A friend of mine said something wrong on Twitter last night and it’s bothering me. "Some girls want to be Storm or Rogue or Jean Grey," she said. "Not me. I want to be Wolverine." What?

I get where she’s coming from — gender roles, their destruction, all that. But let’s keep things in perspective. Jean Grey is the most powerful mutant of all. As Phoenix, she’s a primordial force of nature. As Dark Phoenix, she’s a wrathful primordial force of nature. If comic books are megalomaniacal escapism, we should all want to be Jean Grey. Wolverine is better at slicing people to pieces. Jean destroys entire star systems; destabilizes intergalactic empires; compels acoyltes of mystical tyrants to clone her; makes men leave their wives for her (especially when they marry her clones); dies and comes back to life endlessly; jumps out of Jamaica Bay with her hair totally dry. All hypothetical battle plans for defeating the X-Men require gaming out how to neutralize Jean. 

Men: you should want to be Jean Grey. And as I was just saying to Dave Weigel, what a crying shame that X-Men 3 booted a chance to tell the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga.