PROFESSOR X

The famous rescue in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975) was not Charles Xavier's first attempt. X-Men: Deadly Genesis (2006), by Ed Brubaker, revealed that Xavier first sent a secret squad of Moira MacTaggert's young students — Vulcan, Petra, Sway and Darwin — to free his captured original X-Men from the living island Krakoa.

The teenagers had barely trained, so Xavier telepathically downloaded combat experience into their minds and sent them anyway. They freed Cyclops, but Krakoa killed Petra and Sway, and Vulcan and Darwin were believed lost with them. Darwin secretly survived by converting to energy and fusing with Vulcan, who drifted into space in a coma.

Cyclops came home distraught — and hiding one more secret: Vulcan was his younger brother Gabriel Summers. Xavier wiped the entire first rescue, and Gabriel's existence, from Cyclops' memory, then quietly assembled the celebrated international team as his second attempt and told no one what it had cost.