Phoenix #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PHOENIX #3
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX:
Despite the general tone of issues #2-3, she does trust Corsair enough to leave him to defend her body while she enters Hakan’s mind, in order to find out what all the zombie Asgardians are about. She empathises with Hakan’s pain but seems surprisingly reluctant to judge Odin’s punishment – she’s not normally this reticent. She seems to see Hakan as having brought it on himself by starting a civil war in Asgard, but the flashback we see is much more concerned to present Hakan sympathetically, and so Jean’s reaction seems at odds with it. Anyway, she lays the undead Asgardians to rest, then drives off the Black Order.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Corsair turns out to have been after a feather from one of Odin’s ravens which was buried in the Asgardian graveyard, and which is apparently valuable to collectors or something. To be fair, the idea that he would rope Phoenix into this adventure when his main priority was to find a trinket is fair enough – and Phoenix lets him keep the feather. But the story still seems to expect us to be surprised that Corsair would do something as low-level decent as taking the Black Order’s slave labour force home (despite the fact that his origin story involves him being an escaped slave himself). I try to be fairly open minded in the annotation posts about how flexibly a character can be interpreted, but this book’s approach to Corsair seems just downright incorrect to me.
Hakan is the leader of the Asgardian force buried on the alien moon. According to him, he and his force staged an uprising against Odin’s rule, believing that he was keeping Asgard in a state of permanent war; Hakan and his followers perceived themselves to be staging a necessary civil war as the only route to overthrowing Odin and bringing about peace. Odin punished them by leaving them in a state of undeath from which Phoenix frees them. Hakan appears to regret his methods, but stands by his criticism of Odin.
VILLAINS:
The Black Order (Ebony Maw, Black Dwarf, Supergiant, Cull Obsidian and Proxima Midnight) were apparently sent to the moon by Thanos in order to recruit the Asgardian zombies as an army. They don’t put up much of a fight against Phoenix before departing, but then once she’s laid the zombies to rest, they have no mission. Ebony Maw in particular regards Phoenix as Jean Grey, and as an interloper in cosmic matters. At the end of the issue, they show up to form an alliance with Perrikus.
Perrikus takes Adani to the Quarry of Creation, a location which first appeared in Thanos #8-12 (2017); it also cropped up in Jason Aaron’s Avengers run. In the Thanos story, the Quarry is established as a place where ancent gods go to die, and thus a graveyard. In that story too, visitors to the God Quarry experience illusory visions. Perhaps significantly for this series, the Thanos arc involves Thanos’ son Thane having the Phoenix Force, and the guadians of the Quarry – the Cosmic Coven – were powerful enough to remove it from him.
Adani is unfazed by the Quarry’s illusory god, which she sees right through. The Quarry then tells her that Perrikus brought her there so that the Quarry could “judge your soul”, but tells her instead that she has several paths open to her. The images in page 11 panel 1 presumably reflect these paths, and show Adani as a warrior, an X-Man, a mother and some sort of superhero. Adani tells Perrikus afterwards that the Quarry made no judgment on her, which is consistent with what we see, but on some level we’re having to take her word for it.
At any rate, Perrikus sees this as a successful outcome for Adani, consistent with his view that “true power comes from within”. He ends the issue by explaining his immediate agenda, of dealing with “others in this galaxy wielding powers that do not belong to them.” Presumably that’ll be Jean.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 4 panel 3: “Proof of my father’s shortcomings.” Adani’s father was very religious, as shown in issue #1. She reads the God Quarry as a sign of the ultimate weakness of gods, and thus the wrongheadedness of her father’s beliefs.
Pet peeve of mine: whether anyone is religious at all is not supposed to have anything to do with god-belief. Christianity and Islam are built that way. Religion in general is not.
This book is written and edited (partially) by women, which is supposedly part of the explanation why the takes on characters are straying from usual expectations.
(Incidentally, it is funny how we now tend to have more editors than writers in comic books.)
Corsair was clearly inspired by Han Solo, but all the same there is a tension between what we usually see on panel and what he is supposed to have been doing for a living. He _has_ taken the codename “Corsair”, after all. It is reasonable to assume that he has well-developed mercenary instincts.
Besides, frankly, anyone who does not see himself as a career superhero and still chooses to be on the sights of Thanos’ agents is probably having some benefit out of it, even if it is hidden.
I am beginning to suspect that this series wants to say something about the nature of the Phoenix and how, if at all,, it is connected to Jean. I assumed otherwise, because it is such a mess.
I’d say Corsair owes a lot more to Captain Blood (and other old scoundrel with a heart of gold characters like him) than to Han Solo?
BTW, Corsair was introduced in January 1977, four months before Star Wars was released. Though I guess it’s possible Claremont and Cockrum saw the Star Wars script Lucas gave to Marvel so Marvel could produce the 1977 SW comic?
Maybe Howard Chaykin’s Cody Starbuck (rogue space pirate). He debuted prior to Corsair and Han Solo. One would expect that Cockrum (and Claremont) must have been familiar with Chaykin’s character, while Lucas probably would not. Lucas’ inspirations for Star Wars seemed to be based more in old pulp influences.
The Starjammers, including Corsair, were solely conceived of by Dave Cockrum, and Corsair wad based on Errol Flynn.
How many Marvel characters were based on Errol Flynn? Cockrum based his interpretation of Nightcrawler on Flynn, Cockrum again was influenced by Flynn as well as the more obvious Zorro when he created El Aguila, Lee and Kirby based Fandral on Flynn.
@Chris V
Yeah, Cockrum was a Flynn fanatic, and he loved his swashbuckler characters. All of his swashbuckler characters are Errol Flynn, lol.
The Starjammers weren’t originally supposed to be X-Men characters. Cockrum created them with a solo series in mind, but the two running try-out books (Marvel Spotlight and Marvel Premiere) were solidly booked for two years. Claremont convinced him to debut them in X-Men, and the decision to make Corsair Scott’s father was the creative justification they came up with for having them appear in the book.
Okay, some of those details I mentioned are apparently incorrect. The part about Corsair being based on Erroll Flynn is true, but the other stuff (which I got from Wikipedia) isn’t quite accurate. I just referred back to the original interview between Cockrum and Pete Sanderson in The X-Men Companion, and Cockrum actually asked Chris to let him put Stsrjammers in X-Men, not the other way around. Also, the decision to reveal Corsair as Scott’s father wasn’t for want of creative justification. Apparently, they just thought it would be a neat idea, lol.
By the way, if you’d like to read the full interview, go here
https://tombrevoort.com/2022/12/25/the-x-men-companion-1-dave-cockrum-interview/
The pages of that interview from The X-Men Companion are reproduced there, so You’ll have to click on them and zoom in. Well worth reading.
I suspect swashbuckling space pirate types were in the pulp zeitgeist in the late seventies.
“She seems to see Hakan as having brought it on himself by starting a civil war in Asgard, but the flashback we see is much more concerned to present Hakan sympathetically, and so Jean’s reaction seems at odds with it. ”
Note that Hasan says “We fought to end Odin and his ENTIRE bloodline”. And Corsair says “Odin supposedly used to imprison an army of his own men who tried to kill him.” In other words, they tried to kill not only Odin but Thor. Also, Hasan’s dialogue makes it clear that the majority of Asgardians disapproved of what he was doing, so I suspect that we’re supposed to see Hasan as an unreliable narrator.
“Adani tells Perrikus afterwards that the Quarry made no judgment on her”
The point is that Adani’s experience in the Quarry changed her from a child to the adult warrior we saw at the end of issue 1. We all thought that Adani was from at least a decade later but in reality it was Adani after she’d been through the Quarry.
So this is why Jean’s choice not to stop Perrikus but to save hundreds of lives was “wrong”. Not because he himself was so dangerous but because he formed an alliance with Thanos and brought Adani to the Quarry. The general idea of “hero chooses to save lives instead of stopping obscure villain most readers have never heard of , only for the villain to set in motion a disastrous chain of events” sounds like an interesting plot on paper. But something about this plot just isn’t clicking for me.
Cockrum based the Starjammers on the Fatal Five.
@Michael – If that were true, it’s curious that Cockrum made no mention of that whatsoever in his interview with Sanderson. He was quite upfront about the Imperial Guard being based on the Legion (not that he could plausibly deny that anyway).
He mentioned the idea for Starjammers dated back to 1973 which, yes, is still several years after the Fatal Five first appeared, but he also said Hepzibah was a last-minute inclusion. That would mean that Cockrum’s group, supposedly based on the Fatal Five, existed in his mind for four years before seeing print as a trio of dudes (Corsair, Raza, and Ch’od) and a space ferret (Cr’reee). I’m no math wizard, but that doesn’t seem to add up. Got a source?
OK, I found this comment on the Supermegamonkey website:
https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/uncanny_xmen_107108.shtml
“At the time the conjecture (reflected in the letters column of issue 111), was that the Starjammers were stand-ins for the Fatal Five. That would almost make sense, since they were created by now-Marvel-editor Jim Shooter, and you could see a Raza=Tharok, C’hod=Validus, maybe thing going on, but Marvel denied it, and of course there were only four Starjammers, unless you count the robot doctor.
Posted by: Andrew | March 15, 2018 9:33 AM”
So apparently it was just fan speculation.
@The new kid — I don’t know if space pirates were in the zeitgeist at that time, but if so it wasn’t only in the U.S. or even the west. Leiji Matsumoto created one of the best known space pirates in Japanese manga/anime history, Captain Harlock, in 1977.
This book falls into the Superman category of “How can I get excited for an action adventure book about an unstoppable god person?”
If the Black Order is a totally meaningless threat to Jean, I just don’t really see the point.
Traditionally, the way you make an overpowered character interesting is by presenting them with challenges that their powers can’t solve, often moral dilemmas. Which I think this writer understands, and is attempting to do. I just don’t think it’s being terribly well implemented so far.
“Maybe Howard Chaykin’s Cody Starbuck (rogue space pirate). He debuted prior to Corsair and Han Solo. One would expect that Cockrum (and Claremont) must have been familiar with Chaykin’s character, while Lucas probably would not. Lucas’ inspirations for Star Wars seemed to be based more in old pulp influences.”
Yeah, I don’t know if George Lucas has ever acknowledged a connection, but the character of Han Solo has a lot in common with the pulp character Northwest Smith. Cockrum might’ve been drawing from the same well of inspiration.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/NorthwestSmith
@Drew
Or maybe his inspiration was Errol Flynn, like I already mentioned in three previous posts, one of which included a link to an interview with Cockrum himself where, when asked about Corsair, Cockrum straight up tells the interviewer: “He’s Errol Flynn.”
No. No
Cockrum’s own words are not enough.
Clearly he didn’t know his own inspirations.
I am sure that there are plenty of other possible inspirations for Corsair… but I checked the dates and it turns out that Corsair’s first appearance was in 1977’s X-Men #104. The second was in #107.
To the best of my ability of pursuing that information, the original Star Wars movie debuted shortly after #104.
I do believe that to have informed Claremont’s depiction of Corsair, but of course, what do I know? It is just a hunch.
“I do believe that to have informed Claremont’s depiction of Corsair”
The similarities are coincidental, Luis. Not only does the timeline not support it, but look at all the other names that have been thrown out in this thread as possible influences for Corsair. Cody Starbuck, Captain Blood, Northwest Smith, and yours, Han Solo. The fact is that Corsair is a very popular archetype. Inevitably, a character like that is going to resemble loads of other characters. It’d be pretty difficult for any writer to write Corsair as Cockrum imagined him (the leader of a band of vigilante space do-gooders up against a space empire) and *not* have him come off as somewhat Han Solo-ish (and again, debuted before Han Solo).
Michael mistakenly believed that the Starjammers were based on the Fatal Five, but that was a misconception that got spread about due to a resemblance between a couple of the characters. Then there’s the X-Men/Doom Patrol thing with fans mistakenly assuming one was a knockoff of the other, when neither would’ve been possible as both teams debuted the same month. Coincidences happen.
I’m inclined to accept the argument that swashbuckling space pirate is an archetype and Corsair was, at his inception, more-or-less sui generis within that class.
That said, I have no doubt that Claremont was influenced by Han Solo as he developed the character over the next several years.
Also, it must always be noted that Hepzibah is named after a skunk from the comic strip Pogo. This fact ought to be noted, without exception, in every single conversation about the Starjammers that ever occurs.
Finally, thanks for the link to the interview! Love that kind of behind the scenes stuff.