APOCALYPSE

Five thousand years ago in Akkaba, a settlement in ancient Egypt, the first mutant was born — a boy named En Sabah Nur, "The First One." His grey skin and blue lips marked him as different, and his own people abandoned the infant in the desert to die. But his cries were heard by a band of nomadic raiders, the Sandstormers. Their leader, Baal of the Crimson Sand, saw the child's raw will to survive and raised him as his own son.

The Sandstormers lived by a single credo — survival of the fittest — and it became the foundation of everything Apocalypse would become. When the time-traveling Pharaoh Rama-Tut (secretly Kang the Conqueror) sent his armies to wipe out the Sandstormers, Baal was mortally wounded. Dying in a cave, he revealed advanced alien technology hidden there — left behind by the godlike Celestials. Vowing revenge, En Sabah Nur embraced his destiny, renamed himself Apocalypse, and used the Celestial technology to forge himself into a biomechanical immortal.

He debuted in X-Factor #5–6 (1986), created by Louise Simonson and Jackson Guice — but his full origin wasn't told until Rise of Apocalypse #1–4 (1996), a full decade later. In the modern Krakoa era, his saga expanded again: his wife Genesis and their four children were revealed as the original Horsemen, lost with the island of Arakko — and his millennia-long "survival of the fittest" crusade was preparation for their return.