Storm #7, by Murewa Ayodele and Lucciano Vecchio, is yet another stellar installment of the best “From the Ashes” solo title. Ayodele has been taking Storm to a whole other level, giving her the power of Eternity, all in order to save the universe from an all-devouring threat that is on its way. This is exactly the kind of story that Storm should be in the middle of; she’s long been the X-Men’s greatest leader and deserves her spot among Marvel’s top heroes. Storm #7 put her up against a very strange foe, but luckily she’s not alone. This is yet another brilliant part of the series, as Ayodele has brought back one of the most disrespected X-Men: Maggott.
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Ayodele has done more than just bring Maggot back, giving him a massive power upgrade as well, and bringing him into the rarefied air of the Omega-class mutants. Storm herself is a Omega-class mutant, but that makes sense for a mutant that can control the weather. Maggott’s powers are of a much different level than Storm’s, and his upgrade has been very surprising for fans who have been following Maggott since his debut in the mid ’90s, almost thirty years ago.
Maggot Was a Strange Addition to the X-Men
Maggott first appeared at an interesting time for the X-Men. It was the tail end of writer Scott Lobdell’s run on Uncanny X-Men, issue #345 to be exact, and Maggott showed up as the next big X-Men mystery character. This had become a tried and true method of making popular X-Men in the ’90s. It was the formula that had worked on Wolverine in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as Gambit and Bishop in the early ’90s. It was a really simple formula — introduce a cool looking new character who would sell readers because of what he looked like and then reap the benefits as the writers revealed more and more about him. However, the thing about Maggott that was quite different from Wolverine, Gambit, and Bishop is that the character never really intrigued readers all that much — he looked cool, but he was just a big blue guy with weird worms. By 1997, when the character had first appeared, X-Men readers had been in a cycle of diminishing returns, especially as Lobdell became the de facto head writer of the X-Men titles, for years now, and Maggott never had the hooks that earlier mystery box characters did. However, that doesn’t mean the character wasn’t actually pretty cool, because he was.
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Maggott was at first thought to be from Australia, with Lobdell peppering his speech with Australian slang. However, after Lobdell’s departure from the X-books, writer Joe Kelly decided to make Maggott South African. Maggott’s robotic maggots that followed him everywhere and ate everything were revealed to be his digestive system. Whenever he needed energy, he would release them and they’d eat anything. When they returned to his body, he gained superhuman strength and durability. It would also be revealed that Magneto was the one who found and nursed him to health after his power manifested. All of this was really cool, but the X-Men books of 1997 were a very different place than they’d been even a year before, and Maggott was soon dropped from the team when the roster was cut down to seven. Since then, Maggott has bounced around the mutant side of the Marvel Universe, dying and being resurrected, even showing up a few times in the Krakoa Era. All of that led him to his current place as Storm’s strong right hand.
Maggott Is Ready for His Close-Up
Maggott’s brief flirtation with the spotlight of the X-Men was disappointing, and that’s putting it nicely. The character was completely changed after his first appearance, and while he did get a starring role in several stories in X-Men (Vol. 2), he would be gone by issue #80, when Kelly and Uncanny X-Men writer Steve Seagle were forced to cut the X-Men down to a manageable number. Maggott, along with Cecelia Reyes — another new mutant introduced around the same time, was gone and his one chance at stardom went with it. Since then, Maggott has been stuck in the D-list.
Maggott has a small core of fans who love him, so this latest comeback has made them very happy. Maggott was always a cool character — his powers were unique and his South African backstory was ripe with potential — and fans are finally getting to see that in Storm. The power upgrade is the icing on the cake, making him a more powerful hero than he ever was before, and finally paying off what readers wanted from him all those years ago, when we first saw him drawn by ’90s X-Men superstar artist Joe Madureira. Hopefully, this role in Storm will lead Maggott to the place he should have been 28 years ago — the top of the mutant heap.
Storm #7 is on sale now.
