nmrosario
asked:
Most longtime comic book fans are familiar with the story behind the Dark Phoenix Saga, how Jim Shooter put the editorial hammer down and made Claremont and Byrne rewrite/redraw the entire ending of their saga AND kill off Jean Grey. My question: is this something that would happen at Marvel today? Where an editor basically steps in and forces a writer/artist team to radically change their story and kill off one of their characters seemingly against their will? Or was Dark Phoenix a unique case?

I don’t think you have quite a full understanding of all the facts in that case.

First off, to answer your question: could it happen today? Sure, it certainly could. But that would mean that all of the various safeguards that we’ve put into place to prevent a situation from getting to that point had failed. But sometimes, that can happen.

In that instance, Jim wasn’t aware of the particulars of that storyline until he read the printed make-ready of X-MEN #135, in which Dark Phoenix destroyed an inhabited planet. That event is a little bit different than just saying that a particular character is going to go bad, that’s the genocide of an entire race of people, an entire biosphere. So Shooter wanted to know how the story was going to resolve itself.

By that point #136 was off at the printer, and #137 was going to be following it in short order. And Jim felt, probably rightly, that simply taking Jean Grey’s cosmic powers away wasn’t a sufficient balancing of the scales–that to let Jean just go about her business thereafter with the X-Men would have been a travesty of justice, and something that he simply wasn’t comfortable with.

Jim didn’t insist that jean be killed. He spoke with Chris and John and the editors, Jim Salicrup and Louise Jones, about the particulars of what needed to happen to redress those scales, but it was ultimately they who decided that the only ending that made sense to them was to have Jean killed. Part of the difficulty here was that, given the schedule, there was only enough time to redraw something like five pages if the book was going to ship as it should.

Chris also took the opportunity to go back into the rest of the issue and make significant copy changes, so that rather than contemplating lightweight subplot issues such as what Mariko might be doing at that moment back in Japan, the X-Men all individually grappled with the issues involved in what Phoenix/Jean had done, and came to the decision to fight for her.

The irony of all of this is that, had those changes not been mandated and made, we likely wouldn’t be talking about that story today. it would have been a very nice moment in a very nice run, but the death of Jean Grey was one of those instant hallmark moments that immediately became a classic (whether you liked it or not, same as with the death of Gwen Stacy.)