In Marvel's upcoming Phoenix: Resurrection, the adult Jean Grey will finally be coming back from the dead. Over the years, Jean Grey dying and coming back to life has become a bit of a joke, but at the same time, her deaths (and returns) have been generally overstated to a large degree.

While yes, any death and return to life should be considered significant, when it comes to comic books, such things are surprisingly common. Therefore, it was only in the 21st Century that Jean Grey's deaths and resurrections really got out of hand. Here, we'll detail her comic book history of deaths and returns, while noting that we're not counting stories where the entire world briefly is destroyed (like the famous Sise-Neg storyline in Doctor Strange's comic book series in the 1970s), but stories where she is specifically noted as having died.

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The first time that Jean Grey seemingly died was during the classic conclusion of X-Men #100 (by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum). The X-Men had just escaped from a space station on a special space plane piloted by Dr. Peter Corbeau, but during the travel to the station (where the team had traveled to rescue three of their kidnapped team members - Wolverine, Banshee and Marvel Girl, who was actually not technically a member of the X-Men at the time and was only with the X-Men for Christmas Eve because Jean was dating the X-Men's team leader, Cyclops) the ship's shields had been damaged in the area of the plane where you would manually pilot the plane. Sadly, the automatic landing system was also damaged. There were some severe solar flares going on, so whoever was stuck flying the plane without the shields was going to die from solar radiation, but someone had to pilot the ship or else it would never land back on Earth. It was a suicide mission and Jean Grey volunteered - using her telepathic powers to take the information from Dr. Corbeau's brain on how to land the ship and then hopefully would use her telekinetic powers to shield herself. It did not go so well (well, the landing part actually went okay, but not so much the "shielding herself" part)...

The next issue (by Claremont, Cockrum and Frank Chiaramonte), the ship crash landed into a bay outside of New York City (okay, so even the landing part did not go especially well) and while the X-Men all collected themselves in the water, they were shocked to see that Jean Grey might have died, but she had now been reborn as the Phoenix, named after the mythical bird who comes back to life after it burns to death!

So Jean/Phoenix rejoined the X-Men and was now the team's most powerful member. However, after she was split off from the rest of the team (Jean believed that they had died in an explosion after a fight with Magneto at his Antarctic base and they thought that she had died in the same explosion), she ended up becoming targeted by the evil Jason Wyngarde, the longtime X-Men foe known as Mastermind. Mastermind used his powers of mental manipulation to try to woo Jean Grey to his side so that he could use her to become the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club, while he would become the Black King. However, as it turned out, messing with the mind of someone who could take on one of Galactus' heralds easily was not a good idea and Jean snapped, turning into Dark Phoenix. As Dark Phoenix, she headed off into outer space and destroyed a Shi'ar space ship and an entire planet of sentient beings. The Shi'ar did not take kindly to that, so they decided that they had to kill her.

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The X-Men, however, had just seemingly succeeded in bringing Jean back from the darkness through Professor X basically using all of his mental might on her. They, therefore, refused to allow the Shi'ar to just take her and kill her. Instead, Professor X invoked an ancient Shi'ar custom where the X-Men would basically fight the Shi'ar Imperial Guard to the death for Jean's life (how annoyed must Empress Lilandra have been when her boyfriend dropped that nugget on her? "That was just pillow talk, Charles! You were never supposed to use that against me like that! Kitty Pryde, who I don't even technically know just yet, is totally right about you - you're such a jerk!").

Things weren't looking so good, and they got even worse when Jean began to feel herself turning into Dark Phoenix again. She ultimately decided to take herself off of the board to protect the universe, stepping in front of a Shi'ar laser and dying in one of the most famous Marvel Comics issues of all-time, X-Men #137 (by John Byrne, Chris Claremont and Terry Austin)....

You have to love how bizarrely verbose Cyclops is after just watching the love of his life kill herself.

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It was surprisingly only five years later that Marvel decided to bring Jean Grey back from the dead. At a comic book convention at some point in the early 1980s, Kurt Busiek, then just on the cusp of getting his own start as a comic book writer, told former X-Men editor Roger Stern a way that Marvel could bring Jean Grey back to life if they wanted to. Stern thought it was an interesting idea and he passed it on to his friend, John Byrne, who then passed it on to Marvel when they were planning to start a new X-Men spinoff series starring the surviving original members of the X-Men called X-Factor. Originally, Dazzler was going to be the fifth member (along with Cyclops, Beast, Iceman and Angel), but when Byrne passed along Busiek's idea, Marvel quickly decided to bring Jean Grey back to make her the mysterious fifth member of X-Factor.

Jean Grey's official return occurred in Fantastic Four #286 (by John Byrne and Jerry Ordway, with a number of pages re-written by Chris Claremont and re-drawn by Ordway, as Claremont did not like this idea, but if they were going to do it, he was going to be darn sure that he got his say on how it happened).

As it turned out, Jean never actually died in X-Men #100. No, she was near death when a cosmic force known as the Phoenix Force showed up and offered to save the lives of the rest of the X-Men if Jean would allow the Phoenix Force to take over Jean's life, as it wanted to know what it was like to be a human. So it copied Jean's mind and memories and then placed Jean's body in a cocoon at the bottom of the harbor where the plane ultimately crashed. So the Phoenix was not actually a altered Jean Grey, but rather an entirely different creature copying Jean Grey's form. Byrne makes the compelling argument that if we all were impressed by the heroism that Jean Grey exhibited when she chose to kill herself rather than become Dark Phoenix in X-Men #137, then isn't that scene even more impressive if it was just a cosmic force copying Jean's heroism? That's how powerfully heroic she is - someone just copying her was willing to sacrifice itself to save the universe!

Anyhow, the now-never-actually-ever-died Jean Grey joins X-Factor as Marvel Girl, where she finds out that her old boyfriend, Cyclops, married a lady who looks just like her and had a child. He quickly dumped his wife and kid to come back to be with Jean (since Cyclops is the worst) and eventually they learned that Cyclops' wife was literally a clone of Jean Grey created by Mister Sinister because Sinister really needed to see what would happen if a Summers mated with a Grey. The clone, Madelyne Pryor, went evil and was killed (Jean then absorbed Madelyne's memories, as well as the memories of the Phoenix on Earth - this way that Jean could remember stuff that happened while she was died, as that allowed her to be friends with characters she technically had only just met, like Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Wolverine). Jean and Cyclops began dating again (she also slowly but surely dropped the whole "Marvel Girl" name and just started going by her real name).

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It was towards the end of her time with X-Factor that Jean died again, in a very odd way. You see, when Infinity Gauntlet came out, Jim Starlin had to ask other comic book titles for permission to use their characters in the series about Thanos taking over the universe by collecting all of the Infinity Gems to form the Infinity Gauntlet. The X-Men office of titles would only give Starlin permission to use two of their characters. Naturally, he chose Wolverine (as, well, come on) and the other choice he made was Cyclops (presumably he wanted one member of the X-Men and one of X-Factor). Therefore, for the rest of the X-Men and X-Factor, they became victims of Thanos' first major act with the Infinity Gauntlet, which was to kill off half the people in the universe with a snap of his fingers at the end of Infinity Gauntlet #1. The deaths were fully revealed in Infinity Gauntlet #2 (by Jim Starlin, George Perez, Joe Rubinstein and Tom Christopher)...

That was just a minor death, though. She came back to life with everyone else at the end of the series, when all of Thanos' actions with the Gauntlet were reversed.

Jean's next "death" followed soon after (it might have even technically overlapped each other). In 1991, X-Factor merged with the X-Men to form one giant team of X-Men, who were then split into two titles - Uncanny X-Men and X-Men. Each title spotlighted a specific squad of X-Men, a Gold Squad and a Blue Squad. Jean Grey was on the Gold Squad, whose adventures took place in Uncanny X-Men. Both titles were plotted by Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio and initially scripted by John Byrne (Scott Lobdell soon stepped in for Byrne). Jim Lee and Scott Williams drew X-Men and Whilce Portacio and Art Thibert drew Uncanny. In the first issue of Uncanny X-Men with this new set-up, Uncanny X-Men #281, a villain from the future named Trevor Fitzroy used Sentinels to wipe out the Hellions of the Hellfire Club and also Emma Frost and, tragically, Jean Grey!!

Luckily, the X-Men very quickly discovered that Jean had simply switched minds with Emma Frost and Jean was alive in Emma's body while the comatose Emma was in Jean's body. They quickly switched them back. Emma stayed in a coma for a couple of years before finally coming out of it and then working with the X-Men to atone for her guilt over seeing her students murdered in front of her (Emma Frost should never take on any students - they are all constantly getting murdered in front of her).

This, then, began a long stretch of time where Jean did not actually die (we're not counting the altered timeline of "Age of Apocalypse" here, but if you want to count that, then yes, she did die there before the timeline was fixed). She made it through the rest of the 1990s intact. As we got into the 2000s, Jean had begun to embrace her history as the Phoenix and had semi-formally adopted that name as her code name.

In New X-Men #148 (by Grant Morrison, Phil Jimenez and Andy Lanning), Jean Grey and Wolverine were trapped on Magneto's old Asteroid M headquarters and were hurtling towards the sun. They were both slowly dying as they got closer to the sun. Ultimately, Wolverine couldn't stand it and had to put Jean out of her misery so he stabbed her to death right before they hit the sun...

Shockingly, her "death" just fully kickstarted her access to the powers of the Phoenix Force. She quickly resurrected herself and Wolverine and returned to Earth to take Magneto down.

Once they succeeded, however, in New X-Men #150 (by Morrison, Jimenex and Lanning), Magneto lashed out and murdered her when she was showing him some mercy (Wolverine then sliced his head off in retaliation - that, of course, turned out to be a shapeshifter pretending to be Magneto because, you know, it's comic books).

At the end of the Morrison's run, we see Jean Grey come back as the White Phoenix 150 years later (she uses her great powers to actually send a telepathic message back in time to force Cyclops to move on with Emma Frost after Jean's death).

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The Phoenix Force, naturally, remained even after Jean died. This caused a problem, though, when the Shi'ar foolishly tried to destroy the Phoenix Force while it was without a host. Damaged, the Phoenix Force traveled to Earth and resurrected Jean Grey in X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong #1 (by Greg Pak, Greg Land and Matt Ryan).

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In X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong #3, Jean tried to fight the Phoenix Force's control (the Phoenix Force wanted to cause some destruction to get back at the Shi'ar, while the Shi'ar, meanwhile, were tracking the Phoenix Force to Earth and were willing to destroy Earth to destroy the Phoenix Force). She asked for Wolverine's help - the more energy that the Phoenix Force expended bringing her back from the dead, the weaker it would get and thus the easier it would be for Jean to take control of her own body.

So Wolverine obliged by repeatedly stabbing her to death...

Now that she had control again, Jean then also killed herself....

Naturally, the Phoenix Force brought her back again (using Cyclops' power beams to re-energize itself), but in the end of the series, Jean was back to her "final" rest as the Phoenix Force moved on.

Jean remained dead for the rest of the 2000s, as her death in New X-Men #150 was now lasting far longer than her original death in X-Men #137.

In 2012, Marvel cleverly came up with a way to bring Jean back to life without technically bringing her back to life. In All-New X-Men #1 (by Brian Michael Bendis, Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger), the original X-Men were brought from the past into the future. Marvel Girl's powers (which, back then, were only telekinesis due to a mental block that Professor X had placed on her mind) were kickstarted and she learned about what had happened to her adult self...

The young members of the X-Men have remained in the present and young Jean Grey even has her own comic book. However, over 12 years after she died in New X-Men #150, the original adult Jean Grey is set to return in Phoenix: Resurrection #1!