Storm (Marvel Comics)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  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, again more than any teammate. She first appeared in May 1975, and she can summon hurricanes, lightning and blizzards at will. Yet the questions that follow her are less about spectacle. Who gets to decide what a leader looks like? What does it cost a person to hold that much power in check? And what did it mean for readers to see a hero like her at all?

  967

• 2. Two Designs, One Hero

  ›

  Cadence Industries, Marvel's corporate owners, thought the X-Men needed characters with "foreign appeal." The team from the 1960s had fallen out of popularity, so Marvel reinvented it as the "all-new, all-different X-Men." Only Cyclops kept his place. The newcomers were no longer teenagers, they came from different countries and cultures, and they already knew how to use their powers.

  Len Wein wrote and Dave Cockrum pencilled Giant-Size X-Men #1, which introduced Colossus from the Soviet Union, Nightcrawler from West Germany and Thunderbird, a Native American of Apache descent. Storm represented Kenya. Cyclops from the United States, Banshee from Ireland, Sunfire from Japan and Wolverine from Canada filled out the roster. In the story, a battle against the living island Krakoa ends with the new X-Men replacing the first generation.

  Cockrum had two earlier creations to draw on when he designed Storm. The Black Cat wore Storm's costume, minus the cape, and had been submitted for the new team's original lineup. Then the project went on hiatus, other female cat characters such as Tigra appeared, and the Black Cat became redundant.

  Typhoon, Cockrum's second design, had been drawn as a man. The creative team did not want an all-male lineup, so editor Roy Thomas suggested that Cockrum turn Typhoon into the woman of the group. Cockrum liked the idea. He gave the character the Black Cat's costume, a cape and a new haircut with white hair.

  Cockrum's collaborators feared that the white hair would make her look like a grandmother. He was confident he could draw her so that she always looked young, and he insisted on it. The hair stayed, and the comics would later tie it to her family line.

  4582

• 3. Cairo and the Serengeti

  ›

  Chris Claremont set down Storm's backstory in The Uncanny X-Men #102, published in December 1976. Her mother, N'Dare, was a Kenyan tribal princess descended from a long line of African witch-priestesses, all with white hair, blue eyes and a natural gift for sorcery. Her father, David Munroe, was an American photojournalist. Ororo was born in Harlem, in New York City, and the family later settled in Cairo, Egypt.

  The Suez Crisis is where later canon places the death of Ororo's parents, when a fighter jet crashed into their Cairo house. Early tellings described a botched aircraft attack during an Arab-Israeli conflict instead. Either way, she was a small child, she was buried under tons of rubble, and she survived with a violent claustrophobia. In the late 2000s, writers such as Ed Brubaker and Christopher Yost suggested that she had largely conquered the fear.

  Achmed el-Gibar, a benign street lord, found the orphan after she had wandered Cairo's back alleys for a few weeks. Under him she became a prolific thief. One of her victims was Charles Xavier, the future Professor X, who had come to Cairo to meet the Shadow King. Mark Sumerak's miniseries Ororo: Before the Storm, in 2005, later retold this period with a focus on her bond with el-Gibar.

  In The Uncanny X-Men #117, from January 1979, Claremont added a detail to that meeting. Xavier used his mental powers to hold the girl in place for a moment. But his mental duel with Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, absorbed both men, and the girl escaped.

  As a teenager, Ororo followed an inner urge into the Serengeti and met T'Challa, the future Black Panther. Despite strong mutual feelings, they went their separate ways. In the Serengeti she also first showed her power over the weather. A witch-priestess named Ainet took her in as a surrogate mother.

  Ainet's village once suffered a terrible drought, and Ororo commanded rain for days to help. The kindness backfired. Her rain disrupted the natural order, caused droughts in numerous other villages and killed hundreds of animals. Ainet explained that the gesture had been poorly considered, and she taught Ororo how her power worked with nature and how to distribute rain properly. For a time a tribe worshipped the young woman as a rain goddess.

  Only after Professor X recruited her out of that life did Ororo take the code name Storm.

  105567

• 4. Taking the Lead

  ›

  Chris Claremont took over from Len Wein as writer in 1975 and held the job for the next 16 years. That is why he wrote most of the issues featuring Storm. At first he wrote her struggling to adjust to Western culture, and she called the obligation to wear clothing in public "absurd."

  By the early 1980s, X-Men was Marvel's top-selling comic title. Distributors and retailers even adopted an "X-Men index," rating each comic by how many orders it drew compared with that month's issue of X-Men. After "The Dark Phoenix Saga," Storm became the most prominent character in the book. She was often the viewpoint character whose thoughts guided the narrative.

  The Uncanny X-Men #139, dated November 1980, made her the team's leader after Cyclops took a leave of absence. Claremont wrote her as serene and independent. He also gave her a maternal bond with her 13-year-old teammate Kitty Pryde.

  In 1986, the team had to choose between Storm and Cyclops, who was by then married to Madelyne Pryor and expecting a child. They settled it with a duel in the Danger Room, and Storm won. Scholar J. Andrew Deman points to other moments when she commands or overrules "highly masculinized white characters," Wolverine among them.

  October 1991 brought a relaunch that split the team in two. Cyclops led the Blue team in a new X-Men title. Storm led the Gold team in Uncanny X-Men, alongside Colossus, Warren Worthington III, Iceman and Jean Grey. Early on, Gold faced the Hellfire Club and met Bishop, a traveler from a possible future.

  Claremont returned to Storm in July 2001 with X-Treme X-Men, which kept her as its central character until issue #46 in June 2004. Rogue, Gambit and Bishop joined her. She also headed the X-Treme Sanctions Executive, a mutant police task force with worldwide authority.

  After the Secret Wars storyline, Storm led Extraordinary X-Men, a team meant to shelter mutants from the Terrigen Mist, which is toxic to them. She moved the group to Limbo. She tried to build an alliance with Medusa, but after Magneto's X-Men attacked New Attilan, she reluctantly led her team into a war with the Inhumans. Kitty Pryde replaced her as leader afterward.

  In 2019, Jonathan Hickman's House of X and Powers of X had the mutants found a new nation on the living island of Krakoa, where they could regularly resurrect their dead. Storm gave a rousing speech of mutant unity there. She then joined the Marauders, a team in Gerry Duggan's series that located mutants with restricted freedom of movement and helped them emigrate to Krakoa.

  When the Krakoa era ended after Fall of X, Storm joined the main Avengers team in Avengers #17, in August 2024, written by Jed MacKay.

  914175279

• 5. Mohawk and Lost Powers

  ›

  A Brood egg was the first crisis of Storm's early 1980s. In a space opera arc, the X-Men fought the parasitic Brood, and Storm was infected with an egg. She contemplated suicide and was saved at the last minute by the whale-like Acanti aliens.

  The Morlocks, a mutant underclass, lived in the tunnels of the New York City sewer system. When they abducted the X-Man Angel, the X-Men were outnumbered, and the Morlock called Plague left Storm sick. To save Kitty Pryde's life, she challenged the Morlocks' leader Callisto to a duel to the death. Callisto, written as a complex character rebelling against her low social status, fell to a sick Storm and her knife. The Morlock Healer saved Callisto, and Storm offered the Morlocks refuge at the Xavier Mansion. They declined, but she became their leader.

  The fight left Storm more defiantly non-conformist. At Wolverine's wedding to Mariko Yashida in Japan, she met Yukio, a ninja and old friend of Wolverine's. Yukio encouraged Storm to embrace her darker side. Their bond was conceived as romantic, but Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter mandated that no same-gender couples be depicted, so it became subtext. In Uncanny X-Men #312, in 1994, the narrator called them "More than friends... Less than sisters... these two are kindred spirits."

  The Uncanny X-Men #173, in October 1983, gave Storm a new look from Claremont and artist Paul Smith. She wore a black leather top and pants with spikes, and a mohawk. The inspiration came from Walt Simonson, who shaved his beard and mustache on a vacation with his wife, X-Men editor Louise Simonson. When they returned, their daughter Julie, upset at her father's new face, ran from the room.

  Smith explained in a 2008 interview that he submitted several lovely, feminine portraits, plus a joke drawing of Storm as Mr. T. He expected it to push the editors the other way. Instead, Louise Simonson replied, "They're going to hang us whichever way we go. Let's commit the murder." Smith called the mohawk a monstrously bad idea, but his departure after issue 175 was already set, so his vote did not count.

  Julie Simonson's reaction was mirrored on the page. Kitty Pryde rejected Storm's new look, heartbroken, and the two were alienated for a time. Comics scholar andre m. carrington reads the moment as a challenge to the stereotype of Black women as universal caregivers, one that exposes unconscious expectations of race and gender.

  A year later, a power-neutralizing weapon built by the mutant inventor Forge struck Storm instead of its intended target, Rogue, and took away her powers. Forge took her to his home in Dallas, Texas, to recover. They fell in love, but she left heartbroken when she learned that he had built the weapon.

  Forge proposed to her in 1992, but he misread her slight hesitation and withdrew the offer before she could accept. Writer Scott Lobdell waited until November 1993 before writing a reconciliation between the two.

  During the 1988 "Fall of the Mutants" storyline, Storm was trapped in another dimension with Forge, who restored her elemental powers. The X-Men then defeated a demonic enemy called the Adversary, and the battle made the world believe they had all died. In fact, the celestial being Roma had saved them with a spell that hid them from electronic equipment. They set up headquarters in a small frontier village in the Australian Outback, after expelling the Reavers, a group of mutant-hunting cyborgs.

  Nanny and Orphan-Maker captured Storm there. She was believed slain, but she resurfaced regressed to childhood by Nanny, with amnesia. The telepath Shadow King hunted her and framed her for murder, and she went back to thieving. As her memories slowly returned, she met the Cajun mutant Gambit, and the two rejoined the X-Men.

  In "The X-Tinction Agenda," the mutant-exploiting nation of Genosha kidnapped Storm and turned her into a brainwashed slave. In the end she was restored, physically and mentally, to her adult prime.

  After the Age of Apocalypse interrupted the X-Men titles in 1995, Lobdell again pitted the X-Men against the Morlocks. Storm ended the battle by ripping out one of the two hearts of Marrow, a Morlock girl, because a bomb was fixed to it. It deliberately echoed the way Claremont had Storm wound Callisto in 1983.

  2729261912

• 6. Queen of Wakanda

  ›

  Marvel Team-Up #100, dated December 1980, carried a short Claremont story set in Storm's Kenyan childhood. At age twelve, she saved a young Black Panther from racist thugs. Later writers built a deeper relationship between the two characters on that foundation.

  Christopher Priest brought Storm back into Black Panther's world in Black Panther #25-27, published from December 2000 to February 2001. Her first line was "I have been away from Africa far too long." She was called to Wakanda to protect a child from aliens, and the dispute drew in Doctor Doom and Namor. Priest later said the two had a profound love affair but could never have a permanent relationship. In his words, "Storm is the only human being on the planet Panther cannot B.S. She sees right through him, knows him far too intimately."

  In the 2005 House of M storyline, the Scarlet Witch created an alternate reality where mutants dominate and humans are oppressed. In it, a united and independent Africa was ruled by Storm alongside Black Panther. It was the first time the two appeared as a royal couple, although they were not married and their relationship was strained. After the "Decimation" storyline restored the previous timeline, Storm was among the 198 mutants who kept their powers.

  In 2006, Marvel announced that Storm would marry Black Panther. Writer Eric Jerome Dickey, who worked on a miniseries about them, explained that the move explicitly targeted the female and African American audience. Marvel also retold how the pair first met. In the 1980 version, twelve-year-old Storm rescues Black Panther from a white racist named Andreas de Ruyter. In Dickey's miniseries, T'Challa saves Ororo, still twelve, from de Ruyter and his brother. Editor Axel Alonso said, "Eric's story, for all intents and purposes (...) is Ororo's origin story."

  Black Panther #18, written by Reginald Hudlin in July 2006, staged the wedding as a tie-in to the "Civil War" storyline. Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada called it the Marvel Comics equivalent of the marriage of "Lady Diana and Prince Charles." Real-life figures depicted as guests included George W. Bush, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela and Oprah Winfrey, alongside many Marvel heroes. The wedding dress was designed by Shawn Dudley, an Emmy-winning costume designer for TV's Guiding Light, and revealed in the April 17 issue of TV Guide. The comic altered it greatly.

  Some critics and fans felt the marriage was "forced" or "rushed." Hudlin answered that earlier storylines had set it up. He suggested that some of the criticism came from people who wanted to see Storm with a character of long-standing popularity, such as Wolverine. Readers and critics also compared the wedding to the relationship of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who did not marry until two years later.

  Hudlin's run lasted from 2006 to 2009, and Storm featured throughout it. She temporarily left the X-Men. In 2007, when Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman took time off to work on their marriage, she and Black Panther became temporary members of the Fantastic Four. Because the author was Black, these stories went deeper into African-American culture than her earlier portrayals. In one, the couple visits an alien planet and meets alternate versions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. One cover shows Storm resembling Angela Davis, accompanied by members of the Black Panther Party.

  Astonishing X-Men #25, written by Warren Ellis in 2008, brought Storm back to the X-Men. She explained that Wakanda supported an organization called Mutantes Sans Frontières, inspired by Médecins Sans Frontières, which now funded the team. She also joked that she "never knew that guilt-free shopping and constant lovemaking could get so boring." In the four-issue X-Men: Worlds Apart, by Christopher Yost, the Shadow King forced her to choose between being queen and being an X-Man. She told the Panther God Bast that she would not choose, and she kept both roles.

  In 2011, Black Panther left Wakanda to become the guardian of Hell's Kitchen, replacing Daredevil. Storm supported him, but the two grew estranged. During the "Avengers vs. X-Men" storyline he sided with the Avengers, and a Phoenix-empowered Namor destroyed Wakanda. Storm was then stunned when T'Challa told her he had annulled their marriage.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates revived the bond in 2016 with A Nation Under Our Feet. The following year he wrote Black Panther and The Crew, a six-issue series in which Storm, Black Panther, Misty Knight, Luke Cage and Eden Fesi discuss gentrification, racism and police brutality. Storm rekindled her relationship with Black Panther there, though she stayed independent of the Wakandan monarchy.

  1549501658

• 7. Weather and Will

  ›

  Hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms and blizzards all answer to Storm, and so do mist and clear skies. She can change the temperature of an environment, control all forms of precipitation, humidity and moisture at a molecular level, and generate lightning. She can also command atmospheric pressure. Her reach extends over vast areas, on Earth and on other worlds.

  Precision makes her more dangerous than raw force. She can make precipitation fall at unusual altitudes, flash freeze people and objects, and coalesce pollutants into acid rain or toxic fog. Wind currents under her control can lift her into flight. She can manipulate the air in a person's lungs, and she can change the pressure in the inner ear to cause intense pain. By bending light through moisture, she can become partly transparent and, in later comics, nearly invisible.

  Cosmic storms, solar wind and ocean currents also respond to her. She can separate water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen through electrolysis, which lets her breathe underwater. In outer space she can affect the interstellar and intergalactic media. She can even choose to see the universe as energy patterns, tracking the flow of kinetic, thermal and electromagnetic energy behind weather.

  Her eyes turn solid white whenever she uses her powers. Her abilities are tied to her emotions, so she often suppresses extreme feelings to keep them from becoming violent weather. She can view the Earth as weather patterns and pinpoint her geographic position from them. Her mutant abilities are limited by her willpower and the strength of her body.

  In Wakanda, Storm is called Hadari-Yao, which means "Walker of Clouds" in ancient Alkamite, a goddess who preserves the balance of natural things. Her ancestry supports magic, since many of her ancestors were sorceresses and priestesses. Her matrilineal powers have been linked to the real-world Rain Queens of Balobedu, the region from which her ancestor Ayosha, a Sorceress Supreme of the Hyborian Age, came. The Mystic Arcana series features another ancestor, Ashake, who worships the Egyptian goddess Ma'at, also known as Oshtur, the mother of Agamotto. Since the dawn of Atlantis, for reasons never explained, this line of African women has carried distinguishing features and strong magical potential.

  Storm has not developed that potential, but the series hints at it. The Marvel Tarot deck lists her as the High Priestess, a card she shares equally with the Scarlet Witch and Agatha Harkness. A timeline-divergent Storm became the sorceress who taught sorcery to Magik. Her spirit is even strong enough to host the consciousness of an avatar of Eternity. In a gathering that included Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four, only she and Doctor Strange were viable candidates.

  Dracula's commands could not bend her willpower after he bit her. Achmed el-Gibar, Professor X, Wolverine and Black Panther trained her as a skilled and cunning hand-to-hand fighter, and she has beaten physically stronger foes such as the Crimson Commando. She is an excellent marksman with handguns and proficient with knives. She speaks Russian, Arabic and Swahili. She carries lock-picks, and once picked a lock with her teeth while her coordination was reduced to that of an infant. Her ancestral ruby, together with her lightning, allows inter-dimensional transportation.

  The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe - X-Men, from 2004, states that her powers let her breathe at any speed and protect her from air friction and temperature extremes. A 2007 handbook update says her body changes temperature to suit her surroundings. She can see in near-complete darkness and has superb dexterity. Her will is among the strongest of the X-Men, and the electrical fields she creates make telepaths struggle to track her or probe her thoughts.

  The Super Giant once called Storm an "Omega-Level Mutate," grouping her with Omega-Level mutants such as Iceman and Rachel Grey. Marvel eventually confirmed her Omega-Level status.

  67100

• 8. Icon of Representation

  ›

  Misty Knight debuted in March 1975, two months before Storm, which makes Storm the second Black female superhero at Marvel. DC had introduced Nubia, a supporting character for Wonder Woman, in 1973, so Storm was the third in mainstream comics. Marvel's earlier Black characters with powers included Black Panther in 1966, Hobie Brown and the Falcon in 1969, Luke Cage in 1972, Blade in 1973 and Abe Brown in 1974. DC's included Mal Duncan in 1970, John Stewart in 1971 and Shilo Norman in 1973. Storm became the first Black leader and the first female leader of a Marvel superhero team.

  The X-Men have symbolically represented marginalized minorities, and the debut of the original series coincided with the Civil Rights Movement. Storm's creation, in particular, came "during the heyday of blaxploitation films." Gladys L. Knight, author of Female Action Heroes, wrote that "two defining aspects of her persona are her racial identity and her social status as a mutant." Storm has widely been viewed as an icon of third wave feminism and intersectionality.

  Critics have not been uniformly kind to her early years. J. Andrew Deman argues that her first appearances were somewhat stereotypical and showed sexual exoticism that catered to the male gaze. Carol Cooper sees them as emblematic of the mythic earth-mother figure that many Black feminists critiqued as unrealistic and racist. Some have also criticized her blue eyes and often European features as concessions to the aesthetic standards of white Americans.

  Ramzi Fawaz answers that Ororo is "a character with few, if any, genuine antecedents in American superhero comic books: a superpowered black woman, who grew up a vagabond." Scholars such as Deborah Whaley argue that she overcame her stereotypical origins to become "a visionary social subject that propels social change." Fawaz also reads her costume and her "African goddess" persona as echoing the black female disco diva of gay and African American visual culture. He is particularly interested in her mid-1970s bond with Jean Grey, which he sees as a picture of cross-racial alliance between women.

  Margaret Galvan sees Jean Grey as Phoenix as a foil to Storm. Grey loses control of her enormous powers and lapses into narcissism, while Storm avoids that pitfall. Galvan reads this as an allegory for the transformation of liberal feminism from the 1970s to the 1980s. Richard Reynolds, in his 1992 book Superheroes, calls Storm withdrawn and cerebral, with a quasi-maternal role toward many of the X-Men.

  The storyline Lifedeath II sent Storm on a year's leave from the X-Men to return to her homeland. It joined African-American and continental African ideas of Black identity. Deman notes that some of its depictions of Africa are stereotypical, but he sees its links between diaspora and ancestry as potentially progressive for readers.

  Andrew Wheeler of ComicsAlliance noted that Storm was never introduced as a damsel or a love interest. Alex Abad-Santos of Vox described her as five foot eleven, with white hair, black skin and the power to control the weather, something readers had never seen before. In 2014, Karen Attiah of The Washington Post placed her alongside real African women, such as Chimamanda Adichie and Lupita Nyong'o, who were resonating with American audiences.

  Halle Berry played the adult Storm in the 20th Century Fox films X-Men in 2000, X2 in 2003, X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006 and X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014. Alexandra Shipp played the younger version in X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016, Deadpool 2 in 2018 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix in 2019. Storm also makes a guest appearance in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, and she is playable in every game of the X-Men Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series.

  Alison Sealy-Smith voiced Storm in X-Men: The Animated Series from 1992 to 1997. She returned to the role in the 2024 revival X-Men '97.

  9117612