Curated playlist

Fictional characters who can manipulate time

MagikMagik, born Illyana Nikolaievna Rasputina, appeared for the first time in the pages of Giant-Size X-Men #1 in May 1975. Writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum created her. For the next eight years, almost nobody noticed. She turned up now…
Sonic the Hedgehog (character)Sonic the Hedgehog, the blue hero of Sega's video games, was tested on strangers in New York City's Central Park before most of the world had heard of him. The designer Naoto Ohshima carried several of Sega's internal character sketches on…
Brainiac (character)Brainiac made his debut in Action Comics #242, cover-dated July 1958, as a bald, green-skinned scientist who shrank Metropolis and sealed it in a bottle. Writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino created him for DC Comics. Few readers that…
ThanosThanos first appeared on a comic book cover dated February 1973, in The Invincible Iron Man #55, and Marvel's heroes have not been rid of him since. He is a warlord from Titan, a moon of Saturn, born into two branches of a superhuman…
Doctor ManhattanDoctor Manhattan, the blue-skinned superhuman of the graphic novel Watchmen, wears a mark that nobody assigned to him. Military planners prepared a hat for his public unveiling, decorated with crossed ellipses meant to suggest an atom. Jon…
Shadow the HedgehogShadow the Hedgehog speaks his first line in Sonic Adventure 2, released in 2001 for the Dreamcast. The line is “Hmph, aren't you the fake one here?” It lands in a scene where Sonic confronts a black hedgehog who has been posing as him.…
Spectre (DC Comics character)The Spectre first appeared in More Fun Comics #52, dated February 1940, and his debut opens with a murder. A New York detective named Jim Corrigan is on his way to his own engagement party when thugs stuff him into a barrel, fill it with…
Rachel SummersRachel Summers is a Marvel Comics character whose surname was kept secret when she first appeared in The Uncanny X-Men #141, published in January 1981. Writer Chris Claremont and artist and co-plotter John Byrne created her. Readers only…
Shazam (DC Comics)Shazam, the comic book hero also called Captain Marvel, headlined an issue, Whiz Comics #2, that sold over 500,000 copies. The hero at its center is a boy who becomes a towering adult by speaking a single word. Yet this same character…
Scarlet WitchJack Kirby considered at least five names before the Scarlet Witch became the Scarlet Witch. Jinx, Witch Woman, The Sorceress, Evil Eye and Miss Witch are all listed on the back of a splash page in The X-Men issue 4. Writer Stan Lee and…
Phoenix ForceThe Phoenix Force, a cosmic entity from Marvel Comics, once wiped out five billion inhabitants of a single planet. Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum created it, and it first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #101 in October 1976. Yet the saga that…
Mephisto (Marvel Comics)Mephisto first appeared in Silver Surfer #3, cover dated December 1968. Writer Stan Lee and penciler John Buscema created him for Marvel Comics. They modeled him on Mephistopheles, the demon of the Faust legend, who is sometimes called…
Quicksilver (Marvel Comics)Quicksilver, the Marvel Comics speedster whose real name is Pietro Django Maximoff, first appeared in The X-Men #4, dated March 1964. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him. He can move and think at extreme speeds, and that second half of the…
ZatannaZatanna Zatara first stepped onto a comic book page in Hawkman #4, dated November 1964. Writer Gardner Fox and artist Murphy Anderson created her for DC Comics. Today she is counted among the publisher's best-regarded supernatural heroes,…
Legion (Marvel Comics)David Charles Haller, the Marvel Comics character known as Legion, may carry more than a thousand personalities in a single mind. Nobody knows the exact number, because his mind can create a new one whenever something shakes him, from…
Sentry (Robert Reynolds)Robert Reynolds, a middle-aged man better known to Marvel Comics readers as the Sentry, carries the power of one million exploding suns, and almost nobody on Earth remembers him. Reynolds knows his enemy, the Void, is coming back. He also…
Lucifer (DC Comics)Lucifer Morningstar ruled Hell for more than ten billion years, and the sentence that put him there lasted far longer than his crime. According to the comics, he rebelled against Creation for just three seconds. This version of the Devil…