Dr. Bolivar Trask

Few figures in Marvel's Silver Age canon cast a longer shadow than Dr. Bolivar Trask, who first menaced the pages of The X-Men #14 in 1965 — a Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation arriving at the very dawn of mutantkind's place in the Marvel Universe. His debut alongside Charles Xavier, Cyclops, Iceman, and the rest of that founding generation marks him as one of the original architects of the human-mutant conflict that would define X-Men storytelling for decades to come. With two key-issue appearances to his name and a presence that echoes across nearly fifty years of Marvel history, Trask is one of those characters whose importance to the mythology far outweighs his page count — a testament to how indelibly Lee and Kirby stamped him onto the DNA of the franchise from the very start.