Curated playlist

Marvel Comics mutants

Cyclops (Marvel Comics)In Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012, Cyclops killed his mentor, Professor X. The Phoenix Force had concentrated in him alone.
Jean GreyJean Grey is a Marvel Comics character who has died and returned many times. Her tie to the cosmic force that defines her keeps being rewritten. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created her, and she first appeared in The X-Men #1 in September 1963.…
Magneto (Marvel Comics)In 2014, IGN ranked Magneto first on its list of the top 100 comic book villains. Six years earlier, Stan Lee, the writer who co-created him, said in an interview that he never thought of Magneto as a villain at all. Magneto is a Marvel…
Wolverine (character)Wolverine, the Marvel Comics superhero, shares his everyday name with a mountain. Writer Chris Claremont took the name Logan from Canada's Mount Logan for an issue of X-Men in 1977. He liked the idea of the tallest mountain naming the…
Emma FrostEmma Frost made her first appearance in The Uncanny X-Men #129, published in January 1980, as an enemy of the X-Men. Decades of Marvel Comics stories later, she is one of that team's most central members and leaders. She is a mutant, one…
Professor XProfessor X, whose full name is Charles Francis Xavier, first appeared in The X-Men #1, dated September 1963. Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created him for Marvel Comics, and Kirby is also credited as co-writer. Lee said the…
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…
Cable (character)Cable, the grim time-traveling soldier of Marvel Comics, first reached readers as a rumor. At the end of The New Mutants #86, dated February 1990, a teaser promised him for the next issue. He appeared nowhere in that issue's story. Even…
Sabretooth (character)Sabretooth, the Marvel Comics villain whose real name is believed to be Victor Creed, makes a point of finding Wolverine on his birthday. Writer Chris Claremont described the ritual in his own words. On every one of his birthdays, he said,…
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,"…
Kitty PrydeKitty Pryde is a Marvel Comics mutant who can pass through solid walls, and she owes her name to a real person. In 1973, an art student at Canada's Alberta College of Art and Design met a classmate named Kitty Pryde. His name was John…
Polaris (Marvel Comics)Lorna Dane, the Marvel Comics mutant known as Polaris, first appeared in The X-Men #49 in October 1968. Readers then waited decades to learn who her father was. She controls magnetism, much as the X-Men's early enemy Magneto does, and fans…
X-23X-23 is the designation of Laura Kinney, a Marvel Comics superheroine who began life on a television screen rather than a comic page. Her creator, writer Craig Kyle, described her as "Pinocchio for Marvel Comics, she's a samurai sword…
Storm (Marvel Comics)Storm, the Marvel Comics hero Ororo Munroe, appears on 97 of the 182 covers of Chris Claremont's run on the X-Men. No other character was pictured on covers as often during those years. She also fills 4,155 panels across that stretch,…
X-MenThe X-Men comic was cancelled in 1970 after seven years of weak sales. A new team in 1975 turned it into a hit.
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…
Gambit (Marvel Comics)Remy LeBeau, known to readers as Gambit, is a Cajun thief from New Orleans who became one of Marvel Comics' X-Men. Writer Chris Claremont and artist Jim Lee created him. When he joined the team, few of his new colleagues trusted him, and…
Mystique (character)Mystique, the blue-skinned shapeshifter of Marvel Comics, has an earliest recorded appearance in her own stories that dates to the years around 1900. At that time she lived in a male guise as a consulting detective. She formed a romance…
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…
Rogue (Marvel Comics)Rogue, the Marvel Comics heroine best known as a member of the X-Men, cannot touch another person without taking something from them. One brush of skin lets her absorb a person's life force, abilities, memories and superpowers. The longer…
Nightcrawler (character)Nightcrawler, the indigo-furred teleporting hero of Marvel Comics, began as a sleepless sailor's idea during a typhoon. Artist Dave Cockrum was serving in the United States Navy, stationed at Guam, when the storm kept him awake. He later…
Beast (Marvel Comics)Beast, the Marvel Comics hero Dr. Henry Philip McCoy, has a greatest fear, and it is a ball of string. In one X-Men story, that fear became a rescue tool. A psychic assault stripped away his higher human consciousness and left only animal…
NamorNamor, also known as the Sub-Mariner, made his debut in a comic that almost nobody ever saw. It was called Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, a planned giveaway meant for theater owners. Only eight known copies survive from the batch made to…