It happened in one of the early panels in All New X-men #7. O5 Cyclops had just charmed a cute bank teller that still may want to bone him into letting him access his safe deposit box. Inside that deposit box was some pretty useful shit like money, passports, and an old wedding invitation to his and Jean Grey's future wedding. This led to the dramatic moment at the end where he gave Jean Grey the invitation after she told him to stay the hell away from him. That may or may not be the greatest act of pwnage against the opposite sex since the advent of hacking nude pictures from cell phones and giving them to TMZ. But there were other contents in the box I glossed over.
One in particular harkens back to a joke I often make when I do reviews and not surprisingly, it involves Wolverine. Way back in the days when we still didn't take Mitt Romney seriously, there was an issue of Uncanny X-men #510 where Wolverine revealed that he kept a lock of Jean Grey's hair in his room after she died.
This was easy to make jokes out of because it took Wolverine's infatuation with Jean Grey to the kind of obsessive levels that leads most stalkers to hide out in trash cans in hopes that they'll find a used tampon. We get that Wolverine wants to bone Jean Grey. That's perfectly understandable. But keeping a lock of her hair and then naming a fucking school after her? There's professions of love and then there's Vincent Van Goh style crazy that leads people to cut off their ears.
But in All New X-men #7, we found that Wolverine's gesture wasn't as creepy as initially thought. Because it seems that while Cyclops had a bleach blond telepathic nymphomaniac in Emma Frost to console him, he still kept a lock of Jean's hair in that safe deposit box.
So even though Cyclops and Wolverine hate each others' guts, they both have similar levels of obsession when it comes to Jean Grey. But Cyclops never went as far as to name a school after Jean so I think Wolverine still wins that battle. Then again, Cyclops did marry Jean Grey's clone so maybe it's a closer match than we think.
But another detail in this picture that's worth noting is the two rings. I may be speculating in my hung over daze, but those could be his and Jean's wedding bands. We can't tell what's on those pictures and necklaces too, but in another earlier scan one of the pictures clearly depicted him and Jean Grey. So it's not unreasonable to conclude that those other pictures captured similar moments.
Why is this important and why am I making another post about it? Well, other than it being a way to help me fight off a hangover, it does something that I think hasn't been done much lately. Since Jean Grey died in 2003, Marvel has gone to great lengths to white-wash her relationship with Cyclops so that they could justify having Cyclops and Emma hump like an awesomely cliched porno. It had it's purpose for a while, but after Jean stayed dead for so long (too long) it got to a point where Cyclops and Jean's relationship was really underplayed. Some of this may have been to the horrible biases of writers like Matt Fraction, who indirectly admitted he probably gets a boner at the thought of Cyclops and Emma. But it doesn't change or retcon Cyclops and Jean's history.
I know certain fans do NOT want to hear this, but these two did actually get married and they did actually make it work to the point where they raised a kid together for 12 FUCKING YEARS IN THE FUTURE. And when guys like Wolverine, who only managed to cop a few feels and swap a little spit with Jean, seem more obsessed with her, that doesn't say much about the Cyclops/Jean relationship. And since Cyclops actually did marry Jean and actually did have a functional relationship with her, it doesn't come off nearly as creepy that he kept these sorts of mementos. But that's just the musings of a drunk. For all I know, Bendis will brush this shit off like I brush off AA meetings. But at least for one issue, we see that two men who want to kill each other have something in common. Does this mean I'll keep making jokes about Wolverine's burning desire to bone Jean Grey? Fuck no! But it does add some additional context. Nuff said!
I noted that detail too, when I was re-reading issue #7, and I remembered that moment from Uncanny X-Men #510; when I watched that scene I said, woah look at this... but then I thought, so what? After all Jean Grey is Scott's dead wife, so why not have something to keep and to remember her besides pictures and other memories, I mean that's not my style, but I'm just saying.
ReplyDeleteWhat Wolverine did, however, that was fucking creepy, he never got over the fact that he never could be something more to Jean Grey, you already mentioned that he named a school after her so that's another one.
And I'll say it again, what if Jean actually gave the lock of her hair to Scott? That's another possible explanation.