The plot of Deadly Genesis revolves around the X-Men's search for Professor X who has gone missing since the end of House of M. A mysterious new, powerful Mutant named Vulcan kidnaps Scott and Rachel Summers claiming to know of Xavier and possessing a Dark Secret about the good professor.
X-Men: Deadly Genesis contains examples of...
- Abusive Parents:
- Petra's foster father tried to sexually molest her. Fortunately, she was able to use her powers to fight him off.
- Darwin's father left him and his mom when Darwin was a child because he refused to believe Darwin was his child. Darwin's mother blamed him for this and sent him to the Biltmore Academy for Advanced Education so he wouldn't be in the house with her. When she found out he was a mutant she rejected him.
- Accidental Murder: When Vulcan's powers first manifested he accidentally incinerated a kind old Shi'ar who'd been taking care of him, Dai'Andral.
- Adaptive Ability: This series is the debut of Armando Muñoz aka Darwin. His moniker comes from his body's ability to adapt to any situation that could be harmful or lethal to him. In darkness, he gains Innate Night Vision. Exposed to toxic gas, his lungs are changed so they can process it as air.
- All Your Powers Combined: Darwin's powers transformed him into pure energy when Krakoa tries killing him, allowing him to survive by merging with Vulcan. In this state, Darwin also absorbed mutant energies from the deceased Sway and Petra. This allowed Vulcan to use the abilities of all three of his teammates alongside his own powers.
- Asshole Victim: Vulcan's murder of the Sentinel pilot looked like a stock Kick the Dog move... except to readers who recognized the pilot as Nathaniel Briggs, a Dirty Coward and Fantastic Racist who made life hell for the Squad's mutant members in their little-read miniseries.
- Brought Down to Badass: Darwin being separated from him means Vulcan is just your average Flying Brick with energy powers.
- Cain and Abel and Seth: Vulcan is Gabriel Summers, the third Summers brother.
- Character Death: Banshee dies in issue #2 trying and (failing) to stop the Blackbird from crashing into a plane full of people.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Vulcan utterly thrashes Cyclops, Marvel Girl and Wolverine when they fight him in issue #1.
- Cerebus Retcon: Deadly Genesis reveals that before he recruited the All-New, All-Different team to rescue the original X-Men from Krakoa, Xavier recruited another, younger team of mutants for the task. These heroes had a month's worth of training telepathically downloaded into them to prepare them for their mission. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to make the mission go off without a hitch. Petra and Sway were killed in battle and Vulcan and Darwin were thought dead as well. In reality, Darwin transformed into energy and bonded with Vulcan. When Polaris (though mentioned incorrectly in this miniseries as Jean Grey) blasted Krakoa into outer space in Giant-Size X-Men #1, Vulcan was shot into space as well, but survived in a comatose state thanks to Darwin's reactive powers. After the debacle, Cyclops - the only member of the group who was aware of the "first" wave - was deeply distraught, prompting Xavier to decide to mind-wipe him in order to spare him the agony and grief of knowing that his brother died for him, and later working to clear his name by creating an elaborate illusion that Krakoa was sentient.
- Continuity Nod: A couple:
- When Professor X puts the lost class through his "psychic Danger Room", he explains to Moira he got the idea from his studies of 'dream time', the psychic state that the aboriginial teleporter Gateway is famous for using.
- When researching Vulcan's hideout, Beast and Kitty find that it was a facility run by Professor X, Moira, and Karl Lykos (better known as the mutant villain Sauron), referencing the brief period that Lykos spent working with Xavier.
- Cruel Mercy: Xavier believes this is the reason why Wanda Maximoff remade his body with the ability to walk but as a depowered mutant, "to show me what being a cripple really is" in his words.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Vulcan takes the biscuit, even by the low standards of X-Men. He was ripped out of his mother's stomach when a certain crazy Shi'ar emperor murdered her, force-grown to young adulthood and raised as a slave in a secret Shi'ar base on Earth, escaped, was homeless for a while, and just as it looked like things were turning around, he and his friends are sent to fight a living island, which kills all the others, while he's half-dead, and then the Professor erases all knowledge of his existence. Small wonder when he comes back he is epically pissed.
- Darker and Edgier: Recursively transforms the events of Giant-Size X-Men #1 into this with the numerous reveals about what really happened on Krakoa.
- Death by Origin Story:
- Petra's parents were killed in a rock slide that is implied to have been caused when her mutant powers over earth manifested.
- Suzanne Chan (Sway)'s parents were collateral damage in a shoot out between two Chinatown gangs. Sway's powers of time manipulation stopped the bullets from hitting her.
- Vulcan's mother was two months pregnant with him when the Shi'ar killed her. D'Ken cut him out of her belly and placed in an incubation-accelerator which aged him to prime adolescence.
- Disaster Dominoes: Professor X's actions in this story have far-reaching consequences for the Summers family and the Marvel Universe as a whole. Galvanized by the traumatizing memories that Xavier forced him to remember, Vulcan takes off into space on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Shi'ar Empire, which ultimately results in him becoming their emperor and a cosmically powerful The Caligula. Feeling the need to bring his wayward brother back to the fold, Havok takes off after him, setting off a collision course that ends in the murder of their father Corsair at Vulcan's hands. As for Cyclops, losing his trust in Professor X also made him lose trust in Xavier's ways, causing him to become a more proactive, Magneto-esque leader who ultimately became cynical enough to embrace the destructive Phoenix Force, setting off Avengers vs. X-Men in which he Jumped Off The Slippery Slope and became the new Dark Phoenix after murdering Xavier.
- Dishing Out Dirt: Petra's mutant power is the ability to control and manipulate terrain. This includes shaping the earth into constructs like hammers and shields, causing earthquakes, using a large lump of earth to fly and changing coal into diamond.
- Five-Token Band: Moira MacTaggert's students are an Afro-Latino boy (Darwin), a Danish-American girl (Petra), a Chinese-American girl (Sway) and a Caucasian American boy who was born in space (Vulcan).
- Flat Character: None of the secret squad members other than Vulcan get much character development, due to two of them having died horribly and the other being trapped as living energy for almost all of the story. After being liberated from Vulcan, Darwin got Character Development in subsequent storylines, while Petra and Sway got limited development in a What If? tie-in story.
- Foregone Conclusion: One flashback story has the Prof trying to recruit Emma before he recruited the All-New team. Since it's a flashback, he obviously isn't going to succeed. Turns out he decided to just wipe Emma's memory of the encounter, allowing her to go on to become the White Queen... but also saving her from horrible, Krakoa-related death.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Like any self-respecting X-Men Superpower Lottery winner, Vulcan has these.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: How Krakoa killed Sway.
- He's Back!: This story brings back Professor X, who had been MIA since the conclusion of the House of M storyline. Turns out he'd been on Muir Island the whole time. Not amnesiac, just powerless.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: After being rejected by his mother for being a mutant, Darwin tried to commit suicide only to find out he couldn't because of his powers.
- I Just Want to Be Special: All of the lost class embraced being X-Men, but none more so than Vulcan.
- Killed Off for Real: Petra and Sway die and, unlike Vulcan and Darwin, never get a turn in the mutant resurrection revolving door... at least not until writers feeling sorry for them brought them back in X-Men (2019) almost 15 years later.
- Lack of Empathy: Which is possibly the result of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, but in any case Vulcan has no empathy for any of his victims except the first one, the elderly Shi'ar Dai'Andral.
- Manipulative Bastard: Not that he wasn't already one to begin with, but this story is the one that established Professor X to be one par excellence.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Xavier, to his credit, knows how incredibly wrong his actions during the Krakoa incident were and spends most of his time here trying to make amends. Neither Vulcan nor Cyclops are satisfied.
- Mythology Gag: The scene in X-Men: First Class where Xavier and Magneto recruit the mutant Angel Salvadore from a strip club borrows heavily from the backup story in the fifth issue here, in which Charles and Moira meet Emma Frost in a Hellfire Club pleasure house and try to recruit her (without the success Charles and Erik had in XMFC, unfortunately).
- Not Even Human: Not that Krakoa was ever an ordinary human to begin with, but in its debut appearance the Living Island was depicted as having human-level intelligence, being capable of speaking and reasoning advanced enough to set traps. This story retconned that into being a deception of Professor X's and stated that Krakoa was actually just a mindless screaming monster the whole time. Then X-Men (2019) came along and re-retconned it, so Krakoa is now at It Can Think intelligence again.
- Rage Against the Mentor: Cyclops is not happy when the truth about Krakoa finally comes out. He's so unhappy, in fact, that he summarily boots Xavier out of the X-Men and evicts him from his own mansion!
- The Reveal: This story dropped a whole basket of them into the laps of readers:
- The energy of all the mutants depowered during M-Day was not just harmlessly dissipated, but absorbed by a mysterious and extremely powerful new mutant.
- Krakoa wasn't actually sentient but was just a mindless monster all along. Later re-retconned.
- Emma Frost encountered the X-Men much earlier than anyone thought but had her memories of the encounter wiped by Professor X.
- There was actually a third squad of X-Men sent to Krakoa in secret by Professor X.
- Cool and collected Professor X was irresponsible enough to send that third squad after giving them nothing more than an hour-long psychic Danger Room "cram session", with predictable results.
- In the aftermath of the Krakoa incident, Xavier sunk so low as to wipe Cyclops' memories of his own brother from his mind, along with wiping all evidence that the third squad ever existed.
- The events of M-Day have depowered the professor as well.
- Series Continuity Error: In Giant-Size X-Men, Polaris is the one who sent Krakoa into space. In this series, Jean is mistakenly stated to be the one who did that.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Disgusted by the X-Men taking Xavier's side, Gabriel flies off into outer space to exact his revenge on the Shi'ar Empire.
- Time Master: Sway can stop or slow down time in her immediate vicinity. She can also replay past events as ghostly images, an ability she used to track down the people who killed her parents and have them arrested by the police.
- Ungrateful Bitch: You would think Darwin saving his mother from a fire - one caused by her own lit cigarette no less - would endear him to her. Instead, she rejects him for being a mutant.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: As we see in the flashback stories, Vulcan was originally earnest and sincere in his desire to be an X-Man.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Vulcan wasn't originally so powerful as he is in the main story; an oft-forgotten detail is in the first issue when Cyclops and Beast discuss the events of M-Day and Beast wonders where all the energy from the depowered mutants went to. Cut to Vulcan waking up in space...
- Yellow Earth, Green Earth: Petra can control and manipulate rock. She wore a green outfit during the fateful mission to Krakoa.
