Ororo MunroeStorm

As a storied, veteran X-Men member, Ororo Munroe - aka Storm - is one of the most powerful mutants on Earth. A trusted and wise leader of the team, with the ability to control and manipulate weather patterns, Storm has created a legacy of both freedom-fighting and mentorship, forever aware of how emotions can cause one’s powers to spiral out of control.

The Rains Down in Africa

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.

The Perfect Storm

Along with being a highly skilled fighter and thief, Storm has the ability to control the elemental forces that preside over weather. Immune to extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, she can create winds strong enough to support her weight, giving her the ability to fly. Storm draws her power from the Earth’s electromagnetic field, allowing her to generate lightning, tornados, blizzards, and massive maelstroms. At times, she’s been able to control the air in someone’s lungs and the air pressure in a person’s inner ear.

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.

Friendly Forecast

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.

Frosty Foes

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.

Ride the Lightning

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.

Following Jean’s apparent death and Cyclops’ departure from the team, Storm was made leader of the X-Men, and rose to the occasion. Cyclops would eventually return to challenge Storm as leader, but Ororo worked past her own insecurities to stand up for her position.

Storm was turned into a vampire by Dracula, who sought her out for her prowess as a thief. Dracula later would be defeated by a mutant Storm had taken under her wing, young X-Men recruit Kitty Pryde, who at the time was possessed by Dracula’s daughter Lilith.

While battling the monster alien invaders called the Brood, Storm chose to end her own life rather than have the Brood egg inside of her hatch and transform her into one of them. However, discovering that she could also control cosmic solar energy, Storm overloaded her body and killed the egg. Then, while drifting unprotected in cold space, she was saved by a caretaker member of the alien Acanti race, who helped her heal and return to her old self.

Storm challenged, and bested, the Morlock Callisto after the sewer-dwelling mutants kidnapped Angel. Almost killing Callisto in the process, Storm was named new Morlock leader. After resenting Storm for a long time, Callisto finally grew to respect her.

Storm lost all of her powers after being shot by government agent Henry Gyrich, who wielded a weapon invented by the mutant Forge. While she rested and healed, she fell in love with Forge, but their relationship ended once she discovered that he’d been the one to craft the device that stole her abilities.

After some time away from the X-Men, as she processed the loss of her powers, Storm would again become involved with both her longtime team and the younger New Mutants, helping possessed New Mutant Karma fight off the Shadow King’s influence. Storm would briefly have her abilities restored by Loki, who wished to usurp his brother Thor’s status by making her the “Goddess of Thunder,” but she rejected Loki and once more found herself powerless.

Fully part of the X-Men again, Storm bested Cyclops in combat, despite her lack of powers, when Cyclops openly challenged her over who should lead the team moving forward.

Sometime later, Storm and Forge’s paths crossed again when his mentor, who was possessed by the Adversary, convinced her that Forge had turned evil. After being tricked into almost killing Forge, the Adversary banished them both to another dimension where they spent a full year together and rekindled their romance, while Forge was able to invent a device to finally restore Ororo’s powers.

Returning home, Storm rejoined her teammates, but soon after, all of the X-Men sacrificed their lives to defeat the Adversary. The team was resurrected by an Omniversal Guardian named Roma, but initially opted to keep their resurrection a secret and operated out of Australia during this period.

After the X-Men were attacked by the Nanny and the Orphan Maker, Storm was captured and a S.H.I.E.L.D. LMD was used to fake her death. Nanny then transformed Storm into her pre-teens in order to more easily contain her, but Storm’s claustrophobia would then provide her with enough power to overload Nanny’s systems, creating a window for escape.

Storm, in her younger amnesiac form, would meet fellow mutant thief Gambit while being targeted by the Shadow King in New Orleans. She would later introduce Gambit to the X-Men. Storm would also eventually be restored to adulthood on the island nation of Genosha.

When the X-Men split into two distinct strike teams, Storm would serve as co-leader alongside Cyclops. During this period, Forge proposed to her, but her hesitation led him to leave her.

A glimpse of an alternate future, during Apocalypse’s attempt to use Storm to form the prophesied Twelve, revealed just how unbelievably powerful and omnipotent she could be if she gave into the full extent of her powers and became a wholly elemental being.

Following “M Day,” when a deranged Scarlet Witch caused half the world to lose their powers, Storm was reunited with T’Challa in Africa, accepting his marriage proposal. Together, they opposed the Superhuman Registration Act, and Ororo would go on to juggle her duties as Queen of Wakanda with her heroic duties around the world.

Those duties included joining the Avengers for the first time, though that would end when she sided with the X-Men against her new teammates during a crisis involving the mutants of Utopia. Namor’s destructive attack on Wakanda during this period led to T’Challa naming the X-Men enemies of his country and to the annulment of Ororo and T’Challa’s marriage.

Returning to her old teammates, Ororo took over as Headmistress of the Jean Grey School and fended off attacks from resurrected former Utopia student Kenji Uedo. She also become leader of the first all-female X-Men group, which included Psylocke, Jubilee, Rachel Grey, Rogue, and Kitty Pryde.

Following the death of Wolverine, Storm would become the X-Men’s only leader. A crisis would erupt after Terrigen Mist was released into Earth's atmosphere, threatening mutants on a mass scale, Assisted by Doctor Strange, among others, Storm created a sanctuary within Limbo called X-Haven. Her actions managed to save the lives of many of her fellow mutants.