Like xenomorphs, the brood reproduces by forcing their eggs inside other living beings and using them as reluctance transporters. The brood eggs “do not hatch” like the xenomorphs, however. On the contrary, people infected with brood eggs see their body taken slowly and turn into a brood, their own consciousness subjugated by the new brood. It is like an organic version of the Borg of “Star Trek”, although it is worth remembering that the brood is prior to Borg of several years. Seeing the process playing below, in “Uncanny X-Men” # 162, where Shi’ar Imperial Guardsman Fang is transformed into a soldier in Couvée.
In “The Brood Saga”, the brood (often called “Sleazoïdes” in the arc) removed the X-Men because they want to add their mutant powers to their hive. As such, they are all located with eggs of future brood queens. The brood had the structure of the hive, the queen and everything, before James Cameron introduces a queen of the xenomorph in “Aliens” of 1986.
The X-Men spend most of the story on the time borrowed, waiting for the brood eggs of their system to support them. Wolverine, the star of number 162, is saved by his healing postman and weighs if he will have to kill his friends if they turn. An obstacle for X-Men, which you will never see in an “extraterrestrial” film, is that they apply their non-violence code even to the brood; They don’t want to take life, even the life of parasites, if they can help it.
The differences between xenomorphs and the brood are clear, but the similarities are even clearer. “Alien” was released in 1979, it would therefore have been quite fresh in the minds of people when The Brood made its debut in 1982. He is sure to say that the xenomorphs, at least the original of “Alien”, inspired the brood because such an influence appears elsewhere in “X-Men”.
In the 1982 interview book, “The X-Men Companion”, the artist John Byrne said that Drew Kitty Pryde on the basis of what he thought that a young Sigourney Weaver looked like. Weaver, of course, broke out by playing Ellen Ripley in “Alien”. The farewell number of Byrne, “X-Men” # 143, features Kitty in an “extraterrestrial” tribute. Left alone in the X-Mension around Christmas, Kitty has to face an invading villain: an agai demon, which also looks like a xenomorphic a little less than the brood.
Marvel comics
The brood had limited appearances outside the “X-Men” comics; A strongly modified version, renamed the colony and with fewer xeno designs, appeared in the cartoon “X-Men” 1992 but that’s almost everything. Will they appear in Marvel Studios’ “X-Men” films? Or, since Disney has both Marvel and “Alien”, will they abandon the claim and put the X-Men not against the Xeno-ish brood but the real thing?
