X-Babies

Desperate to recapture the magic that had made him the ruler of Mojoworld, Mojo turned to his longtime lieutenant Spiral and the scientists of his creative “brain trust.” Using an unstable organic substance known as neoplasm, they began manufacturing artificial entertainment properties modeled on the missing heroes.

One after another, new programs debuted. There were the X-Women, robotic X-Men, X-Chimps, musical X-Men, silent X-Mimes, and countless other gimmick teams. Each briefly entertained Mojoworld audiences before being destroyed and replaced by the next concept.

Then the producers discovered something special.

Mojo had once achieved strong ratings when he temporarily transformed the real X-Men into infants. Inspired by that success, Spiral used neoplasm to create a team of fully sentient toddler versions of the heroes. These new stars were called the X-Babies.

To Mojo’s irritation, the adorable team became an enormous success. Viewers adored the miniature heroes, whose innocence contrasted with the dangerous situations Mojo placed them in. Although Mojo personally found them irritating, their popularity forced him to keep them on the air.

The X-Babies, however, possessed free will. Realizing they were being exploited as entertainment, they escaped from Mojo’s control and fled with one of Mojoworld’s pilots, Ricochet Rita. Furious at losing such valuable intellectual property, Mojo dispatched his Trademark Police to recapture them and enforce his “ownership” of the team.

The fugitives took refuge in Mojoworld’s dimensional crossroads, the Crossover House, and eventually slipped through a portal to Earth-616, the home reality of the original X-Men. Rita was captured during the chase and returned to Mojoworld, where Mojo transformed her into an emotionless operative called the Agent and sent her to track down the runaway children.

On Earth, the X-Babies encountered Kitty Pryde, who sympathized with the tiny refugees and helped protect them. Soon the team gained further allies, including the British mutant heroes of Excalibur and the paranormal investigators of the Weird Happenings Organization (WHO).

Together they defeated Mojo’s forces and restored the Agent to her true identity as Ricochet Rita. Yet there was still a problem: Rita remained contractually bound to Mojo’s entertainarchy. To secure her freedom, the X-Babies agreed to return voluntarily to Mojoworld. Rita, unwilling to abandon them to their fate, followed them back despite the risks.

Not long afterward Mojoworld erupted in rebellion. The slave population rose up against Mojo’s tyranny under the leadership of Longshot and the mutant pop star Dazzler. During the chaos, some revolutionaries blamed the X-Babies for symbolizing the regime’s propaganda. The warriors Gog and Magog were sent to eliminate them.

The tiny heroes fled once more to Earth-616, splitting into two groups while seeking help. One group encountered Bishop and Gambit, while the other reached Jean Grey—then acting as Phoenix—and Iceman. The adult X-Men protected the children until Dazzler herself arrived, ordering Gog and Magog to stand down. She promised to safeguard the X-Babies in the new Mojoworld government under Longshot.

Back in Mojoworld, the children were given a home far from the politics of the capital. In the strange Umbrella Forest, they built a massive treehouse called the Clubhouse for Gifted Youngsters, a playful echo of Xavier’s school. There they were taught by a mysterious figure known as Charlie X, sometimes called the Prof, who acted as their older brother and mentor.

Life in the forest was not quiet for long. The X-Babies became protectors of nearby communities and befriended a sprite-like creature called Fix after rescuing it from bullies known as the Brotherhood of Mutant Bullies (BOMB). Soon the children found themselves embroiled in Mojoworld’s bizarre entertainment culture once again.

Mojo eventually returned to power. Alongside his creation Funhouse, an evil baby modeled after the villain Arcade, he unleashed giant cartoon robots known as the Centennials and forced the X-Babies and BOMB to compete in a lethal game show titled “Murderama.” Though they struggled with the trivia portions of the contest, the X-Babies excelled at surviving the elaborate deathtraps. During these adventures the young Cyclops gained an unusual companion: a giant dragonlike creature named Locksteed, reminiscent of Kitty Pryde’s dragon Lockheed.

When several members were captured, Charlie X rallied a much larger force—twenty-three X-Babies in total—to mount a daring rescue.

Another crisis arose when Psychilde, the X-Babies’ version of Psylocke, was injured in a training accident inside their Danger Playpen. The wound caused her body to destabilize, reverting into the neoplasm from which all X-Babies had been created. Her teammates sealed her in a jar and carried her across Mojoworld’s surreal landscape to the studios of a producer called Mold, hoping to save her.

Spiral attempted repeatedly to steal the jar, while Mojo escalated matters by unleashing the Mitey ’Vengers, baby versions of the Avengers. Their leader, Iron Ace, briefly stole the jar but ultimately returned it. When Mojo and Spiral attempted to use Psychilde’s unstable matter to manufacture even more characters, the machinery exploded during a rebellion by Iron Ace and his allies.

Psychilde survived the catastrophe, emerging with a transformed appearance, while the X-Babies and the Mitey ’Vengers escaped. Mojo and Spiral secretly succeeded in creating a batch of Evil Babies, however—villains who would later clash with the dimension-hopping team known as the Exiles.

In the aftermath, the Mitey ’Vengers opened a school to train local children, while the X-Babies returned to their Clubhouse in the Umbrella Forest and resumed their adventures.

Trouble struck again when Mojo created another group of Evil Babies inspired by the dystopian Age of Apocalypse, led by the tyrant Apocalypthe. Their assault on Dazzler’s palace destroyed the stronghold of Mojoworld’s new regime. Though the full details remain unclear, the X-Babies survived the conflict.

Years later they were briefly drawn back to Earth-616 when the demon Mephisto manipulated reality and summoned numerous alternate-universe X-Men teams into the prime Marvel universe. The X-Babies were among the many strange variations of the X-Men caught up in the scheme before eventually returning to their own world.

Thus the X-Babies—born as manufactured entertainment—grew into heroes in their own right. In a world where lives were treated as television programming, the tiny mutants carved out a corner of Mojoworld where friendship, adventure, and heroism mattered more than ratings.