In the '90s, the X-Men were the biggest thing in comics. They had started the decade with the best selling comic ever, 1991's X-Men #1, and just went up from there, dominating the sales charts. Printing books with an X on the cover was like printing money and Marvel liked money.
The team itself would go down as one of the most iconic team line-ups of all time, with a roster that consisted of characters with all kinds of power that gelled perfectly. Now, that said, not every member was a winner. Take Marrow and Maggott, for example. They're widely regarded as some of the worst new X-Men members of the '90s. Which is the worst, though? This list is going to lay that out.
10 Marrow: Started Out As A Villain Cliché
When Marrow first appeared, she led a militant faction of Morlocks called the Gene Nation. Their whole thing was committing terrorist acts against a world that forced "ugly" mutants like them underground. They fought the X-Men, Marrow dueled Storm, and Storm had to kill her. The end.
Not really though, as she came back and would join up with the team post - "Operation: Zero Tolerance." Her joining the team was just another example of a villain changing their stripes and it was just so cliche and unneeded.
9 Maggott: Slang As Personality
Back when he was writing the book, Chris Claremont liked to make his international characters use words and slang from their native tongue. It felt sort of authentic, as people who often have English as a second language lapse into their own.
Maggott was of South African descent and the best way writers thought they could convey this was by peppering his speech with Afrikaans slang, à la Claremont. Unfortunately, they did this in lieu of giving him any other identifiers of him being South African and it's one of many things that didn't work about the character.
8 Marrow: Another Surly X-Man
So, Marrow joined the team and right off the bat, she was mean to everyone all of the time. It was her main personality trait. It sort of made sense because she had just been trying to kill them all but it was also just annoying and cliche.
Did the X-Men really need another surly mutant? They already had Wolverine, who was going feral at the time and being even meaner than usual. Plus, Marrow just came off as a kid with a chip on her shoulder instead of someone who had legitimate issues with her teammates and the world.
7 Maggott: Another Mysterious X-Man
When Maggott showed up, no one knew anything about him. He was this weird blue jacked guy with two robotic looking slug things on his shoulders and, to be honest, he looked kind of cool and intriguing, especially when Joe Madureira drew him.
However, he served as a tried and true X-Men cliché - the mysterious X-Man. Now, this can work sometimes but the problem is once this mystery was solved, it wasn't interesting.
6 Marrow: Her Resurrection
When Marrow was a member of the Gene Nation, her master plan involved detonating a bomb and the only way to stop it was to rip her heart out, which would turn off the detonator. Storm agonized over killing her but with no other options, she did the deed.
It was a cool moment full of gravitas... and then they decided to bring Marrow back. How did they explain her returning from the dead? Her mutant powers, which, by the way, were that her bones grow uncontrollably and that she can pull them out and use them as weapons, somehow gave her a second heart. Yep. It didn't make any sense then either.
5 Maggott: It Took Them So Long To Explain His Powers
So, Maggott's powers were that his digestive system came to life as the two maggots that follow him around. They would eat stuff, and he would absorb what they ate and gain superhuman strength and such. These powers are kind of novel and could have been worked with.
However, the writers kept the mystery of his powers going for so long that by the time they were fully defined, readers kind of didn't care. It was the wrong thing to keep a mystery.
4 Marrow: Sharp Things Are Cool
There are lots of hallmarks about '90s character design that are looked back on with derision today but one of them is that so many characters introduced during the decade had sharp things as weapons. It seemed like in the '90s, every new character had a sword or a knife or something sharp.
Marrow's powers gave her built in sharp things to use and, by '90s standards, that should have made her cool, right? It didn't work out that way because readers were already getting wise to this trope.
3 Maggott: They Didn't Play Up The Body Horror
Maggott, on paper, had a whole lot of potential but the writers at the time just never went all in on it. His powers were very different from anything that came before and could have been used to tell some interesting body horror type stories with the character.
It would have set him apart from his fellow X-Men and brought an interesting facet to the character. They did exactly one story that sort of played up this aspect, but after that was over it was never mentioned it again.
2 Marrow: They Focused On Her Too Much At First
The biggest problem with Marrow is that when she joined the team, the writers spent so much time with her right away and it put all of her flaws right there out in the open. Readers couldn't miss the fact that there wasn't very much too her beyond being a surly ex-villain with sharp things.
They should have kept her in the background a bit more, establishing some things about her that fans could get into and empathize with instead of just making her into a stereotypical hardcore '90 character with sharp weapons and a bad attitude.
1 Maggott: They Never Gave Him Anything To Do
Maggott had a very short shelf life as an X-Man. It felt like after they revealed the mystery of his powers and his origin he just sort of disappeared. Not faded into the background or anything like that - just that he was gone.
This is a shame too because there really was a lot that could be done with the character and his strange, novel powers could have fueled some very interesting stories. At the time, there was a writer change on this books and this could have been the reason for this. Regardless, it was a wasted moment.