JB, your FF version is indeed better than the published one.

I still believe that either version robs the entire run of X-MEN 100-137 of a great deal of its emotional power, not just Jean's death. The best portrayal ever of the Scott/Jean romance never really happened to Jean.

I agree.  I recall when reading Jean's rebirth, all I could think about was that great scene in the desert where Jean and Scott were romantic, and then I thought, wait, that wasn't Jean! 

But, I understand the reality of the market.  It is a shame that X-Factor, the excuse for bringing Jean back, was so lame, right down to the concept of the original X-Men hunting mutants, but really secretly helping them. 

Superhero comics are supposed to be like a roller-coaster ride. When you take a particularly spectacular slide, you don't stop the car and back up to do it again. You race on in anticipation of the next one.

This mucking about with JB reminds me of that "West Wing" episode which expressed a simple thought applicable here -- LET BYRNE BE BYRNE.

I'm just speechless that a storyline, a character, he was so intimately connected to and fundamentally familiar with was crushed under heel. Terrible.

This thread is also serving to point up something that has gone very wrong with comics, particularly superhero comics, in the last thirty years or so. "When Jean came back, the first thing I thought of was a scene that appeared six years earlier."

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SER: This fan mentality came up during the Clone Saga. There was objection to the notion that the Spider-Man they had grown up reading was not the "real" one (the "irony" I suppose was that the Spider-Man revealed to be "real" was the one Ditko, Lee, and Romita had worked on).

If the comics audience turned over as it should, there probably wouldn't have been this reaction or at least Marvel might have been willing to "ride it out."

It's hard for comics to "escape" bad stories now because of the fannish belief that "every story and every scene" counts.

SER: This fan mentality came up during the Clone Saga. There was objection to the notion that the Spider-Man they had grown up reading was not the "real" one (the "irony" I suppose was that the Spider-Man revealed to be "real" was the one Ditko, Lee, and Romita had worked on).

If the comics audience turned over as it should, there probably wouldn't have been this reaction or at least Marvel might have been willing to "ride it out."

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The reason why the Clone Saga didn't work was because they changed Peter Parker into Ben Reilly.  Gone was the Daily Bugle supporting cast.  Gone was Aunt May (killed during this fiasco).  Instead we have a character who instead of being married and too old, we have a character that spent the last how-ever-many years wandering the Earth thinking he was a clone.  That's even LESS Spider-man-like.  It was a really bad plan.

Stephen, in that case, I think that "fan mentality" was for the best.

The Clone Saga was a really bad story and a bad idea on so many levels. In that case, fan uproar caused Marvel to do a 180 and restore Peter Parker (the same guy we had followed for 30+ years) as the real Spider-Man.

I agree with the notion that an older fanbase (like all of us here on the JBF, to be quite honest) does make it harder to get past bad stories. But in the case of the Clone Saga, that was a story that needed ending before it did any further damage to the Spider-Man franchise.

After all the discussion around here about uniform colors, did this panel stand out to anyone else?  I thought that it had been decided that the FF uniforms are actually black with blue highlights used in the coloring.

I don't believe that the original outfits (the outfits that Jean refers to in the panel above) were ever supossed to be all black. It was JB's outfits (as Jean also refers to) that were black.

Not every outfit that was colored blue was supposed to be black. The outfits that JB mentions were outfits that were predominantly black in the early appearances, with blue highlights. The Fantastic Four's original outfits never really had large black areas, other than the gloves, boots, belts, and collars (those parts were black).