PROFESSOR X

A heartbroken young Charles Xavier, fresh out of the army and travelling to forget Moira MacTaggert, stopped in Cairo — where a street child lifted his wallet and bolted. The thief was a young Ororo Munroe, years before the world would know her as Storm, and Xavier chased her through the Thieves’ Quarter until a psychic bolt from a nearby café stopped him cold.

Inside sat Amahl Farouk, the corpulent crimelord who ran Cairo’s underworld through the minds of everyone around him. Farouk recognised a fellow telepath, offered Xavier a partnership in pleasure and crime, and — refused — dragged him into a duel on the astral plane. To the café’s other patrons the two men simply sat motionless at their tables while, on the plane of the mind, armoured giants fought with swords of thought; Xavier won, and Farouk’s body slumped lifeless across the table.

Farouk was the first evil mutant Xavier had ever encountered, and the lesson rewired his life: if minds like Farouk’s were out there preying on the world, then someone would have to find gifted youngsters first and teach them a better way. That resolve, planted in a Cairo café in the flashback told in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 #117 (1979) by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, is the seed the X-Men grew from. Farouk’s mind, meanwhile, survived bodiless on the astral plane — and returned for decades as the Shadow King.