Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: from the ashes, Jean Grey, phoenix, Shadows Of Tomorrow, tom brevoort, X-Men Age Of Revelation

Tom Brevoort On How Marvel Might Have Handled Jean Grey Better

Tom Brevoort on how Marvel Comics might have handled Jean Grey better and who is to blame for her not being in the X-Men books right now

Tom Brevoort is the Senior Vice President, Executive Editor and X-Men Group Editor at Marvel Comics. His position and prominence has grown at the company over his decades there, and he is central in terms of editorial and creativity at the comic book publisher. He just gave a big interview to AIPT, which was able to incorporate reader questions. I understand that Brevoort took some slack at Marvel Comics for his open question-and-answer sessions on Substack, including his blatant and uncompromising honesty about how he sees things, which was one of the factors that led to his decision to suspend his regular Substack posts, providing Bleeding Cool with such fodder. But with this Q&A, it's like he never went away. And top of mind for the X-Men fans was the fate of Jean Grey, Phoenix, original X-Man who has been absent from the promotional material following Age Of Revelation and into Shadows Of Tomorrow. Tom Brevoort states;

"I can say with certainty that you'll see Jean in the course of the year. It may not be as soon as you'd like, especially since as soon as you'd like apparently means last week. But it's not like we're not going to feature the character. The honest answer is a couple of plans shifted, and a couple of things didn't end up where we thought they were going to be, and that means we have to reposition and rework some of what we were going to be doing. That happens from time to time. There are larger things going on both internally at Marvel in the story planning that we're doing and in the marketplace, in general. So we've been shifting a bunch of things around, not just in the X-world, but in various areas, and that's impacted some stuff that would've been here sooner, that won't necessarily be there quite as soon — or even in exactly the same form. But it's not like we're necessarily going back to a Greyless world. There will be plenty of Grey to be had. It just may take a little longer to get there than we had intended, you know, six months ago."

So, is the changing comic book marketplace really to blame for Marvel not having Jean Grey in the X-Men? One day, we'll get more clarity on that. Maybe I'll have a dig. After the events of the Age of Krakoa, in which Jean Grey saved the world from Dominion and the mutants from Orchis, she returned to explore the cosmic side of the character. In the Age Of Revelation event, she had died, her powers claimed by Carol Danvers, until Jean returned to take Carol's place. But it seems that wasn't picked up, or plans to pick that up changed…

I think one of the things that we struggle with, quite honestly, is figuring out how to introduce her as an element into ongoing X-Men team storylines when she so obviously tilts the entire table in whatever direction she happens to be standing in, because she's just so gosh darn powerful. And the solution to that in the past has always kind of just been, well, just knock her powers down. That feels reductive in a way. There may be some version of that we have to do to find a way to go, OK, she's back with Cyclops and the guys in Alaska, and they still have a problem somehow. So that's the most difficult challenge when it comes to Jean, where she is, and how she's been set up.

"One of the reasons I gave Ryan Stegman the OK to use her in the X-Men Annual was it felt like she kind of ended up inadvertently being a little bit stranded off by herself in space, dealing with some of the cosmic ends of things, but not a lot of X-characters. And again, there were one or two things there that might have hit it a certain way. She might have been involved in Imperial at a certain point, but it didn't end up going that way, where we might have taken better advantage of that. But this is how the cards fell out, and so now we have to deal with where we happen to be on the board"

Certainly, the Imperial storline in which variouis cosmic powers and tricked by others into fighting amongst themselves and bringing about a new galactic order might indeed have found room for a character such as Phoenix. Maybe next time…. but if you want a clue as to what those plans originally were, Tom's Substack from last summer may have a few points that you could join together if you wished… and hey, the X-Men are back on the big screen in less than a year. Marvel Comics will want all its X-books lined up in a row for then.

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