Angel

Warren Worthington III had the easiest mutation of the original five and the worst decade of any of them. Feathered wings, a trust fund and a jawline: for twenty years he was the X-Man who could afford to be charming. Then the Marauders came up through the Morlock tunnels during the Mutant Massacre and pinned his wings to a wall with crossbow bolts. The wings went septic. Surgeons took them off. A rich, beautiful flying man woke up grounded and mutilated, and Marvel let him sit in that long enough to break him properly.

Apocalypse found him there and made an offer. Warren came back with blue skin, a new name and razor-edged metal wings that fired their own feathers like knives: Death, the fourth Horseman, hunting his own friends. He clawed his way back, then funded X-Factor and later Cable's X-Force out of the Worthington fortune, and he has spent every year since arguing with the thing living in his shoulder blades. The Archangel persona is not a costume he removed. It is a second self that surfaces whenever the killing starts, and the modern books treat it as a condition to manage.

Angel spent the 1960s as the original five's least essential member, the one whose power was merely pleasant, and then became the best argument for body horror in superhero comics. The Mutant Massacre amputation and Apocalypse's rebuild in the late 1980s turned Marvel's blandest pretty boy into its most disturbing redesign, and the blue-skinned Archangel became a defining image of the era. Louise Simonson and Walter Simonson drove that transformation in X-Factor; Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force later pushed it to its endpoint, making him Apocalypse's heir before wiping him back to a blank slate. Every Warren Worthington story since has been about which of the two men wakes up.