Whats the story behind the return of Jean Grey?
Why Marvel let Bob Layton bring Phoenix back, I will never know. JB: Bob Layton didn’t bring her back — I did. And it was not Phoenix who was brought back, but Jean Grey. The sequence went something like this: After the Phoenix Saga — and long before it developed this retroactive titling — Chris would simply Not Let Go. Not an issue of X-Men passed without SOME reference to Phoenix. (I still remember being annoyed when he wrote the Wendigo-eye-view scene with Nightcrawler in the second Alpha Flight appearance as if it was a sunset (I’d asked Glynis for red tones in my margin notes) and had NC launch into a whole schpiel about how the colors reminded him of Jean, etc, etc. He, of course, should not have been Seeing those colors! Thus the effect of the scene was lost.
Why Marvel let Bob Layton bring Phoenix back, I will never know. JB: Bob Layton didn’t bring her back — I did. And it was not Phoenix who was brought back, but Jean Grey. The sequence went something like this: After the Phoenix Saga — and long before it developed this retroactive titling — Chris would simply Not Let Go. Not an issue of X-Men passed without SOME reference to Phoenix. (I still remember being annoyed when he wrote the Wendigo-eye-view scene with Nightcrawler in the second Alpha Flight appearance as if it was a sunset (I’d asked Glynis for red tones in my margin notes) and had NC launch into a whole schpiel about how the colors reminded him of Jean, etc, etc. He, of course, should not have been Seeing those colors! Thus the effect of the scene was lost.) Sideways from this, an annoying little eager-beaver fanboy named Kurt Busiek had come up with the idea that Phoenix was not, in fact, Jean, but a precise duplicate created by the Phoenix Force as a “housing” for itself,
