25 of Marvel’s best spacefaring characters

The Phoenix Force (Image via Marvel)

8. The Phoenix Force

The Phoenix Force has been most often described in relation to its human hosts. Most famously, it thoroughly upended the life of Jean Grey, one of the most powerful mutants on the X-Men roster. However, the Phoenix Force itself is worthy to be considered its own character, if an eminently strange one.

It’s a little difficult to establish the Phoenix Force as the kind of character we’re familiar with. You see, it’s a primeval cosmic entity, a manifestation of passion and life. It was created in a void between states of existence and represents all the psionic energy that was, is, or ever will be in the universe and beyond.

Though it’s traveled throughout the universe as a formless assemblage of energy, the Phoenix Force has often operated as a sentient being. It’s had dealings with Earth before when the magician Feron attracted the Phoenix Force and gave it the idea to take on its bird-like form. It eventually retreated and wouldn’t return to our planet until it sensed the powerful psychic energy generated by Jean Grey.

However, things soon go wrong for Jean. She grows stronger and stronger, while her sense of good and morals becomes ever more ambiguous. She eventually sacrifices herself to avoid becoming entirely evil. This “Dark Phoenix” saga is one of the best runs of the X-Men series, though its impact is watered down somewhat by various incarnations, resurrections, and the like.

The original run of the Dark Phoenix saga claimed that this was all Jean coming into her own immense and dangerous psychic powers. Later, other writers retconned it all into Jean’s possession by the Phoenix Force. Eventually, the Phoenix Force possess other individuals, including Jean’s clone Madelyne Pryor and Rachel Summers, Cyclops’ and Jean Grey’s daughter from an alternate future.