31 Days of Scans - Least Favorite Female Character

This was surprisingly hard, but for the opposite reason from last week. There weren't many female characters that jumped as being not favorites. There are some I dislike to be sure - Emma Frost and Monet to name two - but I feel like that's intentional. It's part of their character that they're kind of arrogant and condescending, and if they seem like people I would not want to be around under any circumstances, they do work well in a team setting. Every team needs a jerk to cause friction. Eventually I settled on a character I'm just never happy to see.

Sorry Jean.

I don't know what it is specifically. There's nothing intensely unlikeable about Jean Grey to me, but there's nothing about her that I found terribly engaging, either. The stories they do about her, the directions they take her character, they don't do anything for me. I'm sure there are plenty of interesting stories out there about her, but I can't say I've seen them, or felt compelled to seek them out. As far as telepath/telekinetics with a connection to the Phoenix Force and the last name Grey go, I've always been much more interested in Rachel.

The fact that where she goes, Cyclops is sure to follow certainly doesn't help. Though it was more that if they were together, I feared the book was going to waste a lot of time on their relationship it could be spending on characters I actually liked. I remember having that specific thought pretty much any time in the '90s I'd see an X-Men comic with one or both of them on the cover. "Aw man, I bet there's not going to be anything about Wolverine, Rogue, or Psylocke in this issue. Booooo."

The fact she was still dead when I first got into comics - OK, still in a coma in an energy cocoon at the bottom of the sea - didn't help. There are a lot of characters that were dead at that time that have always struggled to get traction with me - Adam Warlock, Mar-Vell, Gwen Stacy - I guess because, even if their death or sacrifice is important, that doesn't mean I see the need for them to return as an active character. I know that certain status/alingments/rosters that were in effect when I got into comics have a huge effect on what seems important or normal to me. Rachel was on the X-Men at the time, so that seems normal. Cyclops wasn't, so his being part of the X-Men doesn't essential at all (Chad Nevett wrote once he couldn't understand liking the X-Men without liking Cyclops and I thought, it's easy. Just start reading Uncanny X-Men when he isn't there). Jean being completely absent doesn't seem out of place, or any sort of a detriment to the story to me. That isn't the character Jean Grey's fault, but it's part of what drives my general apathy to her.

I can probably pin a lot of the blame on the early '90s X-Men cartoon. Jean tended to try and do something useful, fail, and pass out, possibly while crying out for Scott. She didn't really get a lot of opportunities to shine. She saved the universe in the Phoenix Saga, but that kind of gets tainted when she goes nuts/gets possessed by the Phoenix Force and has to sacrifice herself. That's roughly how it went in the original comics, but cartoon was my intro to that, which is why I'm mentioning it here. I feel like X-Men Evolution did somewhat better by her, but by then, my feelings were pretty well locked in. Plus, there were still a bunch of other characters I liked much better/found more interesting.