and the bad guy of Deadly Genesis is… (spoilers)

With all that setup, how could it not be Thunderbird, right? The mysterious space baddie is wearing TB’s costume, or at least seems to be. And check out the cover (Silvestri’s version). It’s a cool recreation of the cover of Giant-Sized X-Men #1, with the characters all decayed and dead looking. The only one who’s missing from the original cover? You got it, Thunderbird.

Well, the thing is, that’s just too obvious for me. As I was reading Deadly Genesis #1, I couldn’t help but have a faint recollection of something, something I’d read long ago but had mostly forgotten, something about another bad guy that was disposed of in space. Something that might’ve survived…
Yeah, that’s right, it’s Krakoa! The island that walks like a man!

Guess where Krakoa was first seen? You got it, Giant-Sized X-Men #1. That gives him the familiarity with some of the team members, but not all of the new ones – as seen in Deadly Genesis. That explains the way he formed seemingly out of the muck of that asteroid or whatever it was.

And maybe it explains where all the mutants’ power went to. Possibly, when the Scarlet Witch blasted it off the planet in House of M, it shot off the earth and was absorbed by Krakoa, giving it even more power than it already had.

But even with that solved, there’s still plenty of mystery to be solved in the upcoming issue of Deadly Genesis. So far it’s been a fun read, and the first relevant X-book since the chronically delayed Astonishing.

Yeah, Krakoa might not be the coolest villain they could’ve come up with. But any character can be worthwhile in the right hands, and Ed Brubaker has that covered. And just like with his run on Captain America, the central villain is hardly the only reason to pay attention.