STORY: "A Boykie and his Dinges" (23 pages)  Maggott tells Wolverine his origin story.

What you need to know:
Because you demanded it - the origin of Maggott!  Deep breath...

Japheth is from Ottoshoop, South Africa, and he's got four siblings.  His powers began to emerge when he was 12, financially crippling his family as they struggled to pay for treatment.  He tries to sacrifice himself by driving into the desert to die, but accidentally takes his younger brother Daniel with him.  Fortunately, Magneto turns up to rescue him and helps get the maggotts out of his body for the first time.  Magneto takes him home, where they find that Japheth's eldest brother Lot, a journalist, has been killed while covering an anti-apartheid riot.  Magneto takes excessively violent retribution against the humans, and Japheth rejects him because he's appalled by the violence.  And that's basically it.

The year isn't specified, but the fact that South African troops are violently putting down anti-apartheid demonstrations suggests the late 1980s - in other words, roughly a decade before the story was published.  That would place Maggott in his early twenties, which is plausible.

Maggott explains that Eeny and Meany are his digestive system, and that he can't eat without them.  We're told that they return to his body by eating their way into his stomach, and that he can feel them wriggling inside.  Cute, huh?  Some of the impact is lost because Maggott explains this in South African slang.

The title loosely translates as "A Little Boy and his Thingies."

Storm finally picks up her package from the Salem Center post office.  It's a magical message from Ororo's mentor Ainet - a character we haven't actually seen before - asking her to come back to Africa and battle Ananasi.  That leads into next issue's story.

Comments:
Joe Kelly inherited the character of Maggott as an ill-formed collection of ideas - he's South African, he knows Magneto, and he's got these two maggot things.  This is his attempt to hammer them into a origin story.  To Kelly's credit, he manages to get something reasonably coherent out of the remit, but it's such a weird set of elements that there's only so much he can do.  It hangs together nicely enough, but there's no getting away from the big problem: Kelly wants Maggott's power to be tragic, but it's just too silly and weird for that to work.  The body horror angle works a little better, but it's hampered by the fact that the artist can't really show what's going on (and, as mentioned above, the dialogue is unhelpfully written in South African slang).

Still, it's as good as you could reasonably expect, and it would have been a serviceable origin story going forward.  Of course, it doesn't really explain why Maggott was looking for Magneto, but Kelly might have been planning to get around to that later - we'll never know.

The cover is by Adam Pollina, who was very keen on distorted and twisted figures at this period, but really does seem to be overdoing it here.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Storm, Cannonball and Marrow
Maggott (also in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding Uncanny X-Men #345)
Cecilia Reyes (last in Excalibur vol 1 #121)
Wolverine (between Wolverine vol 2 #130 and Uncanny X-Men #356)
The Beast (last in Excalibur vol 1 #121; next in Uncanny X-Men #356-358, then in Uncanny X-Men/Fantastic Four '98, then in issue #79)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Eeny and Meany

VILLAINS
The Shadow King (behind the scenes; last behind the scenes in issue #73)
Magneto (in flashback between X-Men vol 1 #18 and Avengers vol 1 #47)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Ainet (behind the scenes; last behind the scenes in issue #73)
The Salem Center postmaster
Maggott's parents, Lot, Daniel (Maggott's brothers) and two other siblings (first and only appearance for all; in flashback only)

Written: 31 May 2006

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