The X-Axis – w/c 7 October 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the end of the Beast/Blankslate arc, which feels a bit too high concept and abstract to quite work. There’s a reasonable idea in here: Beast is worried that something about his powers inevitably drives him mad, Blankslate copies his powers and seems to immediately go down that line. But ultimately Beast gets reassured that apparently he does have self-control. But if the Beast’s concern is that he’s going to go mad in the long run, what does a couple of weeks with Blankslate actually tell anyone? And more to the point, Blankslate never feels like a functioning character – the very nature of the concept almost prevents him from being one. So it’s a hard story to really connect with. But it’s a nice idea in theory.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) We’re still at the stage of introducing the cast, but this seems like a fun series so far. Thao and Alex get their debuts here, and while they’re certainly recognisable types, there’s enough in the details to make them feel more fully thought out than that. And the cast dynamics seem promising: Trista wants mutant friends, Thao wants to be a mutant activist, Kate and Alex would both quite like a normal life, and who knows yet what Emma’s up to. It’s clearly a character-driven book, but the art can carry it, and I’m happy to see a bit more mundanity in the X-books, both here and in NYX. Okay, it stretches credibility at times – how many newly activated teen mutants can Kate stumble into while wandering around Chicago? Does Thao, the wannabe activist, really not recognise Kate Pryde even after hearing her name and seeing her powers? But I can let that sort of thing slide when I buy the characters.
X-FORCE #4. (Annotations here.) I’m still not sold on this book. The idea that everyone is blindly doing whatever they’re told to be a device that Forge built, without anyone being quite sure why, seems somewhat interesting. But in practice it winds up feeling very arbitrary. It becomes “this happened, then this happened, then this happened…” Having said that, we’re four issues in and we’ve already reached the last of the locations that Forge learned about in issue #1, which suggests the book might be on the verge of moving into a second act, and if so, maybe it’ll turn out that X-Force is simply taking a little time to get going. Forge’s weird paranoia and the mystery of who or what Tank is do have a bit of intrigue for me, and the art’s great. But there isn’t a compelling through line to hold it all together right now.
PHOENIX #4. (Annotations here.) I thought the first issue of this series seemed fairly promising but I’m starting get the feeling that it doesn’t quite work. This issue brings in Gorr the God-Butcher, a Jason Aaron Thor villain, to fight Phoenix in order that Perrikus can make a point. But it’s hard to say what’s really at stake with any of this. Part of the problem is that Jean was never really designed to be a solo character – her established role down the years has been “heart of the team” or some variant on that, and while a solo book might have been an opportunity to explore other sides of her, that hasn’t really come through. But another side is that Gorr and Adani are both characters designed for stories about organised religion, or at least stories about the frustration of the little people who are beneath the notice of the gods. And Jean isn’t acting like a god, doesn’t have worshippers, doesn’t want them, agrees that the ordinary folk matters, so… what’s the argument about, exactly? Is the point that we’re doing a Thor story but replacing Thor with a character who doesn’t regard herself as a god at all? Where does that go? I don’t really get where any of this is heading right now.
VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #2. By Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs, Kev Walker, Java Tartaglia & Cory Petit. I’m not thrilled that we’re getting such a flood of Wolverine comics again – the Krakoa era was actually quite disciplined i how it used him – but this is surprisingly decent for an event tie-in. It’s a story about a violent father returning to threaten his family, which could really have been done without any Venom War elements at all. But it uses the crossover as a shorthand way to give the guy some powers and get some more visual interest into the story, and fair enough. Kev Walker’s symbiote art is rather neat, too. There’s a clunky beat where the rest of the X-Men show up, which feels a bit off, but that aside, this is actually pretty good.
SENTINELS #1. By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. This is a five-issue miniseries, but it seems to be reasonably closely connected to Uncanny X-Men. The title team are actually a bunch of mercenaries powered up with nanotech, who seem to have been responsible for rounding up some of the mutants in the Graymalkin prison. It’s not exactly a villain book – the title characters come across more as professionals who didn’t quite realise what they signed up for, and aren’t entirely comfortable with it. The first issue sends them after Omega Red, who’s a more or less legitimate target, what with him being a seria killer and all. But while the Sentinels aren’t thrilled about the treatment of the mutants, they’re also well aware that they’re the cannon fodder in this story. Giving them all variants of the Sentinel design may have been a mis-step, since they all look terribly similar, and it’s not really a great design for human-size characters. But the concept has something.
I think this the place I can say this without judgement . I’ve been watching shows and reading comics about me sinister for 30 years, and I have no idea what his powers are/
I think his powers are similar to Apocalypse’s mutant power, except more limited (he can control his body’s molecules in order to regenerate from injuries and adapt it to survive external dangers). Also, he has extreme longevity.
“Also, he has extreme longevity.”
In more ways than one. The fact that the character continues to get wheeled out every now and again despite sucking so hard is his greatest ability in my opinion.
There’s a reason Alan Moore’s run on Supreme has a word balloon along the lines of “Look out— he’s from the ‘90s! His powers are so poorly defined as to be near-limitless!”
Mr. Sinister’s powers cannonically change for each clone. He changes his memories, personality, and genetics each time that he resets. He was not born a mutant, but cloned himself with Thunderbird (Proudstar)’s mutant genes. Since then he has added and subtracted powers like most people change clothes.
Right. Sinister was not born with the X-gene until he decided to make one of his clones a mutant in the Powers of X flashback, but Apocalypse did grant him powers when he remade Essex as a meta-human.
It’s been ignored, but based on the Nicieza Gambit series, a Sinister had already genetically engineered himself with the X-gene earlier, using the mutant Courier’s DNA.
“He changes his memories, personality, and genetics each time that he resets.”
And whoever came up with that should’ve known better. The fact that he keeps popping up suggests Sinister must appeal to someone, but I just don’t see how he can appeal to anyone when he’s written inconsistently by design.
Does anyone here rank Sinister as one of their top five X-Men villains? I’m genuinely curious as to what the appeal is.
Sinister was originally shown with a bunch of psychic abilities, exhibiting telekinetic force bolts and the ability to place mental blocks in people (which somehow stopped Cyclops from using his optic beams back in the days when those were supposed to be uncontrollable due to his brain damage, but never mind all that).
In practice, I think he’s written in one of four ways:
1) physically and psychically invincible and capable of blocking other mutants’ powers, but fatally vulnerable to Cyclops’s optic beams (the 1980s Inferno crossover)
2) impossible for the X-Men to beat in a fight and possessed of a smorgasboard of powers, but will fake a defeat to get away from the bother of fighting the X-Men (post-Inferno and in the early 90s)
3) an imposing figure who can probably beat up a small squad of X-Men, but doesn’t throw around flashy physical powers and can be overwhelmed and potentially killed by characters the writer wants to portray as especially badass or dangerous(the mid-90s up to Gillen’s revamp of Sinister in the Schism-era X-books)
4) a series of iterated clones, any one of which is both vulnerable and disposable, and the next one addresses the weaknesses of the one before it and may have slightly different powers (Gillen’s revamped version from the Schism-era X-books)
He’s probably my third favourite X-villain, depending on if you can even count Magneto. There aren’t a lot of great choices for top-level X-Men villains, after my second choice the Locust, of course.
The Claremont version was decent, but there wasn’t much to him based on what made it to the page. Had we got Claremont’s actual origin for Essex, instead of the hints from the Classic X-Men back-ups, he had a lot more potential.
I didn’t like him filling the role of “all-knowing, mysterious schemer with mystery” that we got after Claremont. I do have a soft spot for the Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix by Peter Milligan. Maybe just because I was so enamoured by everything Milligan was writing at the time, until he started writing Elektra.
I do very much like Sinister as he was presented by Gillen and Hickman. I don’t like how convoluted writers decided to make “Essex” after Hickman left. I think that Sinister should have stayed gone for many years after “Fall of X”, as I don’t see much to be done with the character after the Enigma debacle.
I mean, the constant with Sinister is that he’s a personality and an all-around “creepy manipulator with eccentric fixations” type, and he’s used much more as a spooky background presence or a campy sadist than as a character who does fight scenes.
When he gets stomped on, he gets stomped on in the contrived ways that characters are taken out in big dumb crossover events. So the Phoenix Five overwhlem his defenses, or Havok charges up Cyclops to symbolize the reunification of the scattered X-book heroes, or the Neo get a big push by showing them running Sinister to ground.
@Chris V
Okay, so from what you’ve written (if I’m reading you right) Sinister was never a big favorite of yours until the Gillen/Hickman period? You did say that the Claremont version was decent but it was more the unrealized potential of the character as opposed to the actual presentation that appealed to you. So, basically just the Gillen/Hickman period then?
But the character has been used relatively frequently for, well, it’s getting close to 40 years now. That’s what I don’t get.
He seems to me like he’s more of a writer-favorite than a fan-favorite, and if that’s the case, I can see why. If you can fit Sinister in as the villain for almost any type of story you have in mind because he’s built that way, then it saves you from having to come up with a new villain, I suppose.
As with every character, my opinion on Mr. Sinister depends on the writer. The alternately campy and scary version Gillen, Hickman, and Wells wrote was a ton of fun. I never thought much of him before that.
The character design is decent, though. Sure, he looks like evil Colossus, but certain details-the sliced up cape and sharp teeth- work.
“Sure, he looks like evil Colossus, but certain details-the sliced up cape and sharp teeth- work.”
Well, let’s agree to disagree there. To me he looks like what the NBC peacock might look like if it was fired from its job as the network’s symbol and was very disgruntled about it.
I quite liked Mr Sinister when he was a new character. The master schemer, you hardly saw him at all, mostly it was the heroes struggling to keep up with his henchmen. But when you did see him in action it was hardcore. Strangling Sabretooth with one hand and so-on. This was before the 90s orgy of excess, when such things still held shock value, but even then his quiet inevitability stood out.
I’m not terribly keen on the modern camp version with hundreds of clones, but to each their own.
@Si
Fair enough. I’ve never been able to get past his name and appearance, but I can see how that sort of imagery (like the Sabretooth scene you mentioned) would’ve been striking to younger readers at the time.
Interesting how Sinister seems to be generally regarded as a ’90s character when he was first seen in 1987, but I get it. He fits the style, and to be fair, that style we associate with the ’90s didn’t just start popping up from Jan 1st, 1990 onward. By the late ’80s, things were already heading towards that style, and then heading back away from it by the late ’90s. Cecilia Reyes is a good example of the latter. She’s technically a ’90s character (1997), but she’s not that style at all. She’s the sort of character you could imagine Chris Claremont coming up with in the late ’70s/early ’80s.
If Cecilia had been created just a few years earlier, she’d probably have been given a ’90s-style medical profession-related codename like “Bloodsample” or “Die-Alysis.” And she’d have delivered cheesy “badass” one-liners in battle like, “Time to turn your head and cough!” before force-field punching a guy in the nutsack.
There is one factor that might explain why he keeps popping up as a major X-Men villain.
He’s the only major villain who’s never had a rehabilitation arc.
Think about it. Magneto keeps doing face turns. The White Queen has been an X-Man for over 20 years. Mystique and the Juggernaut have been X-Men on multiple occasions. Even Sabretooth, Omega Red, Sebastian Shaw, and Apocalypse have been written sympathetically. Even the freakin’ Toad has been written as an X-Men ally at this point. I suspect that it’s because Sinister is so over the top that he really only works as a supervillain that he’s almost impossible for a writer to turn into a hero, which means he’s a very good fallback option as more and more villains get redeemed.
Moo, Si: I’m not even sure he’s really at home in the 90s. The vaguely defined powers are absolutely a product of the time, but I can see his design coming out of the same 70s aesthetic that gave us, say, Morbius. In many ways he’s only a step removed from a very generic Silver Age archetype: the scheming villain who does mysterious things.
“He’s the only major villain who’s never had a rehabilitation arc.”
Good point. I guess you’re right. You can’t really do that with him, and not just because of the reasons you already stated, but also because you’d have to change his branding. You can’t have a good guy calling himself “Mister Sinister.” He’d have to change it to something like “Mister Sensitive.”
No, wait. That’s just stupid. You can’t call a character that.
Mister Dexter.
Maybe three people would laugh at that one.
@Moo- Sinister is generally considered one of the X-Men’s top five vilalins along with Magneto, Apocalypse, Mystique and Shaw. (Sabretooth is generally more Wolverine’s arch-enemy- it takes a lot of effort to make him a threat to an entire team on his own. in Sabretooth War, the writers had to have him ally with alternate reality versions of himself, steal technology from Orchis, steal Forge’s neutralizer, etc.)
In fact, in recent years, Sinister has arguably become the X-Men’s main nemesis. Magneto has been more or less reformed since 2004. Apocalypse was mostly dead between 2001 and 2018, and then he spent most of the Krakoan era as an ally. And Mystique seems to change sides every alternate Tuesday. That leaves Shaw, and he’s usually considered the least impressive of the top five. X-Men: First Class had to combine him with Sinister to make him work as a villain.
But really, who else would you put as one of the X-Men;s top villains? The Dark Beast has been inactive for the past five years, since the real Beast’s actions made him redundant. Cassandra Nova and Sublime never took off like Morrison wanted them to. (Although Breevort and MacKay are trying to make Cassandra Nova into a major villain.) Most writers other than Claremont didn’t like the Shadow King. None of the X-Men’s human villains like Hodge or Pierce or Stryker really hit the big time. Selene has had a couple of attempts at a major storyline like Necrosis but she still isn’t quite an A-list villain. Stryfe is a Liefeld creation. Graydon Creed never quite lived up to his parents’ villainy- and he really needs a name other than Bad Seed! Sugar Man and Fitzroy never hit the big time. (Although, again, Breevort and MacKay are trying to make them into major villains.)
I’m sure that the other villains’ reforming helped Sinister but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Yes, he first appeared while Magneto was reformed. But Shaw, for example .never really had a reformation arc except when he was amnesiac. Apocalypse didn’t have a reformation arc until Krakoa but there were periods but there were periods when Sinister was appearing more often than him.
It’s difficult to know why a villain clicks. Look at Boomerang. People say that he became a good villain after Spencer revamped him or maybe after Jeff Parker’s Thunderbolts. But even before Jeff Parker’s Thunderbolts. he was one of the most frequently used of Spider-Man’s foes. And some of these were Bendis-style villain-in-the-crowd-among-dozens-of-villains-even-though-it-makes-no-sense- appearances but the majority were full-fledged appearances.He was one of the core members of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery. So why did Boomernang click with the writers and readers?
I wonder how much the ’90s cartoon has to do with Sinister’s continued popularity, or at least with people thinking of him as a ’90s character. He was introduced fairly early, got to be the overarching villain for a full season, and perhaps most importantly, he had a really cool voice.
@Michael
Firstly, thanks for keeping it brief.
My ideal X-Men villains are more theoretical in nature. Honestly, I think politicians (so long as they’re not written like Graydon Creed) theoretically should make for the best X-Men “villains” because they really do have the power to affect change and make things rather miserable for mutants if that’s their agenda. And it’s not like the X-Men can just beat them into the ground as they would a traditional villain. But obviously, I’m quite aware that these are superhero comics, and you can’t devote entire storylines to the X-Men marching in protest to proposed anti-mutant legislation, so that’s why they don’t work outside of being a background threat.
So, in terms of conventional supervillains, I really don’t have any favorites currently. Maybe I never really did outside of Magneto, Mystique, and….um… huh. So much for that.
But as far as Sinister is concerned, it seems to me that his ranking among X-Men villains owes more to a lack of viable competition than it does to the inherent strengths of the character (whatever they are).
@yrzhe – I believe you may be onto something.
I think Sinister seems like a 90s villain largely because his deal was copied by 90s villains so often, just faster and louder. He wasn’t the first supervillain master planner retconned into every part of a hero’s life, but he was probably the first X-character, and he was big at just tbe right time.
And honestly, he was designed to be a fanciful child’s idea of a bad guy, and I think that just plain resonates well with adults, after all the face razors and bloody claws and realistic battle trousers have come and gone.
By the way, how did we end up discussing Sinister? Was he even in any of the reviewed books? It seemed to go from Brevoort to Sinister out of nowhere unless I missed something. Not that I’m upset about it, but I’m worried that I may have blacked out earlier.
Mojo is clearly the greatest X-men villain
Although…
@Moo
23 comments back from yours.
Asteele said:
I think this the place I can say this without judgement . I’ve been watching shows and reading comics about me sinister for 30 years, and I have no idea what his powers are/
@M
Wow. So it really was random.
I have to say, that’s very impressive. Asteele pulled off the comment section equivalent of jingling keys in front of an infant to distract them.
If you want, we can go back to discussing Songbird.
I’m good.
Songbird, check. Sinister, check.
…Slipstream? He just popped up in the new Unlimited arc.
I think part of why Mister Sinister is regarded as a 90s villain because it was the 1990s that finally defined his lasting modus operandi and gave him a canonical origin story. Even by the end of the 1980s Inferno crossover, it still wasn’t really clear why he’d backed the Mutant Massacre or why he did most of the things he did.
And it was the 1990s that brought him back from his apparent death at the end of Inferno, turning him into a recurring threat and tying him to Apocalypse.
As to his longevity, some of that is that he ended up with a good basic hook as a sci-fi Victorian eugenicist (as opposed to Apocalypse’s pop Darwinism), and this plays nicely against the themes of the X-books. He also has a gleefully malicious personality, which lends itself to over-the-top villainy as much as shadowy manipulation, so he’s often fun to read and probably fun to script.
The downside of all of this is that Sinister tends to bounce between “mysterious master plan that may not ever be clarified if the writer changes” and “mad scientist arbitrarily carries out nasty experiment to give the heroes something to do this month.” In both cases, the 1990s and early 2000s sometimes tended to let him just do his thing, be temporarily stymied, and then gloat that nothing had really gone wrong for him, which eventually just gets tiresome and makes the X-protagonists look rather pointless in their own comics.
The better uses of Sinister in recent years have managed to give him clear, more proximate goals, but also have arcs that end with him getting some kind of temporary comeuppance in the grand comicbook tradition.
It might be interesting to see him have a more lasting reaction to finding out he was really someone else’s project — and pawn — all along, but I get the sense the writers moved on from that possibility pretty quickly.
Omar! Snap out of it! We got key-jingled! That Asteele person could be back at any moment and make us talk about something else. We need to protect ourselves!
What’s the deal with the Upstarts and the Externals? Are they the one and the same? Never really understood what they were all about.
😉
Mojo II the Sequel is the best X-Villain
Given the concepts that we saw with Orchis and Doctor Stasis, I think it’s time we revisited the deep thematic resonance of Mekano.
Totally off-topic:
I *love* Sinister.
Did someone post “Sinister?” Awesome, let’s talk about Mr. Sinister!
I liked when Mike Carey wrote him. He wasn’t exactly a master planner – had a pretty simple scheme to blind the X-Men by taking out the precogs and time travellers before Hope’s birth and to destroy one of the, what, fifteen teams from within – but Carey gave him really good villain dialogue.
He didn’t focus quite enough on his powers to make them make sense. Strong enough to slap a blastin’ Cannonball away, and yet Mystique overpowered him… due to element of surprise? Sure, why not.
On another note, while he had a cool voice in TAS, he was also voiced by Clancy Brown in Wolverine and the X-Men, and Brown is just the best at cartoon villains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFU1kQ_a0TE
@Krzysiek Ceran: Carey was the first writer I remember who made Sinister work consistently for me as a character in a plotline, as opposed to a character concept coasting on style points.
And having part of Sinister’s scheme backfire thanks to Mystique, with Rogue inadvertently “killing” him was an effective way to give the arc some closure, something missing from previous uses of Sinister. (The attempt to set up Miss Sinister as a successor was not as effective, and naturally didn’t stick.)
I’ve also really enjoyed Gillen’s take, though I think one aspect of Sinister could be emphasized a bit more. While it’s more logical to have Sinister just bioengineer his own chimeras and clone or grow what he needs, I always liked the idea that he’s got enough of that 19th-century mindset to him that he wants his masterwork to be something he’s ensured will “breed true” in his sick way of looking at things.
I feel there should be just a hint of Nathaniel Essex still wanting to keep what he had before becoming Sinister, to manufacture some warped simulacrum of the social and family structure he imagines as the “best thing.”
It would explain why he went to the trouble of creating Madelyne Pryor’s fake life and memories and setting her up to meet Cyclops, as opposed to just harvesting some Summers DNA and making Cable or Stryfe in a test tube.
And it would give him more of a reason to engage in manipulative games to get what he wants rather than just quietly gathering resources and doing his thing, as well as explaining some degree of psychological weakness.
Gillen does have Sinister taking up the broader aesthetics of Victorian imperialist culture, but I think Sinister’s more stalker-y mindset from some his past portrayals adds something to the character.
One ting I’ve always wondered about: We know from interviews and Intenret posts that Claremont’s concept for Sinister was an eternal child projecting a supervillain persona (and, perhaps, a cliched “charming badass” person as Gambit by some accounts).
But have we ever learned Claremont’s take on Sinister’s motivation? Was it just that he had some sort of childish, obsessive grudge against Cyclops from the orphanage and was meant to be immature but vastly powerful, or was he supposed to have a more coherent or complex agenda? Do we know Claremont’s idea for the motive behind the Mutant Massacre on “his” Sinister’s part?
(Sorry, Moo, the keys keep on jingling and we just keep leaping for them!)
I think the wild inconsistencies in the character as is make it even more difficult to retrieve the basic concept of the character and his base motivations.
Base Summers resentment would cover an awful lot of ground, though it’s difficult to fathom whether that’d be the original outline of his intent – I’m trying to remember Sinister’s “voice” in Inferno, but I can’t quite grasp it.
I do know the purist, Victorian eugenist bit has been used to underscore how the Morlocks are failed, unproductive, or redundant mutants within his warped scheme of things.
Maybe we cross fingers that Paul decides to go ahead and do a Complete Sinister…?
Also just wanted to reenforce the Mike Carey and Kieron Gillen love. With Carey in particular, given how long he stuck around, I’ve always wondered about the editorial rationale behind bringing him into the fold.
“Fired,” “disgruntled,””NBC peacock” – best description ever! It is perfect, both visually and in describing his personality. Claremont, Carey, Hickman/Gillen; Sinister is really three characters sharing a trenchcoat/cape.
Top 5 excluding the above:
Senator Kelley
Sauron
Malice
Selene
Eric the Red
“Maybe we cross fingers that Paul decides to go ahead and do a Complete Sinister…?”
I’ve never cared for Sinister, but I fully support this idea.