Jean Grey has been through a lot. She’s been dead and everything. And now she’s piloting a very familiar space shuttle that should have been decommissioned a very long time ago. It’s the space shuttle that brought her team back to Earth. It’s the one where she first found herself possessed by one of the most powerful forces in the Marvel Universe. She’s piloting that shuttle that began her life in Phoenix #8. Writer Stephanie Phillips continues an enjoyable look into the life of one of the more prominent telepaths in science fiction. Artist Alessandro Miraclo captures the story for the page with color artist David Curiel.

She’s piloting an ancient space shuttle to the Blue Area of the moon.  That’s a spot that has a lot of personal memories tied-up in the past for Jean. She’s going to have to confront something there if she’s going to be able to truly reconcile with the past. It’s not going to be easy. She’s placing herself right in the path of the one thing that COULD. truly defeat her: herself. Jean Grey is going to attack the Dark Phoenix.

It’s really, really difficult to maintain any kind of coherent understanding of the long and winding march of time in the Marvel Universe. It’s kind of weird to try to tie the current series-in with things that happened nearly half a century ago. Time moves in weird ways across the Marvel Universe, but Jean Grey confronting the Dark Phoenix from the early 1980s feels more than a little weird if the entire history of the Marvel Universe is to be taken into account. Still: Phillips is a hell of a writer and she puts together a really satisfying chapter in the decades’ long history of Jean Grey.

Miraclo has a hell of a job to try to commit the story to the page. The entire issue is a direct reference to the art style of another artist from another era. The events explored in the issue are echoes of something that John Byrne did back in 1980 or so. It’s weird getting echoes of that action into the now with a far more contemporary art style that still manages to embrace the visuals established for this particular end of the series as the entire X-Men team from 1980 makes an appearance.

There’s a whole lot of head cannon that actually makes the longevity of everything still sort of actually connect-up in the Marvel Universe even sixty-plus years into the history of the multi-title mega-project that was started by Kirby, Lee and Goodman back in the early 1960s. Time does weird things in a world of dramatic physics, rampant magic and all of the drama that so often accompanies it. Jean Grey COULD be seventy-something years old and still be quite active with the Phoenix force. It’s cool to ee some reference to the long-run of the life of a character like Jean.

Grade: B