The Secret History Of The ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Mystery Character

It’s been a week since Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit theaters, and now, we’re taking a look at the massive mystery character who may change the Marvel Cinematic Universe forever.

Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day below. Read at your own peril!

After months (years?) of speculation, the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day has finally confirmed the identity of the character played by Sadie Sink. To the surprise of few, she is indeed playing the MCU’s Jean Grey (or at least, a version of her; who knows what’s going to happen in the upcoming multiversal Avengers: Doomsday/Secret Wars saga). The character, of course, is both the First Lady of the X-Men and one of the First Ladies of Marvel, period; one of the three women (alongside Wasp in the Avengers and Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four) featured regularly in Marvel’s early 1960s teams. With that history — plus her role as the central figure of one of the X-Men’s best and most defining stories, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” — and as a character frequently included in adaptations of X-Men stories outside comics (including both the original X-Men Animated Series and X-Men ’97, and across two different eras of Fox X-Men movies), it’s not terribly surprising to see Jean as the first reveal of the MCU’s new roster of X-Men.

More surprising, at least to an X-Men nerd like me, was the inclusion of Jean’s sister Sara in Brand New Day. While Sara Grey is a character from a comics, her history there is relatively limited — she is ultimately a footnote in Jean’s long and complex narrative history — so making her inclusion in the film a fun Easter egg. Although Sara has done little in the comics, her journey has some interesting twists and turns — including at least one “what if?” that could have changed the course of X-Men history as we know it, to the point where kicking off a new big budget, live-action cast of X-Men with Jean Grey would seem absurd.

Sara debuted (as Sara Grey-Bailey, married to a man named Paul Bailey) in X-Men #136, the penultimate chapter of the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” She is staying at the Grey family home with her parents when Jean returns to Earth after devouring the D’Bari sun and indirectly destroying their planet. Sara is there, like her parents, to basically freak out about Jean’s heightened cosmic powers and near-insanity. She also observes as the X-Men arrive to, seemingly, defeat Dark Phoenix before being whisked away by the Shi’ar for the conclusion of the story. She returns in issue #138 (alongside her husband, making his debut) for Jean’s funeral, but doesn’t do much in the Cyclops-centric issue that also serves as a recap of X-Men history up to that point.

Sara’s next appearance would be her most significant, in Bizarre Adventures #27, a magazine-sized black & white comic series which featured multiple stories per issue and rotating creative teams. Issue #27 is an X-Men-centric one, featuring tales of Nightcrawler, Iceman and a Jean Grey story initially set after her apparent death at the end of “Dark Phoenix Saga.” Written by X-Men scribe Chris Claremont (with art by John Buscema) it opens with Sara visiting her sister’s grave, then thinking back to an adventure she shared with Jean about a year prior, when the sisters were kidnapped by Atlantean warlord Attuma, who was hoping to breed with mutants in order to create a hybrid race that would help him conquer Earth.

That story is mostly notable for the the pieces of Jean’s backstory it introduces (like the sequence of a young Jean’s powers manifesting upon the death of her best friend Annie Richardson, causing her to be inside Annie’s mind while she dies, and the establishment of the fact that Jean’s telepathy was part of her natural power set and not a power she was “given” by Professor X years after joining the X-Men, as was the case at the time). It also represents Sara’s most page time until 2025 (though she has to a lot of it warding off an underwater sex creep, which is not great).

After Bizarre Adventures #27, Sara fades into the background even more. She is seen speaking out on behalf of mutants alongside her husband in X-Factor #12, but when the resurrected Jean and Cyclops go to their house, fearing they’ll be targeted by anti-mutant forces, they find the couple missing, shortly before their house blows up. Over time, it will be revealed that they were kidnapped by the anti-mutant organization the Right, which would play a role in the creation of the techno-organic Phalanx. In 1994’s X-Men (vol. 2) #36, it is confirmed that Sara died, and her body was absorbed by the Phalanx (no word is given regarding the non-entity that is Sara’s husband Paul). Sara would pop up a couple times more after that, in stories set in the past, but would remain largely unused until Stephanie Phillips‘ “From the Ashes” Phoenix series. Sara Grey-Bailey returns in Phoenix #12 for a story that ends with her setup as “Beacon,” a cosmic being intended to serve as the conscience of the gods. She has yet to appear in any capacity since.

But while Sara’s published history is fairly light and relatively insignificant, that almost wasn’t the case. In 1985, various players at Marvel, including creators Bob Layton and Jackson Guice, along with Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, hit on the idea of launching a third X-Men title (alongside Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants) to reunite the remaining original X-Men (at the time, Cyclops was retired, making occasional appearances in X-Men, while Beast, Angel and Iceman were part of the New Defenders). Various ideas were put forth as to who the fifth member of the team should be, since Jean was — following “Dark Phoenix Saga” — dead, when John Byrne stepped forward with an idea he’d gotten from then-fan and future comic book writer Kurt Busiek about how to bring back Jean in order to truly reunite the original X-Men.

Claremont hated the idea of bringing back Jean Grey (especially since he and Byrne had been forced to revise their original ending to the “Dark Phoenix Saga” to kill her off on Shooter’s orders in the first place) and he countered bringing back Jean for X-Factor with the idea of using Sara as the fifth member of the team. Having teased in Bizarre Adventures #27 that Sara might be a mutant herself, his pitch involved her having the ability to activate the latent powers in other mutants (an idea Phillips would later revisit when she resurrected the character in Phoenix), and would be someone who, “hated the idea of being a mutant, who hated the idea of being an X-Man, yet accepted the responsibility. More importantly, she was uninvolved with any of the four guys. There was no, ‘I am the center of Scott’s life,’ which made her totally accessible emotionally to Bobby and Warren and Hank, and it allowed Scott to continue, unvarnished, with his relationship with Madelyne [Pryor, his wife at the time].”

Ultimately, Claremont’s pitch received a pass. According to him, Shooter liked the idea, and told him he could use the character anywhere else, but that Shooter was by then too sold on the “commercial reasons” to bring back Jean for X-Factor. But had it been accepted, the entire history of the X-Men from 1985 forward would have unfolded in a very different way. It’s possible — probably even likely — that Jean would have been resurrected at some later date. But when and where she returned would have been vastly different. There’s a very real chance that, if her initial death had lasted longer than four years, the character would exist today as more of a footnote to X-Men history than a near-constant driver of it; a character unlikely to be chosen as the X-Men’s entry point into the MCU as the secret antagonist of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a reality where we’re all talking about Sink’s turn as Sara Grey right now.