X-Men's Mothervine Drug Explained

Talking about his future plans for X-Men Blue, writer Cullen Bunn recently told CBR, "Because of things that happen in the space adventure, you’re going to see a completely new team of X-Men take shape. That team will be dealing with some major story threads, including the revelation of Mothervine, the strange secondary mutations that are popping up with some long-standing mutant characters."

You would certainly not be remiss if you were unfamiliar with the concept of Mothervine, especially since its origins go back a number of years and started in an entirely different universe that no longer exists! With that in mind, we're going to fill you in on what, exactly, the deal is with Mothervine, and why it seems likely that it will play a major role in the reshaping of the world of the X-Men in the main Marvel Universe.

It all started with the 2009 crossover event Ultimatum, which tore the Ultimate Universe apart. Almost all of the Ultimate U's X-Men, including Wolverine, were killed in battle with Magneto, who was also killed by the end of the storyline. The following year, Ultimatum writer Jeph Loeb began the next step in the future of the X-Men when he wrote Ultimate X with artist Arthur Adams...

In the series, Kitty Pryde, one of the few surviving members of the X-Men, visited Jimmy Hudson and left him a message from his birth father, Wolverine...

Jimmy would eventually join Kitty and Rogue to form a new team of X-Men, albeit one in a much different environment in the Ultimate Universe (where the reduced mutant populace left them in a precarious state, ripe for exploitation). They ended up living on a special reservation created for mutants. Any mutant outside the reservation was to be arrested at once.

In 2013, Cullen Bunn wrote a new Ultimate Comics Wolverine miniseries with artists David Messina and Gary Erskine. In the first issue, one of the remaining X-Men, the technopath (someone who can communicate mentally with technology) Black Box, revealed a secret message hidden in the message that Wolverine left for Jimmy...

Jimmy and Black Box left the relative safety of Reservation X and headed out to learn what this message was about.

As it turned out, it was part of an investigation that Wolverine was involved with years earlier involving Magda Lensherr, Jimmy's birth mother! Lensherr (code-named "The Witch of Wundagore") was working on the case for a rival private organization while Wolverine was working with S.H.I.E.L.D. The target of the investigation was a drug called Mothervine. The drug, when injected into pregnant women, would make sure that their children would not only be turned into latent mutants but that their latent powers could be weaponized. In other words, Mothervine helped to create the world's most effective sleeper agents. Children who didn't even know that they were mutants would be activated through an activation phrase "Mother is calling her children home", their powers would kick in and kill whoever their target was and then they would be returned to normal. Mutation on command!

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Lensherr managed to obtain a copy of the drug and she then injected it into herself to keep it safe. What she didn't know, however, was that she was already pregnant with Jimmy at the time, so the perfect copy of Mothervine now existed within Jimmy's blood!

While Jimmy was investigating Mothervine, so was Quicksilver, one of the few remaining mutants in the Ultimate Universe, who was also Jimmy's half-brother! You see, years earlier, Magda was sent to spy on Magneto and she ended up getting pregnant by Magneto and giving birth to two children, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

Quicksilver wanted to use the copy of Mothervine that was present in Jimmy's blood to kick start the mutant race...

Jimmy managed to defeat Quicksilver and keep the secrets of Mothervine from spreading any further. Then, however, the great Incursion happened. The Ultimate Universe was destroyed and some of the surviving members of the Ultimate Universe ended up on the main Earth.

In X-Men Blue #4 (by Cullen Bunn, Julian Lopez, José Marzan Jr. and Walden Wong), Jimmy was revealed to be one of the mutants who made it out of the Ultimate Universe alive. So was Quicksilver, who was now serving Miss Sinister, the evil clone of Mister Sinister! In X-Men Blue #5, she explained how she found some of the survivors of the Ultimate Universe and began experimenting on them...

It was while she was experimenting on them that she discovered the Mothervine drug that was in Jimmy's blood. She quickly began experimenting with the drug, altering it from its original purpose. She let Jimmy go, since she didn't need him anymore, and he joined the cast of X-Men Blue.

The effects of these experiments were first discovered in X-Men Blue #7 (by Cullen Bunn, Cory Smith and Matt Milla). Emma Frost had created New Tian, a new haven for mutants in a deal that she cut with Captain America when Cap was evil and in charge of Hydra and had taken over the world. In X-Men Blue #7 the team was sent in to help free some mutants who were imprisoned in Emma Frost's new mutant haven for speaking out against her.

They ran afoul of some mutants who were serving Emma Frost and among these mutants, including Toad and Wolfsbane, they now had new secondary mutations...

After the mutant team left New Tian, we discovered in X-Men Blue #9 that Miss Sinister and Bastion were working with Emma Frost to use New Tian as a sort of mass experiment to test the effects of Mothervine. Miss Sinister was now planning on taking the plans global...

In X-Men Blue #12 (by Cullen Bunn, Douglas Franchin and Scott Hanna), Jimmy and Angel investigated the place where the X-Men had found him back in X-Men Blue #4 and discovered a lab where mutants had been experimented on using Mothervine. It had mutated the Blob to the point where he had become a gooey blob and seemingly. died. Ultimate Quicksilver actually did die from Mothervine experimenting...

That's the last piece of information that we have seen regarding Mothervine, but from Bunn's interview with CBR, it seems like Miss Sinister's plans to take it global will soon be making a rather large splash in the Marvel Legacy era of the X-Men universe.