Often killed off, X-Men heroine Jean Grey now hovers between life and death weekly around the Marvel Comics bullpen.
"People want to know when we are going to bring her back. It's a question we get about once a week around here," says Mike Marts, editor of the X-Men comic books.
Grey has died in the pages of the X-Men comics three times. Her most recent death came in 2003's "New X-Men" comic book, issue No. 150.
Her first "death" was in Uncanny X-Men, issue No. 101, almost 25 years ago. She was reborn in that same issue, possessed by a powerful cosmic entity called the Phoenix. However, the Phoenix had a dark side and later emerged as Dark Phoenix, a murderer of entire civilizations.
After three years as the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix, Jean committed suicide in "Uncanny X-Men," issue No. 137, sparing the universe from her growing evil side.
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The Dark Phoenix storyline is the inspiration for the movie "X-Men: The Last Stand," which opened Friday. In the film, the presumed-dead Jean returns as the Dark Phoenix.
"When issue No. 137 came out, readers' heads popped off," says Greg Pak, who wrote the Jean Grey comic-book miniseries "Phoenix: Endsong" in 2004. "That's when Jean Grey (committed suicide), and it was a stunner."
Marvel has been tempted to revive the character recently. "X-Men: The Last Stand" brings Jean back after she was presumed dead in the last X-Men movie.
"There's a kind of mystery inherent in the character of Jean Grey," Pak says. ". . . She was a voice of beyond and didn't understand herself.
"If you look at a lot of our characters, they have an appeal in their simplicity. Spider-Man is a nerd who gets bitten by a spider . . . Jean Grey is something else altogether. This is a character that transcended the everyday world. There's something totally compelling about that, this notion that she is tapping into something beyond us all."
But it's not time for Jean to be reborn, Marts says.
"She is such a popular character, but part of the reason you keep a character dead is that the death scene was such a great moment in comic book history," Marts says. "To bring back the character would diminish the moment if you do it too soon.
"After all, there's no guarantee that she'll be back."
