then what about Jean's body being placed in a coccoon in the bottom of Jamaica Bay following hte radiation trip from space and teh Avengers finding her years later? X-factor explained that as Jean healing from her injuries while Phoenix I was a cosmic being who recreated itself in Jean's image but made it clear that it was not Jean. Morrison came and wrote for her but completely ignored that and had characters speaking about Phoenix I as if it was Jean and made no distinction between the two. This was made even worse when just a few months earlier in UXM 387, it was once again written that Phoenix I was not Jean. He chose to ignore that issue altogether. This all may have been alright, had he explained it but he simply ignored what had been developed with Jean since her return. Retcons can be bad as it is, but I think retconning retcons is worse bc it creates one big inconsistent clusterf--k and thats what Morrison did when he opened up this can of worms
It already was a clusterf--k. Try reading the original Phoenix story, the '86 retcon, the Classic X-Men backstories, Inferno, the Excalibur Phoenix stories, Revolution, Hidden Years, and X-Men Forever.
And now we can add Morrison's run, Endsong, Warsong, and the stuff in Rise and Fall and Emperor Vulcan.
X-Men Forever tried to say that the Jean/White Phoenix in Classic #43 was the Phoenix Force that replaced Jean and that Death had explained to it why it had replaced her (although thats not what the actual story was about as Death talked to Jean about the Phoenix).....
But then in X-Men Forever, Jean goes back in time and replaces the Phoenix that replaced her, to meet Death thus making it the real Jean all along in that story.
And they also have Death comment on how both times he met her was the same time.
X-Men Forever also tried to rename and redefine the Phoenix Force as the Resurrection Force and that its purpose is to create life from death.
Prosh hints in X-Men Forever that when Jean's body was in the cocoon her mind was somewhere else...
Another problem with this interpretation is that in Excalibur #25, Claremont had Death appear to Rachel and mention his meeting with Jean in Classic #43 so it had already been put in continuity. Death tells Rachel that Jean chose to give up the Phoenix power then.
Of course Alan Davis ignores this and Claremont's Classic Backstories later on in Excalibur and retcons over Rachel's original origin too. At first it was that Rachel's mother had been a Jean that became Phoenix and that Rachel got the Phoenix power from Jean's essence in the holo-empathic crystal. Davis changed it to that Rachel's mother had never became Phoenix and that the Phoenix Force thought Rachel was Jean when she came into the timestream and then possessed her and gave her false memories.
Yet Davis also writes in X-Men #97 that Jean had ascended to godhood on her own once when he had Cyclops reflect on Jean's original transformation into Phoenix.
Uncanny X-Men #387 did acknowledge the retcon and thats the most Claremont has ever acknowledged it. He also ignored Inferno. On comics-Fan Claremont explained that the editors told him to acknowledge the retcon and told him to ignore Inferno too.
In the story Jean comments as if she has no memories of the Phoenix and just knows of it from records. Yet when she mindlinks with StarHammer their memories combine and she relives the experience from both Dark Phoenix's perspective and the Shiars. But wait where did those memories come from? Jean also acknowledges that she summoned the force and allowed their souls to merge.
So Claremont snuck in a little bit of his version of the continuity. In #381 he had the characters talk as if Jean had been the original Phoenix. He wrote the Classic Backstories to salvage his original story and to show despite the '86 retcon the real Jean had in fact been Phoenix and had an intimate connection to the power.
Jean had relived the Dark Phoenix experience and the deaths of her victims in Classic #43 and when her original body in the cocoon received some of the Phoenix energies (thats why she rejected it).
Even by the most extreme view of the retcon the Phoenix had still absorbed a portion of Jean's consciousness and later returned this to her in Inferno. At the very least a part of the real Jean had been Phoenix. It didn't just simply copy or pretend to be her or anything like that.
There are literally captions in X-Men Forever that say "When Jean become Phoenix..." or when she bonded with the Phoenix.. and when she uses the Phoenix Force to meet Eternity it talks about how she had tried to forget what it felt like AND captions that say "Jean was not the Phoenix....or that she had been replaced by it...
I asked Nicieza about this through email once and he told me that was because according to the continuity Jean Grey both had been Phoenix and had not been Phoenix. Basically the continuity is so convoluted and some of it is so starkly contradictory that it can't be fully reconciled. Greg Pak even commented in one interview that the Phoenix continuity contained direct contradictions.
I think Claremont in his Classic X-Men backstories and Grant Morrison in his New X-Men made the greatest attempts at reconciling the Phoenix continuity. Pak made a nice effort in Endsong too.
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