The Comics History Behind Genosha, Marvel’s Fallen Mutant Haven

With all the suffering Genosha has witnessed, the scars of its genocide and the Decimation have never truly been recovered—but amends have more recently started to be made. At the first Hellfire Gala, after mutantkind had reforged a second mutant nation state on the living island Krakoa, the Scarlet Witch performed an elaborate act to secure her own place in the island’s newfound mutant circuit behind the Resurrection Protocols: mutantdom’s own way to cheat death. She did so, by… well, murdering herself.

With Wanda resurrected by the Five, she was now capable of casting a vast magical ritual, which culminated in the creation of a pocket dimension limbo simply dubbed “The Waiting Room.” The realm was a space between life and death itself, a way for Cerebro to scan across all time and space and resurrect mutants not already backed up in its own archives. Overnight, the queues for resurrected mutants were filled with millions of souls, now waiting in their own elysian field—including those slaughtered in the Genoshan Genocide, and those further killed during the Decimation.

Genosha also received a second legacy during the Krakoan Age as the seed for the ancient mutant civilization known as Threshold. Using genetic material gathered from the Genoshan dead, Kitty Pryde and the Marauders sent a mysterium lockbox filled with biological data back two billion years, setting the stage for the birth of the first mutant society—part of a cyclical time paradox, one where Genosha’s fall would provide the spark for the earliest forms of mutant life in the first palce.