Today, learn how a few years before Ororo Munroe made her debut as the X-Man known as Storm, her co-creator had a very different Ororo appear in a comic.
This is "Just Like the Time Before," a feature where I examine instances from comic book history where comic book creators did early versions of later, notable comic book characters and plot ideas. Essentially, the "test runs" for later, more famous characters and stories.
Let's forget the Bible for a moment (still probably the #1 source of name ideas for kids), people generally tend to be highly influenced by popular culture when it comes to naming their children. For instance, starting in 2014, people started to get really into Game of Thrones and using Daenerys Targaryen' nickname, Khaleesi, as a name for their kid...
It was never a CRAZY popular name, but it was pretty darn popular there for a while, pushing past all sorts of traditional girls' names (interestingly, Daenerys or even "Dany" never got that popular). However, that wasn't nearly the same sort of thing that happened with Arya Stark from Game of Thrones. The name, Arya, had existed as a male name for a while, but it wasn't until George R.R. Martin that the name became a girl's name and it BLEW UP in popularity and is still going strong.
In 2021, for instance, it was in the top HUNDRED girl's name in the United States! That's crazy! That means thousands of little girls are being named Arya every year. By "crazy," I just mean "surprising," as I have no specific issue with the name.
SUPERHERO NAMES ALSO INFLUENCE BABY NAMES, TOO
Superhero stories are also a common area to find names, as well, like when Harley Quinn was introduced and the name "Harley" exploded in popularity...
Harley is not as popular as Arya, but it's somewhere in the 200s for most popular girl names in the States.
One name that isn't AS popular, but is still being used out there (somewhere around the 16,000th most popular name for a girl in 2021) is Ororo, which existed as a term before Giant Size X-Men #1, but Ororo Munroe has obviously popularized the name...
We first see Ororo named in Giant-Sized X-Men #1 (by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum), as she uses her powers in Kenya...
It also here that we first learned that her name was Ororo, but obviously the Munroe part didn't happen until Chris Claremont took over writing the All-New, All-Different X-Men from Len Wein...
Now let's go back a few years to 1971 and see the FIRST time that Wein used the name "Ororo" for a woman from an African country.
WHO WAS THE FIRST ORORO?
Phantom Stranger was a fascinating series where the Phantom Stranger would mostly be used as a sort of facilitator to tell interesting fantasy stories with a bit of a tint of horror to them. Check out the stunning Neal Adams cover for the issue, Phantom Stranger #15 (written by Wein from a story idea of his editor, Joe Orlando, and drawn by the great Jim Aparo)...
John Kwelli was the son of the Chief of an unnamed African nation and he had left his country to pursue a life in America as a successful cybernetic scientist, but when his father took ill, John returned home to see his father before he died, but on the way, he got into a train accident. The Phantom Stranger pulled him from the wreckage, but John then passed out. He awoke to see Ororo, his former love, who had also went to America to study, but she actually returned home unlike John...
John is then berated by a local wise man, who talks about their local god, Chuma, and how John disgraced them by abandoning his family...
An oil company discovered oil in the are and they want the village to sell to them, even if it means them all losing their ancestral home. They don't want to, but they don't know how to fight back. John comes up with an idea. He builds a robot that uses an artificial intelligence and the robot comes to the people AS the god Chuma, inspiring the people to fight back (and also training them)...
We also learned that the wise man was secretly working with the oil company. Okay, so things progress, but it appears that John did TOO good of a job designing Chuma, as the robot has developed human feelings and that includes falling in love with Ororo! when she rejects him, he leaves them to their doom...
The Phantom Stranger then convinces Chuma to return and he rallies the people again the soldiers sent by the oil company, but then his human side once again kicks in and he decides that he will eliminate John as a love rival by killing him during battle. The villagers succeed in defending their home, but Ororo saw what Chuma did and she lets everyone know that he is a murderer...
They stone their "god" to death and he is destroyed and Phantom Stranger gets to give us one of those good old lessons about not messing with gods as a man or something like that...
Interestingly, since the story is about oil, it is worth noting that Ororo actually MEANS "oil" in the Nigeran Yourba language (but more like vegetable oil). In any event, I assume that Wein came across the word somewhere and that Wein liked how it sounded and so we got an iconic comic book name out of it, just re-used a few years later for a slightly more famous comic book character.
Thanks to reader David B. for suggesting this story (he suggested it for a Look Back, but I think it works well here). Okay, folks, you MUST have some suggestions for other characters and/or plots that fit into this theme! So drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com for future installments!