Sunspot

Roberto da Costa was a Brazilian soccer prodigy and heir to one of the largest fortunes in the hemisphere when racist thugs attacked him and his girlfriend at a match. His mutation triggered in that moment, and it is a spectacular one: he absorbs solar energy and converts it into raw strength, his body going pitch black and edged in solar corona, a silhouette that reads as a hole punched in the daylight. The origin matters. Sunspot's power arrived as a response to bigotry, and he has never once pretended otherwise or apologised for the arrogance he built on top of it.

He was a founding New Mutant, then a founding member of Cable's X-Force, then something nobody saw coming. Roberto took the Black King's throne in the Hellfire Club, then simply bought A.I.M. outright with his own money and rebranded Marvel's flagship terrorist think tank as Avengers Idea Mechanics, running it through New Avengers and the U.S.Avengers as a legitimate super-team with a hostile-takeover origin story. The Krakoa era found him doing diplomacy on Arakko, arguing mutant politics on Mars. For a character introduced as the rich kid with a temper, that is a remarkable amount of range.

Sunspot debuted in Marvel Graphic Novel #4 in 1982, one of the original New Mutants, and Marvel has never quite let him settle. Claremont and Bob McLeod built him as the team's hot-tempered aristocrat; the 1990s pushed him into X-Force and then onto the Hellfire Club's throne as Black King; Al Ewing's New Avengers in 2015 gave him the defining bit, an X-Man with enough money to purchase A.I.M. and staff it with Avengers, continued in U.S.Avengers in 2017. Krakoa sent him to Arakko for interplanetary politics. He is one of very few 1980s teen-team characters who genuinely grew up rather than being frozen at eighteen.