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Curated playlist

Marvel Comics telepaths

  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Doctor OctopusDoctor Octopus, the Marvel Comics villain known as Doc Ock, began as a name before he was anything else. Stan Lee, who created him with the artist Steve Ditko, later described how the idea arrived. "For some reason, I thought of an…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Venom (character)Venom, the alien symbiote of Marvel Comics, began as a $220 purchase. In 1982, a Marvel reader from Norridge, Illinois, named Randy Schueller received a letter from Jim Shooter, the company's editor-in-chief. The letter said Marvel liked…
  • 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,"…
  • 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…
  • GalactusGalactus first appeared in Fantastic Four #48, cover dated March 1966, as a god-like figure who fed on the energy of living planets. His creators, writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, wanted to escape the standard villain. Lee…
  • 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…
  • Elektra (character)Elektra Natchios first appeared in Daredevil #168, a Marvel Comics issue dated January 1981, and her creator never planned for her to return. Frank Miller wrote that issue as essentially a filler story. He meant it to be her only…
  • Doctor StrangeDoctor Strange, the sorcerer of Marvel Comics, began life with a lukewarm review from the man who edited him. In a 1963 letter to Jerry Bails, Stan Lee described a five-page filler for Strange Tales and admitted that "The first story is…
  • 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…
  • Silver SurferThe Silver Surfer is an alien with gleaming metal skin who crosses the cosmos on a board that looks borrowed from a beach. His first editor never saw him coming. Stan Lee, who wrote and edited the comic that introduced him, remembered the…
  • 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…

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