Phoenix #11 // Review
Jean Grey has been having nightmares. Perfectly normal. Nothing to be afraid of...except the Jean Grey is one of the most powerful weilders of psionic power in the whole of the Marvel Universe. If SHE’S having nightmares, it’s definitely going to mean something. Precisely what it means comes to light in Phoenix #11 Writer Stephanie Phillips opens a whole new story arc with artist Roi Mercado and colorist Java Tartaglia. THe deeper concerns of Jean Grey get a close-up in a super-powered drama that opens-up a new potential crisis for one of Marvel’s most powerful heroes.
Jean’s having dreams about her sister. The latest is something from a while ago...finally meeting-up with her after a long time and lots of work with the X-Men. Demons attack in Manhattan. (It’s happened before, so y’know...not exactly outside the realm of possibility.) Then she wales-up. The good news is that she’s got someone to share it with. She may be really REALLY far away from her husband, but they don’t exactly have to worry about cellphone reception for a psychic voncersation. He’s lifting weights and working out She’s waking-up very far from Earth.
Phillips cleverly balances the script between the cosmic and the interpersonal. This isn’t an easy thing to do as the one has a tendency to overpower the other in one way or another. And t’s maddeningly difficult to manage that sort of balance without having the whole thing come across as at least a bit absurd. Philips takes a relationship between two sisters and makes it feel very, very real...even if it involves life, death, apparent resurrection, time travel and a whole lot of other absurdity. Philips is wise to ground it all in the emotional lives of a couple of sisters and build-out the cosmic level of everything from there.
Mercado has a very respectable grasp of nuance in emotion and emotional expression. Jean feels really good with respect to the way she is moving on the page. But most of what she's doing on the page is just reacting to things and emotionally. this can be very difficult to bring across on the page in a way that feels all that compelling. It's really nice to see the way. Everything comes together in the art, though. Tartaglia’s colors give life and luminosity to both cosmic energies and interpersonal emotional expressions.
Phillips is mixing a few different things together in a way that seems to be developing a really comprehensive look at the character and what it is that she's going through. This is really difficult for a character that who's been around for the better part of a century. It's a noble effort to try to connect all of the various desperate aspects of who she's been over the decades and over the course of many different writers. It will be interesting to see where she land in a year or so with this title.
