The general impression in the Office at the time, tho, was that Shooter
resented any book's success for which he could not claim a great part of
the credit, and the "success" (critical, but certainly not in the sales
department!) Chris and I were enjoying was very much despite
Shooter, not because of him. We spent an in ordinate amount of time and
effort trying to work within his increasingly restrictive rules and still do the
stories we wanted to do. Honestly, I have spent years trying to convince
myself his reaction to the destruction of the D'Bari planet was NOT just an
effort on his part to sabotage what we were doing.

Of course, what happened after that was basically an unending
cascade of bad ideas.

______________________________________

This should be posted on the walls of the DC and Marvel offices.

...we got Jean back, and Chris could do whatever he wanted with Phoenix.

****

When the Dark Phoenix issues originally came out I was following them along with great interest and pleasure -- some absolutely terrific storytelling (duh) -- but only up to the finale. #137 was a letdown, in one specific way: Jean was dead. Having been first and foremost a fan of the original team, killing her off was not at all what I'd been hoping for. I certainly had no inkling of a "lobotomy" abandoned story, but I had expected that, since in #136 Jean and Professor Xavier together had fought against Phoenix and were temporarily successful, maybe #137 would find a way to permanently rid Jean of Phoenix and exonerate her somehow.

I just wanted Jean back!

I have to add, though, how happy I am to have learned half a century later how much JB loves the original team and how dedicated he is to the principle of "putting the toys back in the box" (etc), so I can surely see why he'd now prefer that the whole episode were wiped out.

••

I'm not sure how that's possible, Glenn. There was no prior notice of what
was going to be in 137. Remember, Chris and I didn't even know
ourselves! It shipped utterly without promotion, hype, hoopla, whatever. I
cannot imagine how an article could have been written about the issue that
would have come out any time close to the month it shipped, let alone the
same week.

And, remember, if the book "sold out" at the LCS, that would have been no
big deal in 1980. The Direct Sales Market was still only a part of the
marketplace as a whole. Anyone who could not find the issue at his/her
LCS could have strolled down the block to the nearest drugstore and found
it on the spinner rack there.

It simply was not an "event" in anything like the modern sense. In fact,
what it was, was something almost impossible to achieve in the modern
marketplace: a surprise!