Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: chris claremont, fabian nicieza, Jean Grey, John Siuntres, louise simonson, Word Balloon
Chris Claremont’s Plan To Resurrect Jean Grey, Which Marvel Rejected
Chris Claremont’s plan for X-Men to resurrect Jean Grey which Marvel Comics rejected in favour of the X-Factor plan
Article Summary
- Chris Claremont reveals the Jean Grey resurrection plan Marvel rejected when launching X-Factor in 1986.
- Claremont says Jean Grey’s death in X-Men was meant to stay permanent, making her Phoenix ending matter.
- His pitch kept Cyclops, Madelyne Pryor and baby Nathan in X-Factor, with Jean’s sister as the fifth member.
- Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson recall Jim Shooter’s promise Jean would stay dead, before Marvel reversed course.
Jean Grey, Marvel Girl, was one of the original X-Men, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for X-Men #1 in 1963. She would become the godlike Phoenix and then die in X-Men #137, by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, in 1980, after the demands of then-EIC Jim Shooter. Her partner, Scott Summers, Cyclops, would later move on and, in 1985, marry Madelyne Pryor, and have a baby, Nathan Summers, who would later be revealed to be the character from the future, Cable. Then one day in 1986, Jean Grey suddenly got better in Fantastic Four and Avengers, and became a founding member of the new X-Men team, X-Factor, by Bob Layton and Jackson Guice, alongside the rest of the original X-Men.
At Terrificon this past weekend, Chris Claremont told the full story, sitting alongside Louise Simonson, who would start writing X-Factor a few issues in, and revealed his detailed alternate plan to resurrect Jean Grey that he desperately tried to sell Marvel Comics on instead, when he learned they were bringing Jean back. Chris Claremont has always maintained that Jean’s death was never meant to be temporary; permanence was the point, once it had been imposed from above. “We got letters for the three or four months after her death saying, ‘When are you bringing her back? How are you bringing her back?’ And there was no Phoenix or Jean Grey in Days of Future Past, they were going ‘uh-oh… maybe they mean it.’ She’s really dead. The longer she was dead, the more cool everyone thought it was because they’re serious about it. That was the whole point. If we killed one, we could kill another.”
Louise Simonson added, “Jim Shooter did say in our company that she would never come back.” Chris Claremont replied, “Until she did… our editor Ann Nocenti waited until she and Barry Windsor Smith, and I were out to dinner on a Friday to plot Uncanny X-Men #198, the second part of the Life Death storyline, and then she told me. I said excuse me, ran back to the office. I was going to scream Jim [Shooter]’s head off… but he’d left and locked the doors.”
Forced to return to dinner and finish the plot, Chris Claremont went home that weekend and plotted “the real story, what should have happened with the creation of X-Factor”, wrote up what he still believes was the stronger path. “If you’re going to re-up Scott, make sure, like any soldier who’s re-upping, his wife is cool with that. So he takes over X-Factor. Madelyne comes along because that’s her job as the wife. And the baby comes too. If you need a fifth person, and you need a woman, and you need a Grey, Jean had a big sister, and she’s a mutnat, I’d established that Jean. She’s a living version of Cerebro. “She’s the one who takes them out and leads them to the mutant they’ve got to fix or find or whatever. But she doesn’t know the slightest thing about how to work her power. So things go wrong. Things go wrong all the time… But it brings tension into every encounter. And leave Jean out of it. Until, let’s say, a year later or two years later… You want to bring her back? Fine. They bring we bring her back. But this is Jean as she was in the beginning. Sixteen years old, fifteen years old, in love with Scott. But Scott’s a father with two kids, and he looks at them, and he’s like thirty… I could make stories out of this. I’m sure the creative cast at that point on X-Factor could come up with ways. But you can’t tell the audience that we lied. Jim’s response was, ‘It’s a great idea. You can use it yourself if you want, but I gave my word to the new guys, the new creative team.”
Louise Simonson, who was present for parts of the original promise discussions, confirmed the sense of broken trust. “You called me, and you said, ‘I’ve heard these rumours that this is going to happen, that there’s, you know, they’re bringing Jean back, and they’re going to pull characters away out of my book and put them in somebody else’s book.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, Chris, Jim swore to us that she would always stay dead if we killed her’, right? So, I reassured him, thinking that Jim would never lie to me. But was I wrong? Yes.”
Maybe it’s time for Chris Claremont to do his own version of John Byrne’s X-Men Elsewhen… but for X-Factor?
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