Tag: dark phoenix saga

You mentioned your fondness for X-Men (Claremont’s run) and for the Phoenix saga in particular. I’ve always had difficulty getting into that because to me it seemed highly incongruous in its elements. It has aliens from outer space, it has some ancient cosmic entity. How does that work in the general political/social grounded social commentary of the X-Men as representative of the marginalized? And what according to you should have been the ideal ending of that arc?

Well, I think you either lean into the rich 70s melange of aliens, cosmic forces, secret societies in fetish-wear copied from The Avengers (UK), allegories about the danger of repressing women’s sexuality and power, crash-landing space shuttles, the Blue Side of the Moon, or you don’t. 

But in so far as it’s related to the social commentary…well, it’s there in places but it’s not in the foreground:

  • Jean becomes Phoenix only because the U.S national security state bankrolls Steven Lang’s genocidal Sentinel program, which sets up the aforementioned space shuttle, at a time of intensified “anti-mutant hysteria,” includeding the firebombing of Judge Chalmers’ house. 
  • The Hellfire Club as a metaphor for social class and the failure of intersectionality – they’re mutants who are basically pushing the Sentinel program, because they’re so rich and powerful they think they’re above oppression. 
  • The cold war between Xavier’s and the Hellfire Club over the soul of Kitty Pryde as a metaphor for whether the Youth of the 70s would follow the idealism of the 60s social movements or selfish Yuppieism/proto-Reaganism.
  • Dazzler the Movie and those shenanigans are bang in the middle there. 
  • And of course, Days of Future Past lands right after it ends…

Here’s how it fits into the larger thing: if all the X-Men are allegories, if they’re just “representatives of the oppressed” and nothing else they don’t work. You have to start with character – are these heroes people we care about and identify with? – otherwise they’ll come off as cardboard cutouts rather than real people and no one will care about their fictionalized oppression. So the hook, to me, is that the X-Men are super-heroes that, unlike the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, face oppression – but you need both parts: yes, the Sentinels and the Hellfire Club and Genosha and everything else, but also the Shiar and the Juggernaut and giant dragons over Tokyo and the Asgardian Wars, and the Dark Phoenix Saga.

So to me, what makes Dark Phoenix Saga important to the X-Men is that it gives Jean Grey and Scott Summers a emotional arc with weight and depth – it makes them real people.