Adam Warlock began as “Him,” a genetically engineered perfect being created by the Enclave in their Beehive laboratory and introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four #66–67 (1967). Still forming inside a cocoon, he sensed that his makers meant to use him as a weapon, emerged gold-skinned and immensely powerful, wrecked their complex, and fled. After a clash with Thor he sealed himself in another cocoon and was found by the High Evolutionary, who was finishing Counter-Earth, an artificial world meant to be free of evil. Roy Thomas and Gil Kane relaunched the character in Marvel Premiere #1 (April 1972) as Warlock: the Evolutionary gave him that name, affixed the Soul Gem to his brow, and sent him to save Counter-Earth from the Man-Beast. The planet’s people added the first name Adam. The early solo series cast him as a messianic wanderer in a golden-red costume, preaching against tyranny until the book was cancelled mid-arc and hastily resolved in The Incredible Hulk.

Jim Starlin reinvented him in Strange Tales and Warlock (1975), turning the messiah into a cosmic fatalist. Warlock discovered that his own future self had become the Magus, despotic head of the Universal Church of Truth. With Pip the Troll, Gamora, and an uneasy alliance with Thanos, he erased that timeline by traveling forward and taking the soul of his dying future self into the Soul Gem, preventing the Magus’s birth. Soon after, Thanos gathered the Infinity Gems to extinguish Earth’s sun; Warlock’s spirit erupted from the Soul Gem during the battle in Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2 and turned the Titan to stone. For years Adam remained inside Soul World, the pocket universe within the gem, until Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet (1991) pulled him back into the living universe.

When Thanos used the completed Gauntlet to erase half of all life, Warlock escaped Soul World, claimed the Gauntlet himself, and briefly became a logical, almost emotionless god. The Living Tribunal judged him unfit for omnipotence; he surrendered the gems and founded the Infinity Watch, keeping the Soul Gem while giving the others to Gamora, Pip, Drax, Moondragon, and—secretly—Thanos. Purging his own extremes of good and evil later spawned the Goddess and a new Magus, who led the Infinity War. Across later cosmic events Warlock has died, cocooned, and been reborn repeatedly, served with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and remained the Soul Gem’s most famous bearer: an artificial man forever arguing with his own future, standing between Thanos and the end of everything.