text: I tend to like just about anything that Brubaker writes.  While I'm not as excited about his Marvel work as most others are, I have enjoyed his runs on Captain America and Daredevil.  His work outside of Marvel has been great; Sleeper is one of my favorite series over the last few years.  In general, Brubaker had not written anything that I genuinely disliked.  Then came 'Deadly Genesis'.
  
  In short, this is a weak story with several plot holes which makes a mockery of a franchise that already has a history of reworking established continuity to poor results.  To what end?  Another Summers brother who is completely disinteresting, another story in which Professor X acts like a jerk, a dead X-Men (for absolutely no good reason), and some horrible reworking of existing long running history to cram it all in which now require secrets to have been kept by several key characters for the last 30 years.
  
  I want to think that this story was driven by editorial mandate.  Unfortunately, this is the second instance in which Brubaker has went back and altered Marvel history from long ago.  In Captain America, he made it so that Bucky never really died in World War II.  This initially rubbed me the wrong way, but the story itself was done well, and the surrounding plots were good, so I begrudgingly went along for the ride.  I was still able to enjoy his entire run on the book.
  
  His attempt to revise history doesn't work nearly as well here.  The key difference is that Bucky had been considered dead for so long that there was very little continuity to adjust.  He hadn't been written into any stories during all that time, so it was very easy to go and insert an alternate history for him.  In 'Deadly Genesis', Brubaker inserts events into key storylines from 30 years ago.  In order for them to work, the reader needs to believe that several key characters has kept these events a secret from that time forward.  It just doesn't work.
  
  To make matters worse, none of the characters' motivation for anything makes any sense at all.  Characters are keeping secrets, and other characters are upset with that, and through the whole you never understand why.  It's as if Brubaker had an end goal in mind, and simply crammed in any plot device necessary to get from point A to point B - even if it required characters to act contrary to their nature or the story didn't make complete sense.
  
  That aside, another difference between the two is simply that this series is not written as well as Captain America.  They overall plot doesn't make complete sense and the characters are presented fairly shallowly.  Reading it was more of a chore than an act of enjoyment.
  
  The interior art is nice, though not great.  Unfortunately, the book falls so short on story alone that the art warrants almost no consideration
  