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Curated playlist

Fictional characters with body or mind control abilities

  • Darth VaderThe actor inside Darth Vader's suit never knew his voice would be replaced. James Earl Jones voiced him instead.
  • Wanda Maximoff (Marvel Cinematic Universe)Wanda Maximoff, the character played by Elizabeth Olsen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, spent two days buried in the rubble of her family's apartment in Sokovia, a country in Eastern Europe. A missile had just killed her parents. Her…
  • PalpatinePalpatine's first name stayed off screen for decades. Fans learned it was Sheev only in the 2014 novel Tarkin.
  • UltronUltron first showed up in Marvel Comics in The Avengers #54, dated July 1968, and nobody reading it could have known his name. He appeared only under a borrowed title, the Crimson Cowl, in a brief and unnamed cameo. Within a single issue…
  • Apocalypse (character)En Sabah Nur is the birth name of Apocalypse, a supervillain from Marvel Comics, and Marvel says the name means "The First One." That translation is considered grammatically incorrect. Broken into parts, the name joins words for "the,"…
  • Doctor DoomDoctor Doom is a comic book villain who answers to no court outside his own country. He rules the fictional eastern European nation of Latveria, and his status as head of state has historically shielded him from prosecution for crimes…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Madelyne PryorMadelyne Pryor first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #168, cover-dated April 1983, and nobody planned for her to become a villain. Writer Chris Claremont once summed up her opening storyline with a single exchange. Scott Summers, the X-Men's…
  • Ra's al GhulRa's al Ghul, the DC Comics supervillain best known as Batman's immortal rival, once admitted that he could not keep track of his own age. In Azrael #6, from July 1995 and written by Dennis O'Neil, he tells the young hero Jean-Paul Valley:…
  • Swamp ThingSwamp Thing, the mound of living vegetation that guards nature in DC Comics, got his name because his creator never gave him one. Writer Len Wein later recalled: "I didn't have a title for it, so I kept referring to it as 'that swamp thing…
  • MakimaMakima, the red-haired leader in Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga Chainsaw Man, makes her entrance in the final pages of the very first chapter. She stands over a young man named Denji and makes him an offer of food and shelter. The price is…

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