Madelyne Pryor and the Three Faces of Jean

Madelyne Pryor started her comic book life as a bad idea; editorial dictates and the vagaries of continuity made her an even worse one.

Less than three years after Jean's death (in real time), Scott and his brother Alex, reunited with their father, Christopher, arrive in Alaska and are greeted by their pilot, a red-headed woman whom all three immediately realize looks exactly like Jean Grey.  Without their reactions, the readers might not know just how close the resemblance is:  depicted by so many different artists, Jean's only defining feature is red hair.  But she is identical to Scott's first love; naturally, she and Scott immediately fall for each other, leaving the readers (and some of the other characters) to wonder: is this Jean Grey, resurrected (again)?  Claremont has gone on record saying that he originally intended Madelyne to be a "red-headed red herring," alluding to Hitchcock's Vertigo as a precedent.

But the Vertigo parallel is, in itself,  if not a red herring, than a herring that is decidedly half-baked. In Vertigo, the uncanny apparent reappearance of a dead woman works because we don't generally believe such things are possible; in X-Men comics, not only are they possible, but they are the stuff of a a typical Wednesday.  Either Madelyne is Jean, or she is the product of a highly unlikely coincidence; frankly, in the world of the X-Men, her coincidental resemblance to Jean Grey is actually less likely that the discovery that she is the second (or third?) coming of Phoenix.  But soon we discover that Mastermind has been manipulating Scott into thinking she is a reincarnated Jean, allowing for a plot that, by superhero standards, makes sense. But there are still unexplained details. Mastermind didn't fool people into thinking Madelyne looked like Jean; this is what she actually looked like.  And Madelyne was the sole survivor of an airplane that crashed at the precise moment of Phoenix's death.

Oh, come on! As if Jean would ever wear her hair that way!

Yet despite these coincidences, Claremont insists that her only purpose was to allow Scott to exit the team and live a happy, quiet life. Perhaps that it is the case, but it is telling that Claremont's idea of a happy ending for Scott entails marrying an exact duplicate of Jean Grey.  Scott at this point becomes a stand-in for the frustrated, devoted fan, who does not want to imagine the X-Men without some version of Jean. Madelyne is an odd replacement for Jean; the readers' investment in the Phoenix storyline was facilitated by a near-constant access to Phoenix/Jean's inner life: Jean was not just a threat, but a person (well, a cosmic force imitating a person, depending on what year we're talking about) undergoing almost unimaginable strains right before our very eyes. Jean was the woman with whom the reader, like Scott himself, had a psychic rapport; Madelyne is an airline pilot who looks like Scott's dead girlfriend. Every comic books character is, of course, a two-dimensional visual representation, but this two-dimensionality is Madelyne's very essence: she exists to be a Jean-like surface.

There were many reasons to be unhappy about the editorially-mandated return of Jean Grey and the retcon of the Phoenix as a cosmic copy, from cheapening the original story to forcing a plot line that makes Cyclops a lying, deadbeat dad who abandons his wife without an explanation. But Madelyne herself was not a great loss, at least, not until depriving her of place, purpose, and, ultimately, her individual self became both a plot point and an ongoing theme. Four decades later, the bad editorial call to resurrect Jean turned out to be a net positive once the franchise moved into new hands (Grant Morrison's handling of the character alone makes it all worthwhile).  And even Madelyne had, after a few false starts, become a compelling character in the Krakoa era.  The reasons she works now are the same as the reasons she became interesting as soon as Scott (and the editors) shunted her aside.  Now her function as a copy of Jean Grey become literal, and her superfluity makes her not just a plot device, but the subject of an existential dilemma to rival Rachel's:  in the new status quo, what is Madelyne Pryor even for? 

Claremont's work on Madelyne over the next few years would end in her demise, which must have felt like something of a mercy killing. With Madelyne gone and Rachel off in Mojoworld, and then the UK, the main X books could finally return to the one, true Jean Grey.  But when Madelyne is brought back (repeatedly), it is not just because no IP is ever truly forgotten, but because her essential superfluity remains intriguing. Yet just as it took years for Jean's return to become thinkable, it would take even more for Madelyne to be seen as a character who could have value in a post-Inferno world. In the Krakoa era, that value comes from lampshading her redundancy: in the new mutant utopia order, where nearly all dead mutants can be resurrected, the Krakoan leadership had decreed that clones were ineligible for the process.  This consigned Madelyne, along with other, more lovable clones such as Honey Badger, to an oblivion that was no longer tolerable to those who were close to them. Madelyne's revival, the modification of the policy, and the storyline that returned her to villainy before beginning a redemption arc, was a strong statement about the nature of personhood, as well as an acknowledgment of Madelyne's ill-treatment by her supposed friends and family (not to mention the editorial regime that marginalized her).

Next: The Superfluous Woman