Warren Worthington III

• 1. Introduction

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  Warren Kenneth Worthington III first learns what he is at Phillips Exeter Academy, when feathered wings begin to grow from his shoulder blades. He believes at first that he is a freak, a mistake of nature. Then a fire breaks out in his dormitory. He borrows props from the school's drama department, dresses as a heavenly angel, and rescues his friends. In that moment he discovers that the wings can fly, and that flying can help people.

  This is a Marvel Comics character who has been rebuilt more often than almost anyone in his own team. He loses those wings, and what grows in their place changes who he is. Why did the people writing him keep taking him apart? What does a hero keep when his body, his mind, and even his soul are rewritten? And how does a boy with a fortune and a pair of wings become a figure that readers fear?

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• 2. Creation and Reinvention

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  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Angel in The X-Men #1 in September 1963, and Lee gave him two defining traits. He was rich and conceited, and he was a winged human, which made him the first Marvel character with wings.

  He stayed a regular in that title until it was cancelled with issue #66. A revival followed that reprinted old stories from issue #67 to #93. In 1970 and 1971, Angel also starred in a three-part solo feature, run as a back-up strip in Ka-Zar #2 and #3 and in Marvel Tales #30.

  In May 1975, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum launched the "All-New, All-Different X-Men" in Giant-Size X-Men #1. Angel left the main title with issue #94. He and Iceman moved into a new series, The Champions, which ran from 1975 to 1978. Its creator, Tony Isabella, had pictured the two friends travelling the highway in the spirit of Route 66, but editors told him to make it a full team book.

  The Uncanny X-Men #134 brought Angel back briefly, and issue #138 made it official, though he left again in issue #148. He then joined Beast and Iceman in The New Defenders and led that group for its last three years, 1983-1986. Marvel cancelled the book in 1986 to free the trio for X-Factor, which debuted in February. Angel stayed until issue #70.

  The biggest rebuild came in X-Factor #24, dated January 1988, when he appeared as Archangel. Writer Louise Simonson and penciler Walt Simonson later explained two motives. They felt Angel read as a Mary Sue, being wealthy, handsome, and adored by women. They also felt he had become underpowered next to characters in a universe where abilities kept inflating.

  Peter Milligan wrote a one-shot called Archangel in 1996. In 1997, Psylocke & Archangel: Crimson Dawn ran four issues from August to November. X-Men: The Hidden Years, set in the team's earliest days, followed from 1999 to 2001. When the Krakoan era closed, Warren was the focus of the 50th anniversary issue of Giant-Size X-Men in 2024.

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• 3. Fortune and Romance

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  Warren was born in Centerport, New York, to Kathryn Worthington and Warren Worthington II. His grandfather, also named Warren Worthington, stood behind the family name. As a playboy who bristled at taking orders, he caused constant friction among his teammates.

  He revealed himself publicly as a mutant after learning something worse about his own family. His uncle, Burt Worthington, had murdered Warren's father and poisoned his mother so that Warren would inherit the Worthington fortune.

  Money later turned into a trap. When Jean Grey returned after two years missing and wanted action against anti-mutant hysteria, Warren organized X-Factor. He hired Cameron Hodge, an old prep school friend, to run it, unaware that Hodge hated mutants. Hodge marketed the team as "mutant hunters" for hire, and Mystique exposed Warren as the financial backer, creating a public relations nightmare. Hodge also embezzled Warren's funds to build the Right, an anti-mutant militia.

  Later, with the X-Men broke and their mansion stripped bare by the US Government, Warren volunteered his own money. That meant reclaiming full control of his family company. After the Dark Angel Saga he lost the leadership of Worthington Industries, though he kept his place as primary stockholder and chairman emeritus.

  Love was as tangled as finance. Warren loved Jean Grey, who loved Scott Summers, and he eventually set that aside, though he still carried an unrequited flame while he dated Candy Southern. He also pursued the pop star Alison Blaire, known as Dazzler, without success.

  When Jean returned and Cyclops, married to Madelyne Pryor, reacted coldly, Warren offered her emotional support and declared his love. Candy found him consoling Jean, and that ended their relationship.

  Later came Charlotte Jones, a New York City police officer and single mother. After that, Warren dated fellow X-Man Psylocke, who then took up with the newer recruit Thunderbird. A love triangle with Paige Guthrie and Stacy X followed. When Jean Grey died, Warren and Paige left the team, and he began charity work in Zanzibar under the name "Mutants Sans Frontières".

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• 4. Horseman of Death

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  During the "Mutant Massacre," a villain named Harpoon mutilated Warren's wings. They developed gangrene, and Hodge ignored Warren's wishes and had them amputated. Warren fled the hospital in his private jet, which Hodge had sabotaged, and it exploded.

  Seconds before the blast, the ancient mutant Apocalypse spirited Warren away and made him Death, one of his four Horsemen. Extensive genetic alterations gave him blue skin and organic metal wings. When Warren beat the other Horsemen in a fight, Apocalypse made him their leader. A drug then removed his reservations about the dark plans ahead.

  Iceman broke the spell in a drastic way. During an attack on Manhattan, he faked his own death at Warren's hands, betting that the shock of killing a friend would shake off the drug. It worked, yet Warren refused to rejoin X-Factor. He felt he had changed too much to be a hero.

  He went looking for Candy Southern and found her missing. She had been lobotomized to protect Hodge's secrets. When Warren confronted Hodge, Hodge murdered Candy in front of him, and Warren decapitated Hodge.

  He renamed himself from "Death" to "Dark Angel," rejoined X-Factor, and took the codename Archangel during the events of "Inferno."

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• 5. Wings and Powers

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  At peak form, Angel's wings carry enough strength to break a man's arm or leg, or put someone through a wall. They fold flat against his torso and legs, leaving only a slight bulge under his clothes. His bones are hollow, and his body burns food efficiently without storing fat. His anatomy resembles that of a bird of prey, and his eyes withstand winds that would damage a normal person's.

  His range is large but not unlimited. He usually flies below cloud height, but he can climb nearly twice as high. At his maximum he can reach the altitude record for a bird in flight, about the height of Mount Everest, though only for a few minutes. Without rest he can fly under his own power for around half a day.

  Professor X trained him to master flight indoors. In one demonstration he defeated the Human Torch, who is much faster, by dodging so that the Torch smashed into a wall or the ground. Wolverine gave him extensive combat training, and Psylocke taught him martial arts while they dated. He also learned from Black Widow and Hercules in his days with the Champions. Once, after he surprised Wolverine, he said, "My father spoiled me with more than money."

  A second mutation, shown inconsistently, lets him heal others by mixing his blood with theirs, provided the blood types match. It does not work on Nightcrawler. Its strength varies, sometimes failing the terminally wounded and at other times raising the recently dead. The mutation hints at descent from the ancient Cheyarafim mutants.

  Archangel's metal wings are grafted from Apocalypse's engineering and resemble the organic steel of Colossus's body. They fire metal feathers fast enough to pierce steel, and the feathers are tipped with poison. A neural inhibitor produced by his own body causes temporary paralysis. The edges are razor sharp, and the wings fly him faster than the feathered pair.

  He cannot fully control the feathers, which sometimes launch in response to his unconscious aggressive drives. That detail matters later, because a teammate will reveal what those drives really are.

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• 6. Wings That Would Not Stay

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  Jean Grey eventually told Warren something that eased his darkest period. His wings, which he believed had a mind of their own, had been acting on his own unconscious desire for violence. After he accidentally decapitated Kamikaze of the Mutant Liberation Front, he tried to reject the cloud that hung over him and retired his "Death" uniform for the blue and white costume Magneto had made.

  The metal did not hold. After Sabretooth eviscerated Psylocke during an escape attempt, the X-Men captured him, but he badly damaged Warren's metal wings first. The damage spread until the wings shattered, and feathered wings that had been growing inside broke them apart. A visit from Ozymandias told him he was one of Apocalypse's chosen ones. He kept his blue skin for a time, until a fight with Black Tom Cassidy brought back his earlier look.

  In X-Force vol. 3 #4, a mind-controlled Wolfsbane ripped off his wings and ran. She delivered them to the Purifiers, who were hunting the Apocalypse Strain, the techno-organic material in them. The Purifiers used it to give an army of their agents metallic wings. Elixir healed Warren's injuries but could not regrow the wings. Then a series of excruciating seizures regenerated them and changed him back into Death, complete with blue skin. He slaughtered most of the Purifiers in a blood-maddened rage.

  The "Dark Angel Saga" went further. The Archangel persona, created when Apocalypse first changed him, finally took over his mind. He planned to inherit Apocalypse's role and gathered an army that included Ozymandias, Dark Beast, and a child named Genocide. At the end, Psylocke, whose real name is Betsy, stabbed him in the chest with the Celestial Life Seed and seemingly killed him.

  The Warren who walked out of the snow afterward was someone else. His soul had departed, and the changed body hosted a new personality with its own soul. This version remembered none of his friends, and he turned away Psylocke, his former lover. He raised a recently dead dog from the grave with his new healing power.

  The Dark Angel Saga left a hidden legacy. In Uncanny Avengers in 2013, readers learned that Warren had fathered two children with Pestilence of the Final Horsemen. They were Uriel and Elimin, the Apocalypse Twins.

  Later, Psylocke and Magneto traveled to Green Ridge, Colorado, to investigate a preacher who looked exactly like the original Angel. During an eight-month gap after Secret Wars, he had allied with Clan Akkaba, which harvested his rapidly regenerating wings and grafted them onto clones. The silent Archangel on Magneto's team was the first of these clones. In the end, the preacher and the silent Archangel merged into a single new blue-skinned persona.

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• 7. A Younger Warren

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  When Beast traveled back in time to bring the original X-Men into the present, Angel came along. He initially wanted to go home rather than stay in such a twisted era. The future he saw frustrated him so much that he left the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning and joined the older Cyclops's outlaw X-Men. This younger Angel starred in All-New X-Men from 2012 to 2017 and X-Men Blue in 2017-2018, before the mini-series Extermination returned him to the past in 2018.

  In the 2015 storyline "The Black Vortex," he gained cosmic powers, including wings of light. They let him travel faster than light, fire blasts that could destroy spaceships, and survive in space by feeding on cosmic energy. X-23 asked why he had risked his life for them, and he answered that he hoped to change his future and avoid becoming Archangel. Before the return trip, a younger Cable surgically removed the cosmic wings and replaced them with wings that Mimic had copied from Angel. That kept the timeline unaltered. Jean also planted a psychic block so the group would forget their experiences until they caught up to the moment they had left.

  Other universes offer stranger versions. In Mutant X, Apocalypse turns Warren into a pale, bat-like creature that breathes fire. In New Exiles, he goes by Krait and serves under Lilandra Neramani. In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, his powers appear at birth, and Professor X adopts him after his parents reject him. In Ultimate Wolverine, he is a prisoner of the Eurasian Republic with metallic wings.

  The oddest mirror is in X-Men Fairy Tales. His equivalent there is Tenshi, a pheasant afraid of flying, who learns to overcome his fear with help from two friends, Hitomi and Aoi.

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• 8. Screens and Rankings

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  The Marvel Super Heroes brought Angel to television in its "The Sub-Mariner" segment, as a member of the Allies for Peace. William Callaway voiced him in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. In X-Men: The Animated Series, Stephen Ouimette voiced a version that was added retroactively as a founding member. Mystique brainwashes him into becoming Apocalypse's Horseman of Death, and Rogue absorbs his dark side to free him. Mark Hildreth voiced a young multi-billionaire in X-Men: Evolution who draws Magneto's attention. Liam O'Brien voiced the character in Wolverine and the X-Men, where Mister Sinister turns him into Archangel.

  Film took longer to find him. He appeared in an early draft of X-Men that never got past pre-production. Archangel was planned for X2 as one of William Stryker's experiments, but he was cut from the film, leaving only an x-ray image in a lab. Ben Foster played him as a young adult in X-Men: The Last Stand, with Cayden Boyd as the child. In that story his mutation inspires his industrialist father to create a "mutant cure."

  A viral marketing website for X-Men: Days of Future Past says Warren was killed in 2011 by Sentinels during a mutant protest march. In X-Men: Apocalypse, Ben Hardy plays an unnamed British cage fighter from the 1980s, with talons on his wings. Nightcrawler injures him before Apocalypse converts him into Archangel, and Apocalypse later abandons him for failure.

  In video games, a quiet oddity sits inside X-Men Legends. André Sogliuzzo is credited as Angel there, but the character never appears, though his model files and icons remain in the game's assets. Elsewhere Archangel is playable in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, voiced by Will Friedle, and the character also appears in Marvel Snap.

  Critics have ranked him unevenly. Screen Rant placed him first among the Horsemen of Apocalypse. IGN put him 11th in a list of the top 25 X-Men. Entertainment Weekly ranked him 40th, ComicsAlliance placed him 75th of 100, and CBR.com named him 10th in a list of the greatest X-Men by courage.

  Sales numbers for his own miniseries were modest. Angel: Revelations #1 was the 106th best-selling comic in May 2008, and issue #2 was 125th in June. Iceman and Angel #1 ranked 161st in March 2011. A CBR reviewer praised the first Revelations issue for treating the angel idea literally, and Adam Pollina's art as nearly Dali-like in its oddness. The collected edition, Angel: Revelations #1-5, was released in January 2009.

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