History:
When Jean Grey was 10 years old, she watched helplessly as her best friend was struck by a car. The strength of Jean's emotions awakened her latent telepathic powers, and she experienced the dying girl's feelings. Withdrawn and deeply depressed, Jean discovered she could not control her newly awakened mental powers and was forced to isolate herself from others to keep hold of her sanity. Jean had been an average teenager; now, she could hear thoughts louder than voices and lift weights with her mind.
Jean's parents were referred to Professor Charles Xavier, secretly a mutant with similar telepathic and telekinetic powers. Xavier treated Jean for several years, erecting psychic shields in her mind so she would not be able to use her telepathic abilities until she achieved the maturity necessary to control them. When Jean had attained a certain level of mastery, Xavier recommended that her parents enroll her in his newly established School for Gifted Youngsters. Adopting the guise of Marvel Girl, Jean became the fifth member of the X-Men -- a handful of troubled teenagers learning to control their strange powers...and fighting to preserve Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. Jean harbored strong feelings for fellow student Scott Summers -- alias Cyclops, whose uncontrollable optic beams would fire whenever he opened his eyes. For years, both were too shy to express their emotions.
Hated and feared by humanity, Jean and the X-Men honed their strange abilities while standing in defense of a world on the brink of genetic war. Following the removal of Xavier's psychic shields, she proved highly adept at using her telepathic powers. When the mutant island known as Krakoa held Jean and several of her teammates captive, Professor X assembled a second squad of X-Men. Led by Cyclops, the new recruits rescued Xavier's original students. Jean left the X-Men soon after, but continued her romantic relationship with Scott.
However, her unique genetic gifts would not allow her to lead a normal life. The government created a new breed of mutant-hunting Sentinels, and the androids abducted Jean and the other X-Men. Imprisoned in an orbiting space station, the team was forced to escape back to Earth in a space shuttle through a lethal solar-radiation storm. The pilot's cabin lacked sufficient shielding, but Jean insisted on flying the craft. Already succumbing to the agonizing effects of radiation poisoning, she was touched by the cosmic being known as the Phoenix Force. The entity created a body for itself that was identical to Jean's, duplicated her memories and personality, and absorbed a portion of her consciousness. It then guided the shuttle to a crash-landing in Jamaica Bay off New York City.
The Phoenix Force placed the real Jean in suspended animation within a cocoon-like pod resting on the bottom of the bay. The Phoenix Force eventually was corrupted by its own power, becoming a threat to all creation. But Jean's persona was dominant, and her psyche caused the entity to sacrifice itself to save the universe. Subsequently, the Avengers -- Earth's Mightiest Heroes -- discovered the pod and turned it over to elastic inventor Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. Finally breaking through the cocoon's psi-damping, the real Jean released herself. Fully healed, she reunited with Scott and the original X-Men; together, they founded a new team, X-Factor. Later, the members of X-Factor rejoined the X-Men. |
