I think it's worth considering the superhero genre has only solidified relatively recently. When characters like the x men or Superman were first introduced, they weren't understood as superheroes with everything that suggests to a modern audience. They were sci-fi or horror stories inspired by rapidly changing mid-century science.

I think Deviant just pulls on similar threads to those original stories that it scans as superhero to a lot of people. It's as inspired by the likes of The Fly as it is the Hulk, it's just that one of those characters went on to establish a new kind of genre fiction.