Interesting to muse upon this. Tells us how much comics, and the comic audience, have changed since 1980. In those more innocent times, the death of Jean Grey (as she still was, then) was like nothing anybody had ever seen. Now, it's old news, and has been done over so many times, hardly even rates as an eyebrow raiser.

••

Two things struck me about this.

• The minimal use of my art in an "essay" about what was, some would insist, the pinnacle of my career.

• The depressing reminder that all the crap Chris shoveled into the "saga" after I left the book is, in the minds of fans, totally part of the story. This is, of course, a kind of microcosm of why I left the book in the first place: I felt Chris was getting the characters wrong, but Chris' version is what readers were seeing. And, undeniably, loving.

The guy does make one major mistake, tho, and it's a common one. He spots the obvious fact that Chris and I were sexualizing Jean in a way that she'd not been before, but he imagines this would have been surprising and shocking to the "twelve year olds" who he imagines were, at that time, the primary audience.

He's forgotten how 12 year olds think -- or did back then, anyway.*

I'm reminded of when GOLDFINGER came out, and presented us with one of the most iconic moments in James Bond's history, Shirley Eaton's nude body painted gold. I was about thirteen, then, and completely understood what was going on. But my parents had friends who had an eleven year old son, and his reaction to that scene was, and I quote, "The lady was wearing a gold dress." Despite the description of what had happened to the character provided by the other characters, he didn't get it. His brain didn't work that way yet.

So, in a comicbook full of people in strange costumes, I'm reasonably sure the younger portions of the audience saw Jean's STORY OF O transformation† as nothing more than another weird costume.

He's right that the movies are going to screw it up again, tho.

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* This can be seen in his declaration that Jean was Marvels most boring female character. Dood! She was a REDHEAD! To us tweens, with our raging hormones kicking in, she could have sat in the back of every scene doing crochet, and she would still have been super hot.

† He gets that our story was at least partially influenced by the AVENGERS episode "A Touch of Brimstone," but he then refers to EYES WIDE SHUT, which came out decades after our story. Rather like some reviewers of the DAYS OF FUTURE PAST movie saying it was too much like THE TERMINATOR.

I suspect this reviewer has spent his formative years awash in Bad Girls and cannot place older comics and characters in their proper context.