To be fair, Rage was a completely original character (that is, not derivative of an existing Marvel character). This was a period where comic sales were booming, and Marvel was looking to cash in by creating entire families of characters around their tentpoles. That's where the push for these three (and the expansion of Midnight Sons, and Fantastic Force, and Force Works, etc.) came from. They wanted a family of titles around anything successful. Even the relatively new New Warriors spawned Nova, Night Thrasher, and Justice spinoffs. A good number of Spider-man (pardon…Spider-men, since we also had Ben Reilly then) family characters also had their own series or minis (Silver Sable, Venom, Solo, Nightwatch, etc) in this period. Not to mention the dozens of mutant titles. Marvel's problem was they wanted tons of titles, but there was a dearth of quality talent. I have a friend who pencilled some stories at the time, and one of the storylines he was working on was written by one of the assistant editors who had never had written for comics before, and basically wrote the same exact story for a couple of continuous issues of a title before he suggested to the editor that maybe they needed to tweak things so they weren't duplicating the previous issue.