The Brood are a fictional race of insectoid, parasitic, extraterrestrial beings appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, especially Uncanny X-Men. Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum, they first appeared in The Uncanny X-Men #155 (March 1982).[2]

Concept and creation

According to Dave Cockrum, the Brood were originally conceived to serve as generic subordinates for the main villain of The Uncanny X-Men #155: "We had Deathbird in this particular story and Chris [Claremont] had written into the plot 'miscellaneous alien henchmen.' So I had drawn Deathbird standing in this building under construction and I just drew the most horrible looking thing I could think of next to her."[3]

Biology

Physical characteristics

The Brood are an alien race of insectoid beings. They are a specialized race, one that has evolved to reproduce and consume any available resources.[4][self-published source?] They are sadistic creatures that enjoy the suffering they intentionally cause others, especially the terror their infection causes their hosts.

Despite their resemblance to insects, the Brood have endoskeletons as well as exoskeletons. Also unlike insects, they have fanged jaws instead of mandibles. Their skulls are triangular and flat, with a birthmark (such as the battle axe which is most common in broodlings but are different for each Brood) between their large eyes. Their two front legs are actually long tentacles they can use to manipulate objects.

Due to their natural body armor and teeth, the Brood are very dangerous in combat. In addition, they have stingers that can deliver either paralyzing or killing poison.

Reproduction

The parasitic Brood reproduce asexually and therefore have no clear divisions of gender. They reproduce by forcibly implanting their eggs into other sentient organism. Each host can only support one egg. Upon hatching, the host dies as the Brood egg releases enzymes into the bloodstream to cause mutation. At the same time, the Broodling begins to psychically attack its host, taking control of its mind, absorbing its genetic material and incorporating all its knowledge and memories into the Brood. They appear to be capable of even infecting demons or someone who is possessed by a demon like Ghost Rider.[5]

They use a hive mind to pass memory to their hosts, which also passes an individual's knowledge, given to a broodling, to the hive and back to the queen, meaning newborn brood know what any member of the race knows. Until the embryo gains the host's body the embryo can only gain temporary control of the host, often without the host noticing as the host is unaware when it loses control.

If the host possesses any genetic powers, the resultant Brood will inherit them. The persona of the host once the Brood is "born" appears to be extinguished, but in some cases, the host's will may be strong enough to survive and coexist with the Brood's.[6] However it is implied that hosts with advanced healing ability are unable to turn, for example when an egg was implanted in Deadpool, instead of turning into a Brood, a small Brood burst out of Deadpool's body.[7]

Brood also have the ability to morph into their host's original form, and a hybrid form with characteristics of both the host and the Brood body.

More recently the Brood had demonstrate the abily to use their hosts as pregnancy carriers instead of to physically transform them.

Civilization

The Brood have a civilization based on the typical communal insect societies, such as those of the bees and ants. The Empress is the absolute ruler, while the Queens lead individual Brood colonies and the "sleazoids" do all the work; despite their evil, they never rebel against their Queens, perhaps due to the latter's telepathic abilities. However, the Queens have no allegiance to each other. Some of the roles have proven to be flexible.

Empress - The Empress is the top tier of the Brood caste system and houses the entire hive mind of the species. She exercises almost total control over her progeny, including determining which Brood become Queen and which remain Warrior-Prime. There is only one Brood Empress at a time, and she is massive. She shares several physical characteristics with her offspring. She has large yellow eyes, a scaly brown hide, and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. However, she possesses several physical traits that distinguish her from all other Brood. While Warriors-Prime have forked skulls, the Brood Empress has two scarlet horns protruding from the top of her head, with an armor plate at their base. She also has eight whiskers, seemingly unique to her physiology. Jagged spikes protrude from every part of her body. In addition to being larger than her offspring, she also has a large ovipositor through which she lays eggs. Her relative size and degree of mobility are unknown. However, she possesses vast telepathic powers, through which she shares a mind-link with the entire Brood hive, although she cannot completely control the actions of her subordinates. When individual Brood rebel, she cannot telepathically force them to assimilate. In these scenarios, she has the renegade offspring destroyed with the help of her assassins/personal guard, the Firstborn. The Empress was one of the casualties of the Annihilation Wave which left the Brood's on the brink of extinction[8] and with her death one of the survivor Brood Queens was selected to take her place among the hierarchy as a Brood Queen is seen among the Galactic Council, where she represents the entire Brood race and even goes by the name of Queen of the Brood.[9]

Firstborn - Considered themselves as the "pure" Brood, they are the most trusted agents of the Empress, existing solely to attack and destroy. The Empress births them herself and dispatches them to quell rebellious Brood Queens and other conflicts that require only fighters. Because they are not born of hosts, they do not possess the Warrior-Prime ability to conceal their appearance by shifting into their host-forms. For this reason, they are used not to subvert and infect, but merely to destroy. The transportation they use to travel to other planets dissolves upon reaching its destination, but this poses no problem, as the Firstborn are ordered to execute themselves upon completing their missions. The Firstborn are larger than common Brood Warriors-Prime, and green instead of brown. They have six limbs: two sets of arms and one set of legs. They have a spear-tipped, prehensile tail, but unlike their Warrior-Prime sisters, they have no tentacles. They also have durable, spiked armor plating on their shoulders, fingertips, tails, elbows, forearms, knees, and, most prominently, on the crowns of their heads. They are extremely durable, disproportionately agile, and immensely strong. Unlike the Warriors-Prime, they do not have wings. However, through some other means, possibly technological, the Firstborn have the ability to teleport. Their teleportation abilities are likely restricted to relatively short distances, as the Firstborn travel over interstellar distances using other methods.

Brood Queens - The Queens fulfill the mental command of the Empress and can communicate with their spawn by telepathy, even across interstellar distances. Their heads and thoraxes are relatively the same size, and they have the same amount of limbs as their offspring, but their abdomens are much larger, presumably because they require the capacity to carry eggs. The Queen's tail functions as a venom-filled stinger, not an ovipositor. The Queens are capable of implanting eggs, which can be of the Warrior-Prime or Queen variety, into hosts for the Brood Hive. Sometimes, the Queen can also lay a King egg variety, but this is rarer. There are two type of Brood Queens, the small Dwarf Brood Queen, are Queens that due to their size and strength are raised among the bottom level of the Brood, and the slightly larger Brood Queens which are also known as the Great Mothers, Mother-Queens and Brood Imperiatrix. The Queens lead individual colonies, which usually encompass entire planets, they also control which of their offspring become Warriors-Prime, and which become new Queens. For example, the Great Mother from Sleazeworld implanted the Shi’ar warrior Fang with a Warrior-Prime embryo, but implanted the rest of the X-Men with Queen embryos, a discrepancy that suggests a certain amount of control on the Queen's end. More so when the Empress dies, both types of Queens can take the place of the Empress, but for such a feat, a ritual must be done which consist of finding the perfect mate and breed with him in order to produce the Firstborns.[10]

Broodlings - As the bottom level of the Brood caste system, the Broodlings were nicknamed "sleazoids" by Kitty Pryde but are also known as Warriors-Prime or Drones, they are the most common of the Brood. They do all the labor and most of the fighting, and are organized into several different roles, among them Weaponeer, Clan-Master, Hunt-Master, Huntsmen, Tech Handlers, and Scholars. They resemble large insects and can vary in size. They generally retain the size of their hosts. Their hides are brown and covered in armored scales. Their bodies consist of three sections: a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. The forked crowns of their heads extend backward, well over the length of the thorax. Each Brood has a unique black figure on its forehead, almost like a birthmark or a fingerprint. They have large, yellow eyes on both sides of their heads, large mouths, and one row of spiky teeth on the top and bottom of the jaw. Each Brood has six limbs; two tentacles that function as forearms and two rear sets of jointed limbs. Their tentacles are dexterous enough to fire weapons and pilot ships. The Brood Warriors-Prime also have wings and fly as a primary means of travel. Their abdomens taper into a two-pronged, functional stinger. The most common method of creating a Brood is through infection of a host, and this is how all Warriors-Prime are birthed. The Brood lays its eggs at the back of the necks of its victims since everything the eggs need to gestate, including all 31 nerve segments and access to the carotid and vertebral arteries, rests at the top of the spinal column. After a Queen implants her eggs into a host, the egg splices itself to the host's nervous system and rewrites its DNA into that of Brood. Upon the egg's hatching, the host undergoes transformation into a Brood Warrior-Prime. The Warrior-Prime retains the genetic memory of its host, enabling it to access the host's personality, access any of the abilities contained in the host's genetic code, and even revert to its host body when it needs to conceal itself. It can also use a transitional form between the Brood and the host, giving it access to the best abilities from each form.

Brood King - This unique male Brood is a rarity and even considered a mutation in the Brood society and is created when a King egg is implanted in its host. The first known Brood King was Grand Admiral Devros of the Kree who was willingly infected by the Brood. Unlike those infected with Queen's or Drone's eggs, the Brood King cannot infect others and only suffers a slight transformation (the skin becomes scaly, the eyes enlarge and the mouth becomes full of razor-sharp teeth) and maintains much of its original personality.[11] It's assumed that like the Empress there is only one Brood King at a time; when Devros was killed by Mar-Vell, who himself had been infect by the Queen, Mar-Vell briefly proclaimed himself the new "Brood King", but the egg was destroyed before it could fully claim him.[12] It was later implied that the King-type egg is actually a natural response of the Brood to the experiments done 8000 years ago by the Black Judges, a secret science wing of the Kree Accusers. Understanding the Brood's volatile nature, they forcibly implanted them with a patriarchal element through a genetic engineering device which, when active, can disrupt the species' matriarchy, take control of them, and use them as weapons to disrupt rival advanced civilizations.[13] The device is an egg-shaped artifact which must always be protected by a containment shield and under no circumstances should the device be removed from it, because inside it lays the potential for whoever controls the item to become the dominant member of the species, giving them control over the legions of Brood that exist in the universe. This leads every Brood Queen to send their swarms in pursuit of it, to prevent any loss of their power in the Brood hive-mind.[14] The device was eventually cracked open and eaten by Broo, a young mutant Brood drone that developed intelligence and independent thought. The properties of the egg were then transferred to Broo, giving him inherent authority over every Brood hive in existence, at least for the next 5 to 10 Kree cycles before the effects wear off.