Pyro

Before he was a terrorist, St. John Allerdyce was a working writer: an Australian journalist with a sideline in lurid romance novels, which tells you everything about how he treats violence. Fire is his medium and he is a showman with it, sculpting flame into dragons, serpents and walls of animate heat. There is one enormous catch. Pyro cannot generate a single spark. His mutation is control, not creation, which is why he never goes anywhere without wrist-mounted flamethrowers and a flame-retardant suit. Take away his ignition source and the most theatrical man in the Brotherhood is just an author with opinions.

Mystique recruited him into her Brotherhood, then marched the whole crew into government service as Freedom Force, and Pyro spent the late 1980s doing federal wetwork with a badge. The Legacy Virus caught up with him in 2001 and Marvel let him stay dead for the better part of two decades, an unusual courtesy. Krakoa's resurrection protocols brought him back into a mutant nation that had no use for his old politics, and the reinvention that followed included a genuine relationship with Bobby Drake, Iceman, which is the funniest and best thing anyone ever did with the character.

Claremont and Byrne created Pyro for Days of Future Past in 1981, part of the new Brotherhood assembled to assassinate Senator Robert Kelly, and he was memorable immediately because his power looked spectacular on Byrne's pages. The Freedom Force years turned that flamboyance into something stranger: a costumed terrorist on a government payroll. He was among the highest-profile characters Marvel killed with the Legacy Virus, and his 2019 resurrection during the Krakoa era gave him the rarest thing a second-string villain gets, which is a genuine second act rather than a nostalgia cameo.