Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Rachel Grey's Phoenix/Marvel Girl costume history


Rachel Grey (actually called Rachel Summers) was the daughter of the X-Men Cyclops (Scott Summers) and Phoenix (Jean Grey) from an alternate dystopian future where all the X-men had either been captured or killed. Captured by mutant hunters, Rachel was forced to be a Hound, using her telepathic powers to track other mutants. As a Hound, she wore a black leather bodysuit with metal studs. Tapping into her natural link to the Phoenix Force she inherited from her mother, she escaped into the past. There she teamed up with the X-Men, and soon found herself embroiled with the X-Men's enemy the Black Queen. Black Queen tried to mind-control Rachel into becoming her servant and gave her a Phoenix-inspired black-and-red costume. However Rachel was able to break Black Queen's control with her rapidly growing psionic powers. Rachel soon found herself becoming one with the Phoenix Force as her powers reached their full potential, and created a red costume with a fiery bird emblem to signify her link to the Phoenix. Later Rachel was kidnapped by the evil TV obsessed monster Mojo, and he put her in a red version of her Hound costume. Even after her escape, Rachel kept the costume to make peace with her Hound past. When the Phoenix Force took her over completely, Rachel was able to regain her senses, but found herself in her mother's original Phoenix costume. Not happy with the green color scheme, she turned the costume red and gold. After a brief jaunt through time to save her teammate, and save the people of a distant future, Rachel returned wearing a darker version of her previous red Phoenix costume, with a dark crimson suit with a much larger stylized bird emblem (but ironically lost her Phoenix Force powers). When she found herself possessed by a dark telepath named Elias Bogan, Rachel's colorful costume was traded for a black leather bodysuit. When Rachel saw this timeline's version of her mother Phoenix die, she honored Jean Grey by changing her surname to Grey (also to show displeasure with her father and his new girlfriend Emma Frost). She also donned a green-and-yellow costume that Jean had designed early in her career (back when Jean was Marvel Girl and not yet Phoenix) but never wore, and took Jean's original codename Marvel Girl. As Marvel Girl, Rachel was displeased to be assigned to work with Emma Frost the White Queen, and even less thrilled to be given a new white costume with fiery phoenix designs as White Queen's White Warrior Princess when the two telepaths had to infiltrate Emma's former team. When reality got temporarily re-written to make mutants the dominant race on Earth, Marvel Girl found herself in a black-and-green costume with a phoenix symbol belt. When Marvel Girl had to head in to outer space to fight the alien race called the Shiar, she absorbed a dark echo of the Phoenix Force and donned a dark black-and-gold costume to symbolize her new powers. While in space, Rachel attempted to send a psychic message to Earth at the very moment the planet was altered by a deranged telepath, which affected her psychic self and created an golden Phoenix-like energy version of her called Revenant on Earth (trapping her thoughts and soul inside the energy form).  After the telepath was defeated, it released her psyche from the energy form, and she was able to return to Earth (and lost her Phoenix echo powers) Marvel Girl now wore red-and-yellow body armor that had ascpects of her Phoenix and Hound costumes. Finally, Marvel Girl slightly altered her suit to her earlier green-and-yellow color scheme with silver armor pieces and a brown leather jacket.

2 comments:

  1. No, the image is Rachel from the cover of Xtreme X-Men 45. Somebody at Marvel used that picture for a Magma encyclopedia entry, completely ignoring the fact that Magma is blonde (not a red head) and wouldn't have the Phoenix Force behind her.

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