In The Shadow Of Sauron!

I was still a fairly untutored country boy in the summer of 1969, much agog with comics and especially Marvel Comics but little read beyond classics such as Frankenstein and the tales by Lovecraft. And it's entirely possible that my very first inkling of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien was in the pages of The Uncanny X-Men when Roy Thomas and Neal Adams conspired to create a new and rather hideous foe to battle the Marvel's merry mutant band in issues #60 and #61.  

Dr. Karl Lykos is an unscrupulous psychiatrist who is also a mutant who can tap into the power of others to feed his appetites. When he chances upon the lovely mutant Lorna Dane, he gets more than he bargained for and before you know it, he's bursting with power, power which transforms him into a bizarre human-pterodactyl hybrid with a potent hypnotic gaze. And as he says quite directly, he has the choice of good or evil and he chooses evil. He christens himself with a name lifted from the pages of popular literature. As he says "An evil so great...so monumental that only one name in all the annals of literature will contain it! The name of Tolkien's ultimate villain...the dark lord who personified evil...who was truly evil incarnate...the name of ...Sauron!!"

He flies into the night sky and confronts the Avenging Angel, who had just left the X-Men in a moment of frustration. 

The X-Men battle this new enemy, and they of course prevail in the end. The team is reunited, and Lykos is left to deal with the consequences of his violations and crimes. 

Sauron returns many years later in the pages of the revived X-Men comic under the auspices of Chris Claremont and John Byrne. The name was too good to waste. By this time, I was in college and had read the Lord of the Rings and realized that as vile a character as this modern Sauron was, he didn't hold a candle to Tolkien's original immortal necromancer who haunted the Third Age of Man in the pages of Tolkien's classic. 

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