Apocalypse (character)

• 1. The First One

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  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," "morning" and "light," which gives something closer to "The First/Morning Light."

  Apocalypse is one of the world's first mutants. He is counted among the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe, and he is the father of the original Horsemen of Apocalypse. Writer Louise Simonson and artist Jackson Guice created him. He first appeared without a name in a Marvel graphic novel in July 1985, then returned in X-Factor in June 1986. He went on to menace the original X-Factor team, then the X-Men and their spin-off teams. Oscar Isaac later played him on screen in X-Men: Apocalypse.

  Where did he come from, and what does a being who calls himself the father of mutantkind actually want? How does a villain endure for thousands of years, and through so many deaths, without losing his menace? The answers begin with a comic page that was first meant to show someone else.

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• 2. Built In A Hurry

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  Bob Layton spent the first five issues of X-Factor dropping hints about a villain working behind the scenes. That figure led the Alliance of Evil, which issue #4 mentioned in May 1986. Layton planned to unmask him on the last page of issue #5 as the Owl, a Daredevil villain. Then Layton left the book after writing that issue, and Louise Simonson took over.

  Editor Bob Harras said the character grew out of storytelling needs. He wanted "a Magneto-level villain" who would raise the stakes and give the X-Factor team a reason to exist.

  In a 2011 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Simonson described the situation she inherited. The creation of X-Factor had pulled the original five X-Men out of Chris Claremont's The Uncanny X-Men. She felt the new series needed an archenemy, which she called "a big, bad villain."

  The look came together on the page itself. Jackson Guice redrew the final page of issue #5, patching a shadowy Apocalypse in where the Owl had been. Harras said he knew he had his character once he saw a sketch by Walter Simonson and heard Louise's take. Guice remembered it differently. He recalled building the look right on the pencil page, adding costume details that hinted at the true design. He did not think a character sketch even existed yet. The silhouette in issue #5 does not match the full figure in issue #6, which suggests Guice lacked the sketch when he drew the earlier page.

  Walter Simonson himself turns down the credit. "I did not co-create Apocalypse. However, I wish I had." He said Guice was responsible for the design and that he only modified it later. He was the first artist to use the character extensively, and in his own words he "juiced up his physique" a bit.

  Though Apocalypse arrived in 1986, later writers placed him in earlier stories. The unnamed benefactor of the Living Monolith in Marvel Graphic Novel #17 was later identified as Apocalypse in disguise. Classic X-Men #25 revealed that he had once met the terrorist Moses Magnum and granted him superhuman power.

  Robert Weinberg, writing Cable, planned to reveal Apocalypse as the third Summers brother, a mysterious sibling to the mutants Cyclops and Havok. Weinberg left before he could deliver it. The third brother was revealed instead to be Gabriel Summers, also known as Vulcan.

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• 3. Survival Of The Fittest

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  Louise Simonson summed up her creation in a few lines. Apocalypse is the first mutant, a brilliant shape-shifter who is virtually immortal and sees himself as the father of mutantkind. In his early years, which she covered in the X-Factor Forever miniseries, he met the Celestials. He realized that humanity might one day be judged unworthy and destroyed.

  So he adopted Darwinian principles. He kills off the weak and forces the survivors to grow stronger, hoping to push humanity to become better and more powerful. He considers himself the Apocalypse of modern man and the father of what comes next, which he calls Mutantkind.

  Simonson drew a sharp line between him and Magneto. Magneto sees mutants as the next step of evolution and strives to protect every one of them. Apocalypse believes in absolute survival of the fittest. If the Hulk were stronger than the X-Men's Colossus, Simonson said, Apocalypse would simply say, "Bye, bye, comrade."

  Bob Harras admired how readable that agenda was. The name alone told readers that this character meant trouble. Humans fear that mutants are the next step, Harras argued, and now mutants had something to fear too: a character who would judge them on their genetic worthiness. He did not care whether you were a mutant. If you were weak, you would be destroyed. In Apocalypse's own mind he was not evil, because he believed he was ensuring evolution. Harras added that the Alliance of Evil was dropped soon after the character arrived.

  The philosophy comes with the equipment to enforce it. Merged with Celestial technology, Apocalypse has total control over the atoms of his body. He can turn his limbs into weapons, wings or jets, regenerate from fatal injuries, and adapt to nearly any disease or hostile environment. He can project and absorb energy, and he commands telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, forcefield generation and technopathy.

  He is also a scientific genius, with knowledge of physics, engineering, genetics and biology that outstrips conventional science. He is a skilled demagogue and a master strategist as well. His blood can heal other mutants but is fatal to humans. A large dose of it once regenerated the body of his descendant Chamber and transformed him to resemble Apocalypse.

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• 4. Five Thousand Years

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  In Akkaba, a settlement in ancient Egypt, a child was born with the mutant X-gene. His grey skin and blue lips led his people to abandon him as an infant. Baal of the Sandstormers rescued him, seeing his potential power and will to survive, and named him En Sabah Nur. The story Rise of Apocalypse says he was born 5,000 years ago and is possibly the first mutant.

  The Sandstormers lived by the credo of survival of the fittest. Only those strong enough to endure hardship and direct conflict were worthy of life. The Apocalypse Wars storyline adds that the young En Sabah Nur was generous and selfless, to Baal's chagrin. When a time-displaced Evan Sabahnur and Beast tried to save the boy, he allowed himself to be captured so they could escape.

  Then the time-traveller Kang the Conqueror arrived in Egypt as Pharaoh Rama-Tut. Knowing what En Sabah Nur was fated to become, Rama-Tut sent his General Ozymandias and an army to destroy the Sandstormers. Injured, En Sabah Nur and Baal took refuge in a cave. Before Baal died, he revealed advanced alien technology hidden there by the Celestials.

  Vowing revenge, En Sabah Nur entered the Pharaoh's city disguised as a slave. He drew the romantic attention of Ozymandias's sister, Nephri. When she saw his true appearance, she rejected him and ran to her brother for protection. His heartbreak and rage fully unleashed his mutant abilities. He renamed himself Apocalypse, and Rama-Tut fled. Using Celestial technology, he turned Ozymandias into a blind clairvoyant made of living stone, enslaved to his will. The series S.H.I.E.L.D. adds that he also joined the Brotherhood of the Shield against a Brood invasion, alongside Imhotep and a man who was either the moon god Khonshu or his first Moon Knight champion.

  As the millennia passed, Apocalypse travelled the Earth and convinced civilizations that he was a deity, inspiring different myths. He manipulated them into fighting wars, which he justified as encouraging "growth, judgment, and destruction." His progeny became Clan Akkaba. He met the near-immortal Eternals, mainly Ikaris and Sersi, who called him their "Ancient Nemesis." Using Celestial technology, he repeatedly entered suspended animation and left Akkaba and Ozymandias to act in his place.

  In AD 1013 he tried to destroy the Asgardian Thor, who he knew would trouble him in the future, but Odin foiled the plan. In the 12th century he awakened latent powers in a crusader named Bennet du Paris, who became Exodus. In 1459 he defeated Vlad Tepes in Romania, the man who would later become Dracula.

  In 1859 he met the British scientist Nathaniel Essex and transformed him into Mister Sinister. He pressed Sinister and the Hellfire Club into serving his plans for global conquest. Sinister judged those plans madness and betrayed him, driving Apocalypse back into hibernation. In 1897 Dracula attacked Clan Akkaba in revenge, and the clan revived their master. Apocalypse beat the vampire again, this time with help from Abraham Van Helsing. He then slept once more, expecting to stay under for possibly two centuries, by which time mutants should be more common.

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• 5. Horsemen And Heirs

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  Cable, a time-traveling mutant, arrived in the present and woke Apocalypse nearly a century earlier than planned. Apocalypse decided Earth was ready for further testing. He gave superhuman powers to Moses Magnum, who tested the X-Men and the Avengers. He then employed the Alliance of Evil to capture Michael Nowlan, a mutant who can boost other mutants' power. That plan brought him into direct conflict with the first X-Factor team, made up of the original X-Men.

  He recruited mutants as a personal guard called the Four Horsemen. One was Warren Worthington III, the hero Angel, whom Apocalypse corrupted into a cyborg called Death. Warren regained his identity and helped defeat his master, taking the new name Archangel. Apocalypse escaped with another recruit, Caliban, and X-Factor took his Celestial spaceship as a base.

  The next scheme targeted a baby. Apocalypse learned that Sinister meant to create an adversary strong enough to destroy him: Nathan Summers, son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor. Apocalypse also realized Nathan's energy was what had awakened him. He sent his group, the Riders of the Storm, to abduct the child. Apocalypse was severely defeated, but Nathan was infected with a techno-organic virus and sent to the future with a woman named Askani to be cured.

  In that future, Apocalypse had conquered Earth and ruled until the 39th century. His body had grown feeble. He learned of the young Nathan but managed to kidnap only a clone Askani had created. He planned to move his consciousness into the clone's stronger body, but the real Nathan killed him in combat. Nathan grew up to be the warrior Cable. His clone grew up to be the mutant terrorist Stryfe. Cable then travelled to the past to prevent Apocalypse's domination.

  Back in the present, the Riders, now calling themselves the Dark Riders, woke Apocalypse early. They told him his Horsemen had kidnapped Cyclops and Jean Grey on his supposed orders. In fact Mister Sinister had been posing as Apocalypse. Stryfe, who had come to the past for revenge, nearly killed him. After a battle on the Moon with his former servants, who had joined Stryfe, Apocalypse was left for dead by Archangel.

  Genesis, the adopted son of Cable, became the Dark Riders' new leader. He had travelled to the present to ensure Apocalypse's rise and to take revenge on his father. He planned to resurrect Apocalypse by sacrificing the people of villages near Akkaba. He also held Wolverine captive, hoping to restore his lost adamantium skeleton and make him a Horseman as a gift. Wolverine broke free and killed Genesis and nearly all of the Dark Riders. Genesis had built a sarcophagus with Apocalypse's likeness, and it sat empty, because Apocalypse had already revived.

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• 6. Strange Alliances

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  During the Evolutionary War, the High Evolutionary planned to rid Earth of those he felt were preventing evolution. Apocalypse believed this disrupted the natural order and his own plans, so he battled the High Evolutionary himself. It was an early sign that his rivalries were not always drawn along simple lines.

  When the psionic entity Onslaught threatened Earth, Apocalypse woke after a long healing slumber with Ozymandias at his side. Watching the conflict with Uatu, he took a suggestion to ally with the one who hated him most, Cable. Cable would carry him to the astral plane, where Apocalypse removed the captive Franklin Richards and badly weakened Onslaught. The Invisible Woman, who had suspected he wanted to kill her son, interrupted the attempt, and Onslaught escaped.

  After that saga, the Hulk and his alter ego Bruce Banner were split into two beings, and the Hulk drew on energy from Franklin Richards' pocket universe. Apocalypse recruited him as the Horseman War, hoping to use that nexus-energy against the Celestials. To test him, he set War against the New World Order, a shadow cabinet bent on conquering the planet. The Juggernaut and the Absorbing Man failed to stop War. The Hulk came to his senses after injuring his friend Rick Jones. Even so, Apocalypse called it a victory, because it tested newly understood Celestial technology. He then triggered the self-destruct on the sword of War, which the New World Order had obtained, and destroyed their headquarters.

  The Hellfire Club later woke the Harbinger, a man Apocalypse had left to incubate for 100 years in the 19th century. Apocalypse freed Caliban and Ozymandias to fend for themselves. He then activated a bomb inside the Harbinger meant to destroy all of New York, but Cable prevented it.

  To provoke an all-out war between humans and the subterranean Deviants, Apocalypse set off nuclear warheads at Lemuria, which mutated the Deviants further. He attacked San Francisco with a mentally controlled Deviant named Karkas, now a gigantic monster. His centuries-old foe Ikaris, now a Prime Eternal, confronted him. Apocalypse defeated Ikaris, but the Eternal still destroyed his ship.

  The largest trap was one he built for others. Supposedly lost diaries of the mutant seer Destiny told of twelve beings who could defeat Apocalypse for good, and his Horsemen abducted the mutants named in the prophecy. The legend was a ruse. He meant to use the Twelve to transform himself into a deity-like entity beyond the Celestials. His physical form had been burned out by the energies he commanded, so he wore bio-armor and planned to move into Nate Grey's body. Cyclops pushed Nate aside and merged with Apocalypse instead. Jean Grey later tore Apocalypse's essence out of her husband, and Cable apparently destroyed that astral form.

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• 7. Death And Return

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  Apocalypse was the principal adversary in X-Factor, which ran from 1986 to 1991, until he was apparently killed at the climax of issue #68 in July 1991. Since then he has died and been resurrected several times, thanks to his power and advanced alien technology. Cable #2, in June 1993, revealed the name En Sabah Nur. X-Force #37, in August 1994, revealed his birthplace in Egypt and the origin of his technology.

  The character gained greater popularity in 1995 with the storyline "Age of Apocalypse." In that alternate timeline, Professor X is inadvertently killed by Legion, so Apocalypse attacks ten years earlier than expected and takes over Earth. Other versions followed. In "House of M," he rules North Africa until Black Bolt kills him. In the Ultimate Marvel universe, Mister Sinister is transformed into Apocalypse. In "Messiah War," Stryfe and Bishop weaken him, and Archangel rejuvenates him. Critics have noticed the appeal. In 2017, WhatCulture ranked Apocalypse first in its list of the 10 most evil X-Men villains. In 2018, CBR.com ranked him first among the strongest characters of the Age of Apocalypse world, and second among the most powerful mutants of the 1980s.

  After the 2005 "Decimation" storyline stripped most mutants of their powers, Apocalypse was revealed to be alive. The techno-organic virus he had infected Cable with had let his spirit reconstitute itself. A single drop of his blood in a vat of organs and blood rewrote the material into a new body, and he woke in a tomb in Akkaba. Only a few hundred mutants remained out of the millions he had known.

  He returned in a Sphinx-shaped ship with a new cadre of Horsemen and confronted the X-Men on the front lawn of the X-Mansion. The Horseman Famine caused intense hunger and weakness. Apocalypse offered an elixir of his own blood to any mutant who joined him. At the United Nations he demanded that humanity destroy ninety percent of its own population, or he would unleash a meta-plague on all humanity. His Horsemen were lost, Ozymandias betrayed him, and the X-Men and Avengers forced him to retreat. It emerged that the Celestials had lent him their technology and required greater suffering as payment. When he tried to embrace death, he was instantly resurrected and heard a voice say, "We cannot let you die. Not yet."

  In the 2010s Clan Akkaba brought him back as a child, to be indoctrinated. X-Force wanted him dead, but Psylocke chose to protect the boy, believing he could be trained for good. Fantomex fatally shot the child. In a 2011 storyline, a young boy labeled En Sabah Nur, aged 847 days, was found incubating in a Weapon project facility called the World. In the 2012 "Dark Angel Saga," Apocalypse was revealed to have fathered a son with Autumn Rolfson, who hid it from him. Fantomex raised a clone of Apocalypse in an artificial world, named Genesis, as a boy taught to use his abilities for good.

  The boy Evan Sabahnur appeared in Uncanny X-Force #1, a reincarnated child with no memory of his past, and the adult Apocalypse returned in 2012 in Uncanny Avengers. In the "Apocalypse Wars," the Extraordinary X-Men travelled thousands of years into the future and found a ruined New York. Apocalypse had risen there, and what remained of Earth had become the Omega World, a huge structure of bubble worlds. He was its heart, and his Horsemen were its antibodies. Nightcrawler fatally wounded him, the Omega World crumbled, and Storm brought him back to the present. Later Nightcrawler freed him in exchange for a cure for Colossus, then threw him into the vortex created by the World-Eater, seemingly killing him.

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• 8. Krakoa And Legacy

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  In 2019, writers Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard expanded Apocalypse's origin in the Excalibur series and the X of Swords event. They revealed that his survival-of-the-fittest creed had a purpose. He had been preparing the mutant population for a dangerous reunion with the long-lost mutants of Arakko. Among them were his wife and his four children, the original Horsemen of Apocalypse.

  During "Dawn of X," Apocalypse accepted Professor Xavier's invitation to enter Krakoa. He joined the Quiet Council, a group of fourteen powerful and experienced mutants who served as the island's lawgivers. He took up learning magic and advised the new Excalibur team. Mutants who lost their powers after M-Day could regain them by dying and undergoing Krakoan resurrection. To prevent mass suicide by depowered mutants, the Council devised the Crucible. In that trial by combat, a depowered mutant must endure grueling physical and psychological attacks from Apocalypse before they can die and be resurrected.

  After Orchis attacked during "Fall of X," Apocalypse returned to Krakoa and found it dying from a lack of mutant energy. Wrongslide and several other mutants offered themselves as sacrifices, and Apocalypse killed them to restore the island's power. When Krakoa's Atlantean half returned from the White Hot Room and merged with its Pacific half, Apocalypse took down Exodus, who had objected to Krakoa leaving. Learning that Krakoa no longer needed his ways, he attacked and fought the X-Men until Jean Grey talked him down.

  He then left for Arakko. Meeting up with Orc, Apocalypse said it was time to find an heir to his legacy. He selected Doug Ramsey, who took the new name Revelation.

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