The role was announced in March 2025 and kept under wraps for well over a year. The rumour was always Jean Grey. The rumour was right.
Sadie Sink plays Jean in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the film uses her cleverly. For a long stretch she is not a hero at all. She is a teenage telepath possessing people and using them to attack Department of Damage Control facilities, her motives unclear, treated by everyone on screen as an uncontrollable threat. Peter ends up working with the police and with the DODC's director to stop her.
If that setup sounds familiar, it should. It is the shape of the most famous X-Men story ever published, run in miniature, and it is Marvel telling you exactly where they intend to take this character.
So here is the collecting side of it, properly checked, in the order the story actually happens.
X-Men #1, September 1963
Jean Grey's first appearance, as Marvel Girl, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Same issue as the first appearances of the rest of the original team and of Magneto.
This is a cornerstone Silver Age book and it is priced like one. I will be straight with you: for most people reading this, X-Men #1 is not a buying decision, it is a thing you hope turns up in a collection you are looking through. When it does, it is usually in rough shape, because 1963 comics that survived were survived by children.
The reason it matters here is that it is the origin point. Everything below is the same character becoming something the 1963 book gave no hint she would become.
Uncanny X-Men #101, October 1976: the first Phoenix
This is the one that matters most, and it is the one I would actually tell someone to go and find.
In Uncanny X-Men #101, by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum, Jean pilots a shuttle back to Earth through lethal radiation to save the team. The Phoenix Force cocoons her and takes her place among the X-Men. She rises out of the water as Phoenix, and the character is changed permanently.
Bronze Age, 1976, and a first appearance that the market has taken seriously for decades. If the MCU is going where the post-credits and the casting suggest, this is the book with the most road ahead of it.
Uncanny X-Men #129, January 1980: the sleeper
Here is the one people miss.
Uncanny X-Men #129 opens the Dark Phoenix Saga, and in doing so it delivers the first appearances of Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost. Two characters who went on to be enormous, in one issue, inside the most reprinted story in X-Men history.
I would argue #129 is the most quietly valuable book on this list relative to how often it turns up. Late 1979 and 1980 American comics circulated well in the UK, print runs were healthy, and it sits in the middle of a run that plenty of people bought complete. It is findable in a way #101 increasingly is not.
Uncanny X-Men #134 and #135: the mistake
This is the bit worth reading twice, because it is where money gets spent on the wrong book.
Jean becomes Dark Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #134, cover dated June 1980. That is the transformation.
Uncanny X-Men #135, cover dated July 1980, is the famous one. It is the Dark Phoenix cover, it is the issue everyone pictures, and it is the one that gets listed constantly as the first appearance of Dark Phoenix.
I am not saying #135 is a bad book. It is a superb book and a deserved classic. I am saying that if you are buying specifically because you want the first, you want to know which is which, and plenty of listings out there do not.
Uncanny X-Men #137, September 1980: the death
Jean activates an ancient Kree weapon and it disintegrates her, after a goodbye to Cyclops that people still argue about. It is one of the few deaths in superhero comics that landed with real weight, partly because Marvel had not yet trained everyone to assume it would be undone.
The full Dark Phoenix Saga runs Uncanny X-Men #129 to #138, January to October 1980, by Claremont and John Byrne. If someone offers you a complete run of those ten issues in one go, that is a better buy than most single issue purchases at the same money, because the middle issues are cheap and the story is the reason anybody cares about any of them.
The honest bit about film bumps
I would be doing you a disservice if I finished this without saying the obvious thing.
Jean Grey has been in films before. Famke Janssen played her across the original X-Men trilogy. Sophie Turner played her in Apocalypse and then in Dark Phoenix, a film built specifically on the story I have just described. The comics moved on the back of those and then largely settled again.
What is different this time is not that there is a film. It is that Marvel Studios has put a mutant into their biggest franchise, in the highest grossing film of the year, as a setup rather than a payoff. That is a sustained plan rather than a one-off, and sustained plans are the only thing that has ever moved these books for longer than a season.
Even so, buy them because they are great comics. Uncanny X-Men #101 and the Dark Phoenix Saga are genuinely among the best superhero comics ever made, and that was true last year when nobody was paying attention to them.
If you think you have these
Late seventies and early eighties Marvel is the single most common thing I find in UK collections, because it is what people who were teenagers then were buying. Which means Uncanny X-Men in the #101 to #143 range turns up regularly, usually as part of a run, usually stored badly.
Two things before you do anything with them. Check whether they are pence copies, because UK distributed copies of Bronze Age Marvel are a category of their own. And do not press, clean, tape or trim anything, because every one of those makes a book worth less, not more, and I say that as someone who has watched people find out the hard way.
Send me photos if you want a straight answer on what you have got. It costs you nothing and I will tell you if it is ordinary, because most of it is, and that is worth knowing too.