“X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga”, written by Chris Claremont, illustrated by John Byrne

 

200 pages, Marvel, ISBN-13: 978-0785122135

Everything I know about comic books I absorbed via osmosis from my brother Tom, a true Comic Book Geek (which I say with all love, Bro). I tried to get into comic books, once: I collected Firestorm when it was restarted in the early 80s, and I was there at the birth of Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragonés, of Mad Magazine fame. But when my Dad took the family on a historic tour of Civil and Revolutionary War sights in 1982, I was lost: it was history for me forevermore, and comic books and such were pretty much given the old heave-ho. But not entirely. When Tom began collecting X-Men, I was interested enough to bum the latest issue off of him when he was finished. As I recall, his interest didn’t start until after the Dark Phoenix saga had run its course, and so this particular character was spoken of with dread and sorrow by the current characters in the series.

And so, as an adult, when I found X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga…somewhere, I picked it up in the spirit of an historian seeking to educate myself about a past event I knew but a little about. Written by Chris Claremont (before he became intolerable) and illustrated by the incomparable John Byrne, The Dark Phoenix Saga collects together X-Men issues #129 through #137 in an omnibus edition. I have to say that, for a “mere comic book”, The Dark Phoenix Saga is a shockingly emotional tale of a good woman driven mad by power. As I said, although I already knew Jean Grey’s ultimate fate, the writing and art sucked me in to the extent that I still found myself dreading what I knew was coming. I won’t go into details, but Jean Grey became, for me, a very real person struggling with powers she could no longer control and, ultimately, fell to temptation like so many mortals, given absolute power, have done.

Jean Grey, like any mortal – even a mutant mortal – was doomed from the start, as who but a god could contain god-like powers? The Dark Phoenix Saga is a story from the Bronze Age of Comic Books (circa 1970 to 1984) and, as such, I don’t think can be pulled off in the modern age, what with a weekly EPIC EVENT and 1000-and-1 titles and artists and writers with egos the size of small moons (Jean Grey, like every dead superhero, comes back to life eventually, a storyline that pretty much destroys the meaning of the Saga). This was more than a comic book; it was an event that dealt with universal themes in a new, different format, and for that, The Dark Phoenix Saga ranks right up there with any event pop culture could manage to pull off.