In Kurt’s case, he was introduced with a grab bag of powers that really had nothing to do with each other—but had everything to do with him not having been created as a human mutant. Dave intended him to be an interdimensional demon, and when Len was shopping for new mutants he saw Dave’s drawings and loved them. Who wouldn’t?

But over the first few months of our introduction to Kurt his catalogue kept expanding. And one such addition was the “revelation” that he was invisible in shadow.

Even setting aside the fact that that was surely something we’d have seen before, when Chris told me about it my first question was “Does that mean he’s invisible at night?” No satisfactory answer.

So, I avoided that power, except for one instance where I used it to help define the abilities of a character I’d created—in a scene that Chris deliberately scripted in a manner other than what I intended, a source of frustration even to this day.

So, no, no fan I of this particular “mutant power”.

It came down to Dave wanting his avatar to have all the good toys.

This was at the beginning of a period when the character names didn’t have to have any connection to what they did or what they looked like. (The tale is told that Stan, introduced to the ANAD D-Men, assumed Storm was Banshee and Nightcrawler was Wolverine.)

The Image boys took this to its nadir.