Phoenix #12 // Review
It’s a plane called Elarunn-7. The entire planet has endured 11 years of civil war. How big the population is and precisely how long it takes for Elarunn to experience year is immaterial. The point is it’s been a long struggle. And now something has crashed onto the surface of the planet. Three have been sent to investigate. They’re looking for signs of life. The craft that crashed there left a pretty sizable crater. There’s no way anything could have survived, is there? The three of them find out in the opening scene of Phoenix #12. Writer Stephanie Phillips opens a new chapter for Jean Grey in an issue drawn by artist Roi Mercado with the aid of colorist Java Tartaglia.
Against all probability, something DID survive the crash. It’s a woman. They take her back to their medical facilities. There isn’t a scratch on her. The medical scans reveal nothing special about her at all. The only thing remarkable aside from the fact that she had survived the crash is the fact that she doesn’t have any memory of how she had gotten to be where she is. Years later, she’s a very prominent figure on Elarunn-7. She’s welcoming her sister to the planet. Her sister...happens to be Jean Grey: one of the most powerful people in the universe.
The big challenge for Philips lies in fusing the cosmic concerns of a powerful force with the more earthly concerns of a traditional Marvel mutant story. Though the full mystery of what’s going on hasn’t been revealed yet, Philips DOES seem to be finding a very natural border between the cosmic-level concerns of greatest powers in the universe and the personal-level concerns of tiny organisms that inhabit it. Philips is clearly working both sides of the thematic spectrum with impressively deft narrative skill.
Mercado delivers Phiips’ script with clean lines and simple composition. There’s such a grand sense of scale in the delivery of the visuals that there isn’t a great need for a whole lot of rendering of detail. Tartaglia does an excellent job of adding mood, tone and depth with the color. Not all of it feels too terribly intense, though. There seems to be some discrepancy between the relatively tiny impact that the craft makes in the opening scene and the three-person team’s reaction to it. They seem to think that it’s a lot bigger a deal than it appears on the page, but the scene still packs a punch.
With the introduction of one of the goofier characters in the X-books at issue’s end, Philips is going to have some difficulty keeping everything grounded as she moves forward into its second year in July. The weird complexities of relations between the cahracters could be a bit of a challenge to articulate in and amidst everything that’s going on. Hopefully the central concern of Jean doesn’t get too terribly lost in the process of delivering that complexity to the page.
