapped to the other side of the galaxy by the same process making a fair amount of time for it coming back and possibly using various other hosts. In his web comic John Byrne has Lilandra of the Shi-ar become one of the hosts after they have separated Phoenix and Jean, and she makes a bee line for Earth to find and reclaim Jean, so that's pretty close. I just happen to have liked the original #137 without changes. So eventually they are both known to have not died, we get to keep heroic Jean Grey and have the naughty sexy bad lady villain too eventually. No Madelyn Pryor, Mastermind stays a vegetable for a long time and if he does come back is very afraid of messing with Jean or Phoenix ever again, or assuming a Wyndgarde persona, Rachel Summers the future child can still be I guess, but no Nathan Grey (Pryor) or Cable (my fantasy here). This may have required Claremont to move on after #143, but I'd like to keep #151 & 152 ("special returning guest writer: Chris Claremont"), his Brent Anderson drawn 'graphic novel', and all The New Mutants.

Also... I would want all the dead heroines that followed (and I think they all came back eventually anyway) would not happen as it just made for more convoluted messy junk to fill up fan aimed non-fiction encyclopedias than good stories. So Claremont and Leialoha keep Spider-Woman going longer so they don't kill here in #50 of her comic... Carol Danvers never becomes pregnant then Binary then Warbird only to wind up back as Ms. Marvel where she was in 1980... Elektra I don't really know how she came back, so maybe she can stay the way Miller did her. At DC I would prefer if Batgirl doesn't become Oracle... but it's not a deal breaker... and believe it or not Supergirl I will give up, she can die in Crisis. DC was determined to go through this consolidation thing, so Power Girl gets tied in with Arion, Wally West is The Flash... yatta-yatta, that's their problem. Maybe a new Supergirl for young readers could come along at some point in a post-Crisis DC, but I'd very much not like it to be anything like Peter David's '90s Supergirl.

I don't know how this really cool X-Men story got to be so messed up for so long really. Even despite the communication lapses and lack of time for it things could've been ironed out in the issues following, but it does sound like positions and resentments became entrenched with Chris Claremont left on the sole musical X-chair for too long. He should have wanted to go and do other things for awhile I'd think like Byrne and Austin did, and he could've still had New Mutants to keep his hand in the mutant pie... and maybe future refugee Rachel could've been a bigger part of that group rather than grafted on as Kitty's friend.

media.comicbook.com/uploads1/2014/09/spider-man-no-more-107895.png