Quote Originally Posted by zinderel View Post
Technically, we have seen the Empress and Firstborn already.

Some backstory: The Brood were introduced to the world by Claremont and Cockrum in 1982. Cockrum has said that he came up with the look on a whim, as the script from Claremont called for some alien henchmen for Deathbird, and Cockrum just drew the least pleasant thing he could think of at the time. From that illustrious beginning, the Brood were born. In 1988, a small number of them came to earth on a dying Starshark. They quickly infected several people, among them mutants whose powers they then gained and fought the X-Men again. One victim, though, wasn’t a mutant. Her name was Hannah Conover. She was the wife of a traveling, Billy Graham-ish minister, and after being infected with a queen egg, she began spreading the infection to others while posing as a ‘faith healer’. This was the last we saw of this particular infestation until 1997, in X-Men vs. Brood: Day of Wrath.

In most cases, Hannah and her nest would have just been another Infestation in the making, but something happened to the Queen who had been Hannah. Even though she was a queen, that Queen has absorbed all of Hannah when she took over. Including Hannah’s faith. She began to have doubts about infecting so many people who had come to her with faith and trust in a higher power. So her hive stopped spreading, she lived as a human instead of a glorious Queen, and her children began following her and her husband - who had NO IDEA that his faith healing wife was a Sleazoid! - as they traveled and acted like security and ushers and looked after the people coming to the Conover revivals without infecting anyone else, even refusing to ‘faith heal’ anymore, out of her shame and guilt...

In Day of Wrath, we learn all of this, and we learn that the Brood are led by the empress, an immensely powerful telepathic being linked to every Queen in the universe. Hannah’s heretical thoughts and behavior prompted the Empress to send her personal royal guard, the Firstborn, to Earth to deal with the problem before it got out of control. The arrival of the Firstborn brought the X-Men back into the orbit of Hannah Conover, and they discovered that this woman they had helped years before was a Queen. Some (Wolverine) wanted her dead, but others saw hope in her desire to be free-willed and her use of her spawn to HELP people instead of mindlessly spreading. They fought the Firstborn at the cost of all of Hannah’s children, and learned that the Empress would never stop sending Firstborn after her, so Iceman and Beast put her in stasis and secured her beneath the mansion in the hope that someday, she might birth the ‘heroic’ Brood of Bishop’s future.
Oooooooh this is fascinating. Do you have issue numbers for this? I want to go and read it on Marvel Unlimited.