| Posted: 30 December 2025 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | 1
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Found this elsewhere:“Claremont had one fantastic idea...Phoenix...and one incredible plotline....and most of that with Byrne...and he rode it for years.” Time for a history lesson, again. Viewed thru the lens of all that came after, it’s hard to grasp those long ago moments that turned Jean Grey into Phoenix. Originally there was nothing more going on than Chris and Dave wanting to boost her powers, to which end they put her in a space shuttle and flew her thru the same cosmic rays that had granted their powers to the Fantastic Four (TAK TAK TAK). This came on the heels of Marvel floundering around for a few years trying to figure out what to DO with her. (Hands up if you remember that it was Jean who was intended to be Ms. Marvel…?) Thing is, once Chris had this Jean+ in his grasp, he kept pushing her. Although she was not, at that point, officially a member of the team (having quit in UNCANNY X-MEN 94), by the time I arrived Chris was well on his way to turning the X-Men into guest stars in their own book. I grumbled about this, and one day Steve Grant—not Chris—made what was then a radical suggestion: turn her into a villain. I didn’t like the idea, but it would allow Chris to have full reign with Phoenix without diminishing the X-Men. So we set off on that course, with me suggesting we use the nearly forgotten Mastermind as the catalyst. Jean was slowly twisted to darker and darker intent, until she burst forth as a full fledged badguy. As originally plotted, one of the ways this was to manifest as having her destroy a Shi’ar battleship, but as I worked on it, I came to see that action was not really enough—especially since it was technically self-defense. So I had her consume a star and in the process destroy its family of planets. We proceeded from that point, until Shooter’s whim of iron kicked in. He’d been briefed on what we were doing, but one day he came into the office demanding that all actions generate CONSEQUENCES. Phoenix, he declared, was to be taken to a “prison asteroid” to be “horribly tortured for all eternity.” My response: f**k that, I’d rather kill her.” Which is what we did. The rest is history. Phoenix, as you can see, was not the result of any individual’s Eureka moment. As with so many characters, it was a cumulative process.
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