JEAN GREY

Long before there was a school roll call, Charles Xavier was quietly tutoring a traumatised schoolgirl at her parents' home, holding her telepathy behind mental walls while her telekinesis took shape. During one of those private sessions, Jean's mind drifted onto the astral plane and found a stranger: a boy she had never seen, alone and hurting. Part of her psyche answered by taking the shape of a vast bird made of living flame — a Phoenix raptor — which spread its wings over the boy and eased his pain. The encounter stayed hidden from readers until Classic X-Men #42 (1990) retold those training years.

The boy on the other end of that fiery visit was Scott Summers, an orphan growing up in Nebraska while his own uncontrollable gift was beginning to stir. He had no name for the presence that comforted him, and no reason to connect it with any living person. Yet that brief contact laid the very first strand of the celebrated psychic rapport between Scott and Jean, years before either of them owned a costume.

Xavier, unsettled by how far his pupil's power had reached without her even trying, kept her telepathy suppressed, and the astral meeting faded from both children's conscious memories. So when Jean finally walked into the school in X-Men #1 (1963) and was introduced to Scott as though for the first time, neither teenager recognised the other. Their famous first meeting was, in secret, a reunion — arranged by a cosmic bird neither of them remembered meeting.