ALTERNATE VERSIONS
In the Age of Apocalypse, the Shadow King fell into Apocalypse’s employ as he recovered from the first encounter with Charles Xavier. Like a genie in a bottle, Farouk was preserved as a telepathic advisor for the Eternal One, reaching out through various hosts and pawns to keep eyes on Apocalypse’s conquered nation. In particular, he recognized the massive power signature emitting from Nate Grey somewhere in America and tagged along on the Pale Riders mission to Antarctica in order to sabotage the haven of Avalon.
In the Ultimate universe, Amahl Farouk was a young thief and telepath who partnered with Ororo and Yuri. Amahl and Ororo shared a relationship, although he was also hooking up with Yuri on the side. Ororo’s growing mutant powers accidentally struck Amahl with lightning, leaving him supposedly brain dead. In fact, his consciousness had merely been severed from his body, and Farouk wandered the mindscape for years. He met psychic parasites called the Brood and his distorted mind assumed a new identity as the Shadow King. Farouk eventually returned to attack Storm’s mind and threatened her and the X-Men as he sought revenge.
In Mutant X, the Shadow King was a perilous threat to the X-Men led by Magneto and Charles Xavier. Professor X supposedly defeated Shadow King but, in actuality, he absorbed the psychic might of his opponent and was corrupted by it. After some time in seclusion, an unstable Charles Xavier returned to kill Juggernaut, and inadvertently wiped the mind of Magneto’s lover Moira MacTaggert in the process. Driven from the X-Men, Xavier became a new Onslaught as he tried to add the minds of every person on the planet to his gestalt consciousness with the Shadow King.
During Excalibur’s Cross-Time Caper, they visited a world where Amahl Farouk was first referred to as the Shadow King. Here, he ruled in shadows from the Hellfire Club, secretly controlling the Black and White royalty as his puppets. In this reality, the Revolutionary War was fought and lost, the founding fathers hung as traitors. Farouk amused himself by lending his skills to a revolution planned by Tony Stark, a rogue member of the Sons of Liberty who still sought freedom for the Americas from the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
In What If..? (2nd series) #32-33, Dark Phoenix was stripped of her power instead of being killed, and therefore continued to live a lie unwittingly as Jean Grey. Mastermind came to take revenge on the powerless “Jean,” unaware that he was being manipulated by the Shadow King. The psychic entity wanted the raw potential of Jean’s infant daughter Rachel Summers as his host, and murdered Jean to abduct her child. However, killing the Phoenix Force only reminded her she wasn’t mortal to begin with. The re-powered Phoenix followed Shadow King to Muir Island, where he used Eric the Red’s old equipment to age Rachel into a viable host. The Shadow King sparred with the Phoenix Force until the cosmic force stopped holding back and consumed the telepathic parasite utterly.
In What If..? (2nd series) #46, Charles Xavier returned to Earth before the Shadow King consolidated his hold on Muir Island. Xavier cleansed Moira and the others of this psychic intrusion, but this “defeat” held benefits for Farouk. The self-important Xavier didn’t bother to identify the cause of the mental attacks, allowing Farouk to remain in the shadows undetected. Furthermore, because Xavier returned before Cable took the New Mutants away to become X-Force, this meant the two men clashed directly, the soldier and the philosopher having different dreams for the X-Men. This led to a more violent severance between the New Mutants and the other X-Men, as well as an overall rise in mutant violence and anti-mutant sentiment on Earth. And in the shadows, Farouk grew fatter off of the hatred and fear.
In Nocturne’s reality, Wolverine was possessed by the Shadow King and attacked Professor Xavier. He succeeded in murdering Charles, but the psychic shockwave from Xavier’s death freed Logan’s mind and left him paralyzed. The Shadow King was apparently destroyed, and “Professor W” went on to lead the X-Men as penance for his crime.
In X-Men Forever, the Storm who returned to adulthood after the X-Tinction Agenda was a bio-synth construct created in Genosha. This unstable version of Ororo interacted badly with the Shadow King’s raw malevolence on Muir Island, leading to her being thoroughly corrupted even after shaking Farouk’s influence. This led to a new villain for the X-Men dubbed “Perfect Storm,” who seduced and then arranged the death of T’Challa to make herself Queen of Wakanda.
The Resurrection of Magneto #3 opened the doors for the Shadow King and various past adversarial forces to all be aspects of the same fundamental malevolence. The trickster should never be believed without caution, but there may be an element of truth in his tale. The Adversary is a trickster god, a demon who worships primal chaos and destruction. Next was Annihilation, a similar demonic force that threatened the one-land Okkara millennia ago from the extra-dimensional point of Amenth. Annihilation already hinted at a personal history with Storm months earlier, odd for Amenth’s deity but certainly expected for the Shadow King or the Adversary.
The next three entities were more unusual, not trickster gods or chaos entities like the first, but specifically presented as various “opposites” of the Phoenix Force in the past. While the Phoenix is chaos and perpetual evolution, the First Fallen represented order as stagnation. Le Bete Noir and the Goblin Force were elemental symbiotic forces that clashed with the Phoenix eons ago, though the Goblin Force only did so in Earth-1298. These entities must exist independent of each other, in some fashion, as Le Bete Noir was imprisoned by the Phoenix within the still cooling Earth towards the beginning of time. A full explanation of their connection to the Shadow King remains to be clarified.