List of Marvel Comics characters: A

A

The young woman known only as A was half of the mercenary duo known as the Lady Killers. A and her partner T assisted Mister X's bodyguard Blok in testing Wolverine prior to the feral X-Man's meeting with Mister X.

A-Bomb

Aardwolf

Aardwolf (Chon Li) is a mutant in the Marvel Universe.

The character, created by Fabian Nicieza, Ken Lashley and Fred Hayes, first appeared in Night Thrasher #3 (October 1993).

Within the context of the stories, Aardwolf establishes himself as a crime lord on the island of Madripoor. He tricked Night Thrasher into helping him defend his empire by defeating Midnight's Fire.

Abominable Snowman

The Abominable Snowman (Carl Hanson) is a character in the Marvel Universe.

The character, created by Jack Kirby and an uncredited writer, first appeared in Tales to Astonish #13 (November 1960).

Within the context of the stories, Carl Hanson is an adventurer who steals a photograph of the Abominable Snowman and attempts to track the creature down. Not accepting advice from others that the photo is cursed, he slowly transforms into the creature during his search.

Morlocks (comics)

The Morlocks are a group of several fictional mutant characters appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The characters are usually depicted as being associated with the X-Men in the Marvel Universe. Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Paul Smith, they were named after the subterranean race of the same name in H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine. They first appeared as a group in Uncanny X-Men #169 (May 1983). (Caliban appeared prior to that (in Uncanny X-Men #148), but he was not yet a member of the Morlocks.)

Due to a series of tragedies, the original Morlocks no longer reside in subterranean New York City (except Marrow, who was one of the original Morlocks as a child), although a violent splinter cell Gene Nation and a comparable group called Those Who Live in Darkness have emerged. Similar groups, called Morlocks by readers and/or the X-Men themselves, have appeared under Chicago and London.

The Morlocks appeared occasionally in the 1990s X-Men animated series and its successor X-Men: Evolution.

Ape

Apes (Hominoidea) are a branch of Old World tailless anthropoid catarrhine primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. They are distinguished from other primates by a wider degree of freedom of motion at the shoulder joint as evolved by the influence of brachiation. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.

Xanthosoma

Xanthosoma is a genus of flowering plants in the arum family, Araceae. The genus is native to tropical America but widely cultivated and naturalized in other tropical regions. Several are grown for their starchy corms, an important food staple of tropical regions, known variously as malanga, otoy, otoe, cocoyam (or new cocoyam), tannia, tannier, yautía, macabo, ocumo, macal, taioba, dasheen, quequisque, ʻape and (in Papua New Guinea) as Singapore taro (taro kongkong). Many other species (including especially X. roseum) are used as ornamental plants, and in popular horticultural literature are known as ‘ape or elephant ear (from the purported resemblance of the leaf to an elephant's ear), although the latter name is sometimes also applied to members with similar appearance and uses in the closely related genera Caladium, Colocasia (i.e., taro), and Alocasia. The leaves of most Xanthosoma species are 40-200 cm long, sagittate (arrowhead-shaped) or subdivided into three or as many as 18 segments. Unlike the leaves of Colocasia, those of Xanthosoma are usually not peltate- the upper v-notch extends into the point of attachment of the leaf petiole to the blade.

Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack.

Data file compression is employed in order to reduce bandwidth, file transfer time, or storage requirements. A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to the Monkey's Audio format can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. As with the FLAC and Apple Lossless format, files encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size, with data transfer rates and bandwidth requirements being reduced accordingly.

Monkey's Audio's advantages are better compression rates compared to FLAC and WavPack, as well as multithreading/multicore support. Monkey's Audio main drawbacks are the fact that it employs a symmetric algorithm, meaning the decoding takes comparable resources to encoding, which makes it unsuitable for all but the fastest portable players (via Rockbox firmware), and that it has limited support on software platforms other than Windows; on other platforms only decoding is officially supported by third-party programs. Although the original source code is freely available, the license is not considered to be an open source one. A GPL version of the decoder has been independently written for Rockbox and then included in ffmpeg.