So,... why in the hell would I identify with a female comic book character while growing up???

I went to middle school and high school in the early and mid 1980's graduating in 1988 at the tender age of 17. Through an older brother's friend I was introduced to the Marvel Super-Hero Role-Playing game which eventually led me into reading comics. I had had some old comics from my even younger days but never collected anything. I can remember buying two comics to start of with - Green Lantern and West Coast Avengers limited series.
I went with Green lantern because he was awesome in the old Super Friends Saturday morning cartoons. It was actually titled something else but it was the cartoon where the good guys fought The Legion of Doom every week. When I read through the comic John Stewart had just recently replaced Hal Jordan as Green Lantern. I dropped Green Lantern pretty fast because it wasn't the guy I knew and just had no interest in this new guy.
I bought West Coast Avengers, I think it was issue 3 of a 4 issue limited series, because it had Iron Man. I knew Iron Man from previous comics. I'm blanking at the moment if Iron Man was Tony Stark or Jim Rhodes at the time of the comic. I didn't know at the time but I ended up favoring the Marvel Comics universe over DC which is Batman & Superman. The next time I was able to buy some comics I ended up with Marvel comics.
Back in the day I bought comics from a spinner rack at the local mall from Walden's book, a now defunct bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble. I can remember seeing this cover of a woman in flames and another woman in a swimsuit and thigh high boots opposing a third woman in corset and boots. I was intrigued and kinda turned on. Hey, I was around 14, maybe, possibly younger. I think I was a freshman in high school or 8th grade. The book was Uncanny X-Men back when there was just one X-Men book a month. The swimsuit/thigh high boots girl was Rachel Summers, daughter of Jean Grey and Scott Summers, Phoenix and Cyclops of the X-Men. Little did I know by that one glance at that cover that Rachel would become my all-time favorite comic book character.

So I bought that X-Men comic and because the rack would often have an issue or two of the previous months I bought those as well. I was well on my way to becoming an X-Men junkie. And boy, did I end up loving the X-Men. They were totally awesome.  :)

So here was this character, Rachel Summers, later Rachel Grey but I pretty much dislike what her creator later did to the character...

Anyways, Rachel was pretty cool. She was surrounded by the likes of Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler. But Rachel's voice resonated with me. She was from an alternate future - it is comic books after all - and her parents didn't know who she was because they weren't married and had no children in this universe. She was new to the X-Men and an outsider even though they loved her in her own universe where they were all aunts and uncles to her. In this new universe Rachel was persecuted and mis-trusted as she tried to make the world a better place and prevent the disaster that destroyed her own world.

I really bought into that. My family was always loving but in my own little head and being the youngest of 5 my views didn't carry much weight. I was always the tag along as well. I was usually skinny and not the best at sports so I was picker on at school by dickheads and those that felt they could overpower me. But I always wanted to add to the world more than I took away from it.

So that's how I ended up relating, at least in my own skewered view, to Rachel's character and she became my favorite. It also helped that she ended up being a hothead ready to use her formidable powers to punish and even kill when necessary. That appealed to me because I couldn't do that in my own world.

Another event was that she got the red 'Hound' costume. Fortunately, the man who ended up becoming my all-time favorite artist, Alan Davis, handed the art chores. Rachel grew from a skinny red-head into a great looking red head wearing spikes and stilettos. The costume, when drawn, either looks rather stupid, or really freaking cool. Davis made it awesome, others, not so much.

Later on, Chris Claremont, X-Men writer for over a decade was tossed off the books only to later return. He ended up using Rachel again after a long hiatus for the character. To my chagrin he dumped almost every positive aspect of the character and made her the rookie of the team and often fairly lame including turning her into a human dinosaur. Ugh. This is when Rachel dumped the Summers last name and adopted Grey. Boo, hiss. And since all this disaster the character has been a minor character in the X-Men lore since. At least she's gotten a bit better more recently.

So Rachel, in her heyday, will always remain my favorite character. She was the character that was mistrusted, misunderstood, was a bit of an outsider even in her own family, and persecuted even when trying to make the world a better and safer place. I related to that at an early age and it's stuck with me ever since.