Rogue is a fictional character appearing in most of the Marvel Comics X-Men related titles. She was created by author Chris Claremont and artist Michael Golden, and debuted in Avengers Annual #10 (November 1981) as a villain. An earlier story intended for Ms. Marvel #25 (June 1979) went unpublished until 1992. Rogue was born as a mutant. More so than most, Rogue considers her powers a curse: she involuntarily absorbs and sometimes also removes the memories, physical strength, and (in the case of mutants) the special and unique abilities of anyone she touches. For most of her life, this potentially fatal ability prevented her from making any physical contact with others, including her on-off romantic love interest, Gambit, but after many years Rogue finally gained full control over her mutant ability.
Hailing from Caldecott, Mississippi (a fictional county), Rogue is the X-Men's self-described southern belle. A runaway, she was adopted by Mystique of theBrotherhood of Evil Mutants and grew up as a villain. After Rogue permanently absorbed Ms. Marvel's psyche and Kree powers, she reformed and turned to the X-Men, fearing for her sanity. Writer Chris Claremont played a significant role in the character's subsequent development. Rogue is unusual among the X-Men as her real name and her early history were not revealed until more than twenty years after her introduction. Until the back story provided by Robert Rodi in the ongoing Rogue series began in September 2004, Rogue's background was only hinted at. Her name was revealed as Anna Marie, although her surname is still unknown. She has sometimes been called Raven which is really the first name of her foster mother Mystique.
Rogue has been one of the most popular and consistent members of the X-Men since the 1980s. She was #5 on IGN's Top 25 X-Men list for 2006, #4 on their Top Ten X-Babes list for 2006, #3 on Marvel's list of Top 10 Toughest Females for 2009 and was given title of #1 X-Man on CBR's Top 50 X-Men of All Time for 2008. She was ranked tenth in Comics Buyer's Guide's "100 Sexiest Women in Comics" list. Rogue has been featured in most of the X-Men animated series and various video games. In the X-Men film series, she is portrayed by Oscar-winning actress Anna Paquin. Her visual cue is often the white streak that runs through her hair.
POWERS AND ABILITIES
Due to the nature of her unique mutant powers, Rogue has had several different abilities over the years.
Mutant powers
Rogue possesses the mutant ability to absorb the psyche and abilities of another human being (or members of some sapient alien races) through skin contact. Rogue can absorb the memories, knowledge, talents, personality, and physical abilities (whether superhuman or not) of the person she touches, as well as occasionally duplicating in herself physical characteristics of her victim. The victim's abilities and memories are absorbed for a one to 60 ratio of time of contact. The victim loses those abilities and memories for exactly the amount of time that Rogue possesses them. This absorption usually leaves the victim weakened, and sometimes renders them unconscious. Their powers may also be temporarily weakened or removed. Rogue's power is constantly active, rendering her incapable of touching others without the absorption process taking place. However, evidence suggests that Rogue's inability to control her powers is psychological in nature. During the times when the Ms. Marvel personality would overtake her psyche, she was able to touch people freely. This fact has since been corroborated by the discovery that Rogue's absorption power never developed beyond the stage of its original manifestation. Xavier later rectified this by telepathically removing the psychological barriers stunting it.
The transfer of abilities is usually temporary, lasting for a period of time relative to how long contact is maintained, but if Rogue holds on to her victim for too long, the transfer may become permanent, leaving the victim nearly dead, as was the case with Ms. Marvel. However, it must also be noted that Ms. Marvel fought the transfer process, which Rogue attested to sometime after the incident occurred. Most often this process happens instantly when Rogue touches someone, but certain extraordinarily powerful beings have proven resistant to Rogue's power, and she may only share part of their memories and power, as was the case when Rogue once attempted to absorb power from the alien Magus. However, in the process of doing so she gained an immunity to the Technarch transmode virus.
As Rogue is absorbing the total psyche of a person, there is a risk of a personality overwhelming her and taking control of her body. It has also been shown that even though the memories she has absorbed eventually fade when a psyche returns to its body, remnants, or 'echoes', of the personalities of victims whose memories she has absorbed remain buried in her subconscious indefinitely, and while there is little to no risk of those personalities overwhelming her like the Ms. Marvel personality could, they can occasionally make their presences known.
Fully developed mutant abilities
Following the conclusion of Messiah Complex, Rogue's slate was wiped clean. The mutant baby's touch mysteriously erased all of the previous memories and abilities Rogue had absorbed, including those of the Hecatomb. It also cured her of the Strain 88 virus. Rogue's touch now simply steals the memories and abilities of individuals she comes in direct skin-to-skin contact with. The longer the contact, the longer Rogue retains the absorbed information, powers, and also the abilities of the individuals she absorbs. She can now control her powers at her will, making her touch lethal—or non-lethal—at will.
Following the events of X-Men: Legacy, Rogue appears to be able to activate her powers at will, as opposed to them being constantly active, as demonstrated when she kisses Gambit without incident. Her inability to control her powers stemmed from mental blocks within her mind which formed each time she used her abilities, crippling the development of her powers from their nascent stage. When Professor Xavier removes the blocks, her powers are allowed to develop normally. With this new control, Rogue demonstrates the ability to absorb and collectively utilize all the powers of the New X-Men, in order to defeat a rogue Predator X, with no apparent harm to either them or herself. Her power also affects aliens, such as when she was transferred to a planet in other dimension by Magik, and one of the aliens involuntarily touches her and she gains the ability to communicate in their language, along with their knowledge.
She later uses more lethal version of her powers against the Avengers during her fight with them, even making Falcon and She-Hulk immediately unconscious without any negative feedback on her physical self (besides She-Hulk's green skin) but she can not control the minds of the ones she absorbs. She absorbs their powers and renders them unconscious for a long time, even She-Hulk who is extremely durable.
The new twist in Rogue's powers consists of prompting her victims of her skin-to-skin contact, for a consent on the process. Rogue's victim can either resist the absorption and suffer, like originally with Rogue's powers, or instead submit to the absorption, and so the process instead becomes entirely fluent without consequences. Rogue has used this twist extensively in the Legacy series; just two examples of it are when aiding the victims of a subway collapse absorbing all rescuers' abilities in X-Men Legacy 274, and also when quenching a riot in a prison of mutants absorbing the existence of some mutant-volunteers in X-Men Legacy 275.
Ms. Marvel powers
As a young woman, Rogue permanently absorbed the superhuman powers and the psyche of the original Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers). This provided her with superhuman strength, stamina, durability, reflexes, speed and a 7th sense. She was able to repel bullets and fly at sub-sonic speeds, much like Ms. Marvel could. In addition, she possessed an amalgamated mutant human/Kree physiology that rendered her resistant to most toxins and poisons, with the added effect of making her virtually invulnerable.
Rogue also gained a precognitive "seventh sense" that enables her to predict an enemy's move subconsciously during battle. She used this ability to predict where Nightcrawler would teleport and from which direction Magus of the Technarchy would attack. This ability was not always reliable, however, and would randomly and sporadically activate.
When she possessed Carol Danvers' psyche, her "double" consciousness made her highly resistant to telepathic probes, even those of Charles Xavier, which was said to have been a byproduct of two minds existing in one body and/or Carol Danvers' Kree physiology. Rogue could also draw upon the combat and espionage training of Carol Danvers by allowing her alternate personality, a duplicate of Danvers', to dominate her conscious mind.
When Rogue later lost all of her superhuman abilities for a time,her Ms. Marvel powers vanished for quite some time and did not return until later when Rogue absorbed an injured Cadre K girl named Z'Cann.
X-Treme abilities
During the Maximum Security miniseries, Rogue absorbed an injured Cadre K girl named Z'Cann. The girl held on longer than necessary, using her mind control to boost the process and because of this (perhaps because she had absorbed a fluid Skrull physiology) Rogue mutated further, gaining the ability to 'recall' the powers of anyone she had ever absorbed before, though she could not control when or which of these powers surfaced. For a short time Rogue also had a Skrull appearance, scanned as though she had Skrull DNA, and had their shapeshifting powers, but these soon faded and she returned to her normal appearance.
Through meditation, Rogue learned how to suppress the random manifestations of most of these abilities, but found herself with Wolverine's claws and healing factor, and Cyclops' optic blasts for a time (she had to wear ruby quartz glasses), while also still retaining her mutant and Ms. Marvel powers.
Later, Sage used her own mutant abilities to 'jump-start' Rogue's power, giving her the control to manifest any ability she had ever absorbed, whenever she wished to. It is generally accepted that after regaining her abilities after X-Treme X-Men, she has lost this ability.
Though Z'Cann was a telepath, Rogue never displayed this power (though she did manifest telepathy, it was with the Phoenix energy form, so it was most likely an echo of Jean Grey's powers).
Powerless
For a time Rogue lost all of her powers, including her original mutant ones, after she was fatally injured in a fight with the mysterious warrior Vargas. During this period, she displayed exceptional fighting skills and agility, though it was said these were not superhuman in nature.
She also still possessed a 'fluid genome' that enabled Sage to use her as a conduit through which to channel the mutant powers of the X-Treme X-Men team in a fight against Bogan.
Sunfire powers
In her short-lived ongoing series (2004–2005), Rogue absorbed a large portion of the mutant Sunfire's solar-absorption based powers. In addition to her own natural mutant abilities Rogue could then project intense heat and flame, envelop her body in a fiery aura, fly by focusing her power downwards in a tight stream to propel her like a rocket, focus her power inward to increase her strength (though not at her Ms. Marvel levels), exercise immunity to heat and radiation, and see the infra-red spectrum.
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