The Phoenix Force is a cosmic entity in Marvel's comics: the force of life, death and rebirth, and the nexus of all psychic energy in the universe. It is best known for bonding with Jean Grey of the X-Men, which made her the most powerful mutant on the team, and the most dangerous. Magneto is the mutant who stopped hoping humans would accept his kind, and the Sentinels are the giant robots humans built to hunt them.
Between them they carry the X-Men's oldest argument: whether mutants can ever live safely alongside humans. Most of the team is on the X-Men shelf. This follows the comics and names the films and cartoons where they differ.
The Phoenix Force explained
In the comics, Jean flies a damaged shuttle home through a lethal dose of solar-flare radiation and should die. Instead she rises from the wreck in a new costume, calling herself Phoenix, with powers far beyond her old telepathy and telekinesis. Later stories explain what happened: the Phoenix Force saved her by sealing the real Jean in a healing cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, then took her form and memories and believed itself to be her.
That Phoenix is the one in The Dark Phoenix Saga (1980). Manipulated by the Hellfire Club, it breaks loose as Dark Phoenix, devours a star and wipes out the D'Bari, the people of a world in its orbit. The alien Shi'ar Empire demands her death, the X-Men fight its Imperial Guard on the Moon to save her, and when she feels the darkness rising again, Jean ends her own life rather than let it out.
The Phoenix keeps coming back. In Avengers vs. X-Men (2012) it splits between five X-Men, and a possessed Cyclops kills Professor X. The 1990s cartoon adapts the saga over several episodes, and the films tell it twice, in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and Dark Phoenix (2019), each its own way. Rebirth names the Phoenix's one rule.
What Omega level means
An Omega-level mutant is one whose main power has no known upper limit for its kind. The term was used loosely for decades. In the comics of the Krakoa era, from 2019, the X-Men keep a formal list, each name paired with the power that qualifies. Jean Grey, Magneto, Storm and Iceman are among the names on it: Jean for her mind, Magneto for magnetism, Storm for weather, Iceman for ice.
It is a ceiling, not a ranking of who wins a fight. Omega-level Iceman means there is no known limit to the cold he can make, not that he beats a better fighter with a smaller power. Rogue, Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, below, are not on the list, and their best stories never needed them to be.
Magneto
Magneto is Max Eisenhardt, also known as Erik Lehnsherr, a mutant who controls magnetism: he bends steel, flies on magnetic fields and moves enormous weights of metal. As a boy he survived Auschwitz, and the lesson he took from it shapes everything he does: a hunted people cannot wait for the world to decide to be kind. His old friend Charles Xavier believes mutants and humans can share the world. Magneto believes mutants must protect themselves first, by force if it comes to that.
He founded the first Brotherhood of Mutants and was the X-Men's first enemy, but he has also run Xavier's school and sat on the ruling council of the mutant nation of Krakoa. His helmet blocks telepathy, which keeps Xavier out of his head. The films call him Erik throughout and keep the same split: friend and enemy at once. Master of Magnetism uses his old title.
The Sentinels
Sentinels are giant robots built to find and capture or kill mutants. In the comics the first were designed by the scientist Bolivar Trask, who saw mutants as a threat to humanity; his machines soon decide the surest way to protect humans is to rule them. Behind many Sentinel stories stands Master Mold, a huge robot factory that builds the rest.
The best-known Sentinel story is Days of Future Past (1981): a future in which Sentinels rule North America and mutants live in camps, and the mind of an adult Kitty Pryde is sent back into her younger self to stop the assassination that started it. The 2014 film of the same name sends Wolverine instead. Later comics go darker still: wild Sentinels wipe out Genosha, an island nation that was home to millions of mutants. Sentinel Hunt pairs Cyclops with a Sentinel.
On the shelf
Rogue's powers, and Gambit
Rogue absorbs other people through skin contact: their memories, their abilities and, if she holds on, their life force. A brief touch takes a little; a long one can put someone in a coma or kill them. Her power first showed when she kissed a boy and he fell into a coma, and for years it meant she could not touch anyone without hurting them.
She started as a villain. Fighting the Avengers' Carol Danvers, then called Ms. Marvel, she held on too long and kept Carol's flight, strength and near-invulnerability for years, along with some of her memories. Fearing for her sanity, she went to Xavier and the X-Men for help. Later comics let her switch the power on and off. Her long romance with Gambit, a Cajun thief from New Orleans who charges playing cards with explosive energy, ran for years on the one thing they could not do: touch.
The films change her. In X-Men (2000) she is a runaway teenager whose power is the whole tragedy, with no flight and no super-strength. Hands Off says it in two words, and Ace of Hearts deals Gambit's hand.
On the shelf
Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde
Nightcrawler is Kurt Wagner, a German circus acrobat with blue fur, yellow eyes, pointed ears, a long tail he can grip with, and two fingers and a thumb on each hand. He teleports: he vanishes with a "bamf" and a puff of smoke that smells of brimstone, and reappears where he means to be, carrying anyone he holds. He needs to see or know where he is going, because arriving inside something solid would kill him.
He looks like a demon and is the gentlest member of the team, a devout Catholic with a swashbuckler's sense of fun. His family is pure X-Men tangle: his mother is the shape-shifter Mystique, later comics named his father as Azazel, a demonic-looking teleporting mutant, and a 2023 story rewrote it again: his parents are Mystique and her partner Destiny, with Azazel's genes borrowed for the job. In X2 (2003) he opens the film with an attack inside the White House.
Kitty Pryde, later Shadowcat, joins the X-Men at thirteen. Her power is phasing: she passes through solid objects by letting her atoms slip between theirs, and she can take anyone she holds with her. Phasing through a machine shorts out its electronics, and she has learned to walk on air. She is often seen with Lockheed, a small alien dragon. Phase Out names her move, and Teleport Away names his.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
Jean, Magneto, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Nightcrawler and Kitty are on the X-Men shelf, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: the X-Men were drawn as a team in which each member has one loud idea, a visor, a helmet, a tail, a fan of cards, so any one of them can hold a back alone and still read from across a room.
Read next: Weapon X, adamantium and the healing factor explained (the team's best-known member) and Doctor Doom, Latveria and the Fantastic Four explained.
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