Ororo Munroe

The daughter of a rebellious Kenyan princess, N’Dare, and an American photographer, David Munroe, Ororo was born in Harlem in New York, though her family relocated to Cairo, Egypt when she was six-months-old. A few years later, N’Dare and David were tragically killed when a plane crashed into their house. Though she survived the event, Ororo would develop claustrophobia due to her time trapped in the rubble of her home. Left an orphan to wander the streets, Ororo picked pockets and stole to survive.

Ororo eventually left Egypt and headed south on foot with the goal of reaching her ancestral homeland. After almost dying while crossing the Sahara, Ororo’s latent mutant powers manifested, allowing her to save a kidnapped Prince T’Challa. Afterwards, her time wandering the Serengeti as a young woman, bringing rain to those in dire need, transformed her into a worshipped “goddess” among local tribes.

After working with Ororo to defeat fellow weather manipulator Deluge, Professor Xavier asked her to join a new version of the X-Men; one which would help rescue the original team from the living island of Krakoa. She accepted and was given the code name Storm.

Storm has a deep psychic bond to the life force of Earth itself - a connection that creates empathy within her toward life everywhere, big and small. Storm comes from a centuries-long line of African priestesses, all of whom possessed distinctive white hair, blue eyes, and powerful “magic.” During their attempt to thwart Deluge, it was Charles Xavier who told her that her powers stem from being a mutant.

Losing her parents so young forced Ororo into an early life of scavenging and isolation, thus making the friends she is connected to as an adult all the more significant. After Ororo joined the X-Men, Jean Grey was the first reach out to her, helping her acclimate and adjust to Western culture. Jean also discovered Storm’s claustrophobia and did her best to help her friend overcome her panic attacks.

Despite inventing the weapon that robbed her of her powers at one point, Forge was able to win Ororo over and the two of them remained a complicated romantic couple for a time, before that relationship came to an end. Storm would later become the Queen of Wakanda after marrying the warrior she’d met in her youth, T’Challa. The two were a formidable couple until their harsh split after Namor and the Atlanteans devastated Wakanda.

Joining, and in many cases leading, groups like the X-Men, the Morlocks, and the New Mutants has provided Storm with many close friends and allies, including Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Gambit, Colossus, and numerous others. One friend in particular, the free-spirited ninja Yukio, has influenced Storm’s appearance, as Ororo cut her hair into a distinctive mohawk after meeting Yukio in Japan.

X-Men founder Charles Xavier is a mentor and surrogate father-figure for Storm and the main inspiration for her becoming a mentor to other younger pupils, like Kitty Pryde and the New Mutants. Frequent X-Men team leader Cyclops has also been a key ally in Storm’s life, though an on-again, off-again rivalry also grew between the two, beginning during her initial time as leader during his first leave of absence from the team.

Storm has a mighty list of enemies, gathered both during her X-Men career and her time away from the team. As part of the X-Men, she continually faces the likes of Magneto, the Adversary, Mr. Sinister, the Hellfire Club, Dark Phoenix, and more.

Quite often, because of how powerful she is, Storm finds herself the target of villains who seek to use her as a pawn in order to exploit her abilities, sometimes manipulating her memories in an effort to control her. Loki is one such schemer, using Storm, who was powerless at the time, by restoring her abilities and brainwashing her into thinking she was the “Goddess of Thunder” in an attempt to discredit Thor.

Storm’s memories were also wiped for a time by the crazed scientist known as the Nanny, who planned on using her abilities to make orphans out of the world’s super powered children.

Frequent X-Men foe Apocalypse has seen a special significance in Storm, attempting to turn her into a member of “the Twelve” - a group of mutants prophesied to bring about a new golden age of powered individuals as the master race.

Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, has been an ongoing mutant adversary of Storm’s dating back to a brief encounter in her childhood. Since then, the Shadow King has returned many times to menace Storm, her teammates, and those under her tutelage. Like the raging weather she commands, Storm has racked up some tumultuous times, both on and off Earth, and during her exploits with the X-Men and beyond.

After Ororo was orphaned, she was briefly taken in by Achmed el-Gibar, an Egyptian master thief who taught her how to be an expert pickpocket. It was during her time as a young thief, in the wake of the death of her parents, that Ororo first encountered Charles Xavier in Egypt, years before he recruited her into the X-Men, when she attempted to steal his wallet. Coincidentally, this was the very moment the Shadow King, Amahl Farouk, unleashed a psionic attack on Xavier, allowing Ororo to escape.

Ororo then left Egypt and, during the arduous journey that followed, killed a man in self-defense after he attempted to sexually assault her. Later, after saving the life of the young Wakandan Prince T’Challa, Storm returned to her ancestral homeland and was taken in by a village elder, Ainet, who taught her to control her burgeoning mutant powers. While chasing a thief into a subway tunnel, alongside teammate and friend Jean Grey, Storm was halted by a crippling bout of claustrophobia for the first time since she joined the X-Men - the result of her being trapped under rubble as a child when her parents were killed.

Storm’s claustrophobia would rear its ugly head a few more times during her early adventures with the X-Men, including after Banshee’s home, Cassidy’s Keep, was attacked by Juggernaut and Black Tom, and then again when Dr. Doom transformed her into a statue of organic chrome. While frozen, Storm subconsciously controlled weather patterns all over the world, creating a raging thunderstorm.

Storm would soon have to watch as Jean became conflicted between her feelings for her friends and loved ones and her new destructive impulses as Dark Phoenix – the result of a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix Force that had given her incredible new powers. Though it was eventually revealed to not be the true Jean, but rather the Phoenix Force itself posing as her, “Jean” eventually sacrificed herself in order to save billions of innocent lives, a loss which Storm and her X-Men teammates, were all heavily impacted by.

During the dawn of the Krakoan age, Storm became one of the members of the Quiet Council on the mutant nation-state of Krakoa. She would join Kitty Pryde, now going by Kate, on a pirate ship as they sailed across the world rescuing mutants and taking them to Krakoa. When Mars was terraformed by Omega level mutants, Storm helped create the atmosphere, and she would become the Regent of the Sol System and the Great Ring of Arakko. When the former leader of the Great Ring, Genesis, returned from her warpath in Amenth, Storm, Apocalypse, and the Brotherhood of Arakko teamed up to fight in the Arakki civil war, eventually defeating Genesis by creating a new living island, Kaorak, and banishing her to Phobos, moon of Planet Arakko.