And finally, getting us somewhat back on track, X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong wraps up.

Quentin Quire finally turns up with Sophie in tow and tries to get her brought back to life.  She's not interested, and that's the end of that.  Meanwhile, Jean comes back from the ice yet again to take back the Phoenix as a host.  She's a bit discombobulated, but the X-Men psychically bombard her with love, which sorts her out in time to save them from the Shi'ar megaweapon before heading off to another plane of existence again.

Okay, yes, yes.  It's a Care Bears ending.  And yes, those are normally awful.  This is a very rare example of a story where it actually works, because it's not love in an abstract sense.  It's the X-Men's own love for Jean, and its purpose in the plot is to help bolster her sense of identity so that she can get back under control.  It's not one of those "she is overwhelmed by the power of abstract love" scenes, which really are nauseating.  It's about the X-Men's relationships with her, so it makes passable sense. 

It's also got beautiful artwork, of course.  I can certainly understand that Greg Land's work, particularly with Justin Ponsor's colourists, is a little too airbrushed and perfect for some tastes.  Nonetheless, the pages are beautiful to look at, and if a lot of the women have the same face, at least it's one with expression.

This was originally billed as being the last Phoenix story, but it's rather hard to see how that's the case here.  The character is functionally impossible to kill off - dying and coming back is what phoenixes do, after all - and nothing here seems much more final than anything we've seen before.  There have been rumours of rewrites on this book, which wouldn't entirely surprise me.  After a very strong start, Endsong wraps up in a way that really does leave you wondering quite what the point of the exercise was meant to be.

This isn't to say that it's a bad story, merely that we seem to have come full circle and achieved very little at the end of the day.  It does, at least, provide Jean with a stronger write-out than she got in "Planet X", although of course "Here Comes Tomorrow" was meant to serve the same function for her.  It also gave us some interesting material about Scott and Emma's relationship, where Jean returns and Scott actually isn't interested.  I'm pleased to see Scott and Emma being presented as a real relationship rather than as Scott settling for second best, because it's an infinitely more interesting pairing.  Splitting up Scott and Jean reinvigorated both characters, even if Jean's too dead to take advantage of it.

Still... we've gone from "dead and buried" to "dead and off in another plane of existence."  We've taken Quentin Quire full circle and put him back in his bottle.  We've taken Sophie full circle and put her back in her grave.  And Scott and Emma's relationship, far from being shaken by Jean's return, is actually reinforced.  It's hard to avoid feeling that there wasn't much point to the whole exercise.

But it's been beautiful to look at, and full of interesting character moments.  Greg Pak has done an impressive job of trying to square all the interpretations of the Phoenix and still produce a story everyone can live with, and he's more or less succeeded.  I'd be interested to see more from him.  The failings of this series come from the limitations of the remit, not the efforts of the creators.

Rating: A-

back | continue