Maggott's Maggots

Both on the page and off the page, Marvel Comics is slowly removing The X-Men from their lineup of properties because 20th Century Fox owns the film rights to The X-Men franchise. As more and more mutants fall into obscurity, I'd like to take the chance to introduce one of the oddest mutants out there. His name is Maggott and he is this week's Z-Lister.

Created by Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira in 1997's "Uncanny X-Men #345", Maggott was a mysterious new mutant who joined The X-Men just to find Magneto. He also looked really stupid in the 90's, but everyone looked stupid in the 90's. Doesn't help that Lobdell came up with him. Maggott kept his origin to himself, but eventually told Wolverine his story. He was once a boy named Japheth who lived in South Africa and was often sick, too sick to digest solid foods. Japheth ran away from home hoping to die in the wild and spare his family the worry over his health. However, he was found by Magneto who cut Japheth open and released the two large slugs from inside him. Magneto had studied Japheth from afar and discovered his mutation was that his digestive system was in the form of two sentient maggots. These maggots crawl out of Japheth's stomach, eat food, and then return to Japheth's body to transfer the nutrition gathered. Japheth refused to join Magneto's anti-human crusade, but after witnessing a group of white South Africans wipe out his village Japheth was forced to run away and find Magneto again. Not because Magneto's ideals reached him, but because his new form of eating still caused Japheth much pain. Along his travels he took the name Maggott and named his maggots Eany and Meany.

When he joined The X-Men, Maggott believed his maggots were starting to attack innocent people while he was asleep and almost turned himself over to the police, feeling responsible for what his maggots did. The X-Men discovered it was actually a group of demons committing these crimes and Maggott was released. Maggott was one of three characters almost possessed by the telepathic villain Shadow King. The telepathic hero Psylocke sealed Shadow King's mind away, but had to retire from being a hero because any use of her telepathy could've released Shadow King again. Which it did.

Maggott reappeared as a prisoner at Weapon X's concentration camp where he was experimented on and killed. However, one of Maggott's maggots escaped Weapon X and was eventually captured by evil mutant geneticist Mister Sinister. While this maggot stayed with Sinister, Maggott and his remaining maggot were revived by a villain named Selene to be part of her undead army of mutants. Maggott escaped this army and appeared both at a party at The Hellfire Club and as part of Cyclops' Million Mutant March.

I find Maggott to be yet another interesting character who fell through the cracks. His relationship with his sentient digestive system was really one-of-kind and if writers weren't so obsessed with writing the next great Wolverine or Cyclops story I could've seen Maggott taking off in some entertaining directions. What if one of his maggot's betrayed him? What if he developed more maggots? What if he died and his maggots became a new superhero duo? Weird ideas like that are easy to explore in a book where aliens, demons and time travel are all weekend activities. And hey, diversity! All and all I actually like Maggott as a concept and a character and hopefully a writer comes along who has the same opinion and really does something cool with this oddball X-Men.

Thanks for reading.

Drinking game: Take a shot every time you see the word "Maggot".

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