The following contains major spoilers for X-Force #37, on sale now from Marvel Comics.
While the mutant heroes of X-Force have made their fair share of enemies over the years, few have eluded them in the way that the enigmatic Man with the Peacock Tattoo has. Over the course of more than three years, this mysterious foe has tormented Krakoa's mutant heroes in his bid to rid the world of them entirely. Although his complete anonymity has long made him impossible to understand, that has changed in an instant with the long-awaited reveal of his identity as none other than the next generation of Genegineer.
As Beast and the eponymous team of X-Force #37 (by Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX, and VC's Joe Caramagna) plumb the depths of Domino's memories for an answer as to where their enemies are, the worst of them all is well on his way to seeing all his plans come to fruition. Thanks to the psychic abilities of his young "adopted son" Max, the enigmatic Man with the Peacock Tattoo is on the verge of turning mutantkind's crowning achievement into a weapon of his own. Unfortunately for him, Max is only willing to play along for so long without knowing the truth, forcing his kidnapper to reveal his heartbreaking origin as yet another clone of the Genegineer.
Who Was Marvel's Genegineer - And What Happened to Him?
Originally debuting in Uncanny X-Men #236 (by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri) David Moreau, the man who would become the Genegineer was a patriotic citizen of Genosha with a passion for science and a particularly unsettling disdain for mutants. When Moreau encountered the menacing Sugar Man offering him technology from another timeline, he leaped at the chance to turn it on Genosha's mutant populace. Eventually, Moreau developed a way to identify whether a person had an X-gene, with those who did having their memories erased before being conscripted into the Genegineer's grotesquely modified mutate army.
Genosha's mutants weren't the only ones to be pulled into the Genegineer's web of cruelty. He took great pains to create a multitude of clones of himself to experiment on, often with lethal results. As the Man with the Peacock Tattoo describes it, what time wasn't spent being tortured was spent imprisoned, only ever able to glimpse the outside world. This drove him to violently escape, although he certainly can't be blamed for that. What absolutely can be held against him, on the other hand, is what the Man with the Peacock Tattoo has done in the time since.
The Genegineer's Legacy is Gunning for the X-Men
Rather than distancing himself from the man who abused and dehumanized him, the Man with the Peacock Tattoo has seemingly taken up the Genegineer's legacy as his own. This is startling considering everything the original Genegineer put him through, let alone the fact that his progenitor is little more than a footnote in Marvel history. In effectively bringing him back, the Man with the Peacock Tattoo has done far more than simply updating an obscure villain for the modern era. He has potentially opened the floodgates for more just like him to follow.
This isn't to say that the Genegineer wasn't an imposing figure during his reign, but rather that for how short-lived and rarely revisited it was, there was never any expectation of it making a comeback. Now that it has, there is genuinely no limit as to how wide it could stretch, especially under the circumstances of its return. The Man with the Peacock Tattoo wasn't the only clone of the Genegineer, nor was he the only one to hope to follow in those footsteps besides his lab-grown brethren. All things considered, the Man with the Peacock Tattoo could very well be setting the Genegineer up to be the next great X-villain over three decades after his demise.