If you’ve been reading Joe Kelly’s current Amazing Spider-Man run, you’ve probably noticed a strange alien scientist traveling alongside Peter Parker in space. That’s Dr. Xanto Starblood, and he’s got a longer history in Marvel Comics than most people realize.
Who Exactly Is Xanto Starblood?
Xanto Starblood is an alien zoologist, author, and self-described scientist. He’s obsessed with studying life forms across the universe, and he’s willing to do some pretty questionable things in the name of research. Think of him as a cosmic mad scientist, except he genuinely believes his methods are justified. He’s bald, has two horn-like tentacles, and glowing purple lines across his body. Visually, he looks exactly like someone you wouldn’t want to run into alone in deep space.
He was created by writer Jason Aaron and artist Nick Bradshaw, and he first appeared in Wolverine and the X-Men Vol. 1 #5, published in February 2012.
His First Story: Going After Broo
When Xanto debuted, he was targeting the X-Men, specifically a student at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning named Broo.
Broo is a member of the Brood, which is a violent alien species in Marvel Comics. Most Brood are savage and dangerous by nature. Broo is different. He’s intelligent, kind, and curious, which makes him an outlier among his species. And… that’s exactly the problem, as far as Xanto is concerned.
Xanto believed that the universe has a natural order, built up over millions of years. He thought that an intelligent, empathetic Brood was a cosmic mistake that could eventually destabilize everything. So he decided Broo needed to be eliminated.
On his way to Earth, a group of S.W.O.R.D. agents (think of S.W.O.R.D. as a space-focused version of S.H.I.E.L.D.) boarded his ship to stop him. Xanto responded by feeding them to his trained Brood warriors.
He made it to the Jean Grey School and immediately caused chaos. He released a virus that caused a Brood embryo to grow inside the stomach of the school’s headmistress, Kitty Pryde. It was a calculated distraction to keep the staff busy while he hunted Broo. He also used his ability to psionically control animals to subdue Krakoa, a living island creature that served as the school’s grounds, since Krakoa tried to stop him.
Kitty eventually had his Brood warriors killed, so Xanto went after Broo directly. Kitty bought time by having the Bamfs, which are little teleporting imp-like creatures connected to Nightcrawler, warp Xanto around the school until he fell 100 feet to the ground, and then Krakoa crushed him.
Somehow, he got back up. He cornered Kitty and Broo in the Danger Room, disabled the room’s defenses, and was about to kill Kitty when Broo finally snapped.
Broo gave in to his Brood instincts and attacked Xanto with everything he had, nearly killing him.
Xanto barely survived. S.W.O.R.D. arrested him. On his way out, Xanto told Broo he wouldn’t come after him anymore because the attack proved to him that Broo was just a regular savage Brood underneath it all. In his mind, the “error” had corrected itself.
Joining the Hellfire Academy
Xanto stayed in S.W.O.R.D. custody for a while, but he got pulled back into the story when Beast, the X-Men’s resident scientist, came to him for help. Broo had suffered brain damage that left him in a feral state, basically behaving like an ordinary violent Brood. Beast wanted Xanto to reverse it.
Xanto refused.
In his view, Broo was now exactly what a Brood was supposed to be, so there was nothing to fix. To make his point, he spoke to Broo in the Brood’s native language, which triggered an instinctual rampage. During the chaos, a villain called the Philistine broke Xanto out and recruited him for the Hellfire Academy.
The Hellfire Academy was a villainous school set up by Kade Kilgore, the young Black King of the Hellfire Club. The goal was to train the next generation of supervillains. Xanto joined the staff and taught xenobiology, which is the study of alien life forms. One of his students was Kid Omega (Quentin Quire), an X-Man who had infiltrated the school undercover. Xanto quickly came to dislike him.
When the X-Men eventually raided the Academy, Xanto didn’t stick around to fight. He grabbed the feral Broo and fled on his personal spaceship, planning to head to Rigel-3, which was his former academic home base. Along the way, he intended to use Broo as a weapon against anyone who got in his path.
It didn’t work out that way. A Bamf teleported onto the ship and Broo bit it, which psychically connected him to Nightcrawler. That connection was enough to restore Broo’s intelligence. A recovered Broo knocked Xanto out, took over the ship, and crash-landed back on Earth to rejoin the X-Men.
Xanto got left behind again.
A Brief Return During the X-Men’s Phoenix Situation
Xanto showed up again in X-Men Vol. 7 #11-12, during a period when Jean Grey’s Phoenix activity was causing major disruptions across alien civilizations throughout the galaxy.
Xanto teamed up with a space pirate named Captain Karkos and came up with a plan to kidnap Cyclops, Jean’s partner, and use him as leverage against her.
Corsair, who is Cyclops’ father and himself a space-faring adventurer, overheard the plan and tried to warn his son. Xanto and Karkos caught Corsair first and shot his ship down.
The pirates arrived above Alaska on a braindead Acanti, which is a massive whale-like alien creature sometimes used as a living spaceship. They attacked the X-Men with weapons specifically designed to cancel out mutant powers, and managed to capture Cyclops using Ruby Quartz Armor, which blocks his optic blasts. They also subdued Juggernaut and Magik.
Alpha Flight showed up, helped the X-Men destroy the Acanti’s hearts to bring the ship down, and that was that. Xanto and the pirates were captured and handed over to the Kree/Skrull Alliance to wait for punishment.
But… he escaped. Xanto’s escape was mentioned but not shown in the comic.
Traveling with Spider-Man
This brings us to the current Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 7 run, written by Joe Kelly with art by Pepe Larraz.
Peter Parker ended up stranded alone in deep space after being sent there by a powerful villain named Hellgate. Peter was in rough shape, surviving on collected water and eating whatever he could find, with no memory of how he got there.
That’s when Xanto found him.
By this point in his life, Xanto had been traveling the universe collecting living specimens for his research. He specifically targeted aliens who were alone, stranded, or dying. People whose lives were already, as he put it, forfeit among their own kind. His crew of captives included Rocket Raccoon, a warrior named Raelith, an alien called Nial, and a small symbiote named Symbie. A symbiote, by the way, is the same type of alien species as Venom.
He also wears a living alien called Glitch as a suit. Glitch is a Technarch, which is a techno-organic alien species in Marvel Comics. Xanto found Glitch drifting through space with no sense of purpose and convinced him to give up his individual consciousness to serve as Xanto’s armor.
Peter got added to the collection, but with one big difference. Xanto didn’t experiment on him. He was fascinated by Peter’s biology, since Peter is a human who was bonded with spider DNA through a radioactive spider bite. Xanto was interested in Peter’s drive to get stronger and fight Hellgate again. The two struck up a genuine friendship built on shared curiosity and mutual respect between two people who think a lot alike.
Xanto started helping Peter train. Peter, being Spider-Man, started turning the group into something resembling a team, taking on missions like delivering resources to a planet under the control of a corrupt interstellar corporation called the Gothon Conglomerate. Even though Peter made it clear from the beginning that his plan was to go home as soon as possible, the group kept growing closer.
There was even a funny moment where one crew member, Nial, was revealed to have sabotaged their own ship to delay the journey because he didn’t want the group to break up.
Throughout all of this, Xanto was working on something. He built a device called the Genetic Re-Coder, engineered specifically around Peter’s unique DNA. The idea is that it would amplify Peter’s powers. When he finally finished it and handed it over, Xanto told Peter not to use it. Despite everything they had built together, he was genuinely worried the device could have consequences that neither of them could predict.
Xanto chose to stay in space as Peter returned to Earth with Raelith and Symbie.
What Makes Xanto Interesting
Xanto works as a character because he’s not a straightforward villain. He has a belief system behind his actions. He thinks he’s doing the universe a favor. When he kidnapped those stranded aliens, he told them their lives would at least mean something for science if they were already lost to their own people.
The fact that Peter Parker, of all people, managed to get through to him and build a real friendship with him says something about both characters.
He’s also a rare case of a minor character who gets genuinely developed across different writers and runs. Jason Aaron built the foundation, and Joe Kelly is now using that foundation to do something different with him.
