Empress Shalla-Bal

Empress Shalla-Bal carries the weight of royalty right there in her title, a Marvel creation who stepped onto the cosmic stage in 1990 courtesy of Alan Grant and James T. Sherman. She inhabits one of comics' grandest neighborhoods — the Silver Surfer's universe — where she shares pages with figures as towering as Galactus himself and the Fantastic Four's Susan Storm Richards. Her presence across nearly three decades of Marvel publishing, from her Copper Age debut through 2018, speaks to a character who earned her place in the cosmic tapestry, and her inclusion in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Master Edition marks her as a figure the House of Ideas considered worth cataloguing for keeps.