As I stated in the post for the DC women I like the most I love seeing strong women characters. There is just something wonderful about a good strong woman character and being able to see them right up with the male heroes. There are quite a few female heroes in the Marvel Universe that I admire so I’ll try and keep the list short.

Kitty Pryde: Kitty AKA Shadowcat has always been one of my favorite characters ever since I was a kid. She had a hard power to control with being able to just pass through solid objects like a ghost. Sometimes like when Excalibur was started the power was almost uncontrollable. One of the interesting side effects of her powers was that if she phased through machinery it tended to short circuit, yet she worked through this to become a bit of a computer genius. During the X-Men the End series you see Kitty trying to become the mayor of a city trying to overcome the mistrust humans have against mutants to try and help both races. Kitty is also one of the few characters I know of where they have given her a storyline or two based on her religion. The one that I remember the most was a story where Dracula came after the X-Men and turned them all and Kitty was the one that had to save them. When she held up a cross however it didn’t work on Dracula because she is Jewish but her Star of David necklace had worked. Kitty has also been instrumental in the X-men and was a founding member of Excalibur.

Rahne Sinclare: Wolfsbane was always one of my favorite characters tied even with Shadowcat. Yes I admit I am a bit biased on her due to my love of the redheads but I always liked Rahne for other reasons as well. Though starting out very naive in things (which I always found cute too) she had a deep inner strength. After all this was a VERY religious young lady who was brought up by a priest and when she found out she was a mutant her father figure (who turned out later to really be her father) cast her out saying she was a demon spawn. Something like that could have pushed a lesser person to suicide but she had great inner strength and that let her overcome this. Unfortunately the rest of her life wasn’t roses and song but was quite rough. From being bound to Havok against her will to finding out her love was gay and through all this she stayed strong and became a teacher for the School where she grew up. Rahne is the original member of the New Mutants and has also run with the X-men and the government sponsored version of X-Factor and later Jamie Madrox’s X-Factor Investigations. Rahne was best friends with Daniel Moonstar and while in wolf form has a psionic rapport with her as well.

Rachel Summers: Rachel was always an interesting character to me, other than the obvious red hair. She was the daughter to my two favorite X-Men Jean grey and Scott Summers however this is where it starts to get weird. Rachel is not from the mainstream marvel universe but from an alternate timeline. In our timeline Jean and Scott have no kids of their own but Scott does have a son from a clone of Jean which never happened in Rachel’s timeline. Another oddity that I liked about Rachel was that she seemed connected to the Phoenix Force that had once driven her mom to become Dark Phoenix but didn’t seem to drive Rachel that way at all. Rachel had a hard life living in a future where the mutants were hunted down and killed and unfortunately a hunter called Ahab had made her into one of his tracker hounds which means she was a psychic slave whose soul job was to hunt down other mutants. Rachel still wears the spiked leather outfit from her hound days as her costume but for the most part has hidden the other identifying marks though every so often you can still see her hound facial tattoos when her powers flare brightly. Rachel was best friends with Kitty Pryde and was one of the X-men and a founding member of Excalbur.

Jean Grey: Jean Grey has a very convoluted story and a life that was cut tragically short several times (Comics are bad about resurrections, even worse than daytime soap opera’s). Jean was one of my all-time favorite characters in the Marvel Multiverse. Jean Grey is both a telepath and a telekinetic so not only could she read minds and influence minds but she could lift people and objects with her mind. Jean is the original X-Man the first recruited by Charles Xavier for his School for Gifted Youngsters. Jean along with the other original X-Men (Cyclops, Beast, Iceman and Angel) went on to eventually form the team known as X-Terminators(aka X-factor) basically the members of X-Factor posed as a mutant hunting group of humans called X-Terminators who would go out and “take care of” trouble mutants. What actually happened was that they would let the mutant know who they really were and try to get them out of the situation and to somewhere safer. The amazing thing is with just a slight costume change no-one really thought it interesting when the two teams kept showing up in the same places with members who could be twins. Jean had a pretty hard life though as she became the Host of the Phoenix Force. Basically Phoenix used a clone of her body while the real Jean Grey slept on the bottom of Jamaica Bay in New York and was later found by the Avengers. During this time Jean, as Phoenix, became corrupted and became Dark Phoenix who eventually died. During this time Scott had married a red head named Madelynn Pryor who was actually a clone of Jean Grey. Maddie would also die before Jean was brought back. Jean has died and come back several times since and even married Cyclops at one point.

These are just a small sampling of my favorite characters from the Marvel Universe. As you can tell if you look at my DC post like this I have a greater love of the Marvel Universe than the DC on. To me it’s just a bit more relatable and has better characters. I could have kept this post going all day or done several posts but for now I’ll leave it here.

Photos Courtesy of:

Jean Grey: Comicvine.com

Rahne Sinclair: ifanboy.com

Rachel Summers: Deviant Art User leonx

Kitty Pryde: all-things-x.blogspot.com