The X-Axis – w/c 5 June 2023
IMMORTAL X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) The Colossus spotlight issue was always going to be interesting, given his weird status quo as the puppet of a Russian novelist. For the most part, Immortal has been content to leave that as a lurking issue in the background, but the premise suits Kieron Gillen’s style perfectly – in fact, it’s arguably more at home in this book than it was in X-Force. I’m still not sure how far we’re meant to take this narration as literally describing Piotr’s state of mind and how far we should see it as reflecting Scrivener’s, but that’s fine – it’s an interesting tension in itself. A bit more consistency on the ground rules between titles wouldn’t have gone amiss, but this works well. And again, Gillen and Lucas Werneck get plenty of visual interest into a very talky, political story – nearly half of this issue by page count consists of people talking in the Quiet Council chamber, but you wouldn’t know it. What’s surprising me somewhat is how quickly the Council seems to be falling apart after Sins of Sinister, but then maybe that’s in the nature of a system with no checks and balances that concentrated all the power in twelve secretive people. It works up until it doesn’t, at which point it goes really, really wrong, really, really fast.
X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) One of those stories that exists largely to build up a new threat, in this case the Stark Sentinels. I’m not entirely sold on the concept of these things – the Iron Man iconography feels like it doesn’t have much to do with this book – but I can see the point that if you’re going to do the Sentinels, they need a bit of rehabbing. And borrowing some credibility from Iron Man might not be the worst way to do that. It makes for a decent enough fight scene, at any rate, though I’m not altogether sure it plays to Joshua Cassara’s strengths as an artist. . It’s the opening scene with Mother Righteous and Dr Stasis that works best for me, though, since the relationship between the various Sinister iterations seems like something worth exploring.
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – MUTANT FIRST STRIKE #1. (Annotations here.) The second of the four Before the Fall one-shots is an odd book. The other three all seem like they’re fairly important to the wider storylines. This, on the other hand, feels like a decently executed but ultimately stock X-Men story. The bad guys frame mutants for doing a bad thing, the heroes save the day and win hearts and minds on a small scale, but the wider media narrative remains firmly against them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it feels more like a routine restatement of the premise than anything else. I think the idea is to tell the story of the mutants losing control of the narrative to Orchis, but the problem is that it’s done in a way that would have fitted equally in the 80s or 90s. Surely in the Krakoan era there ought to be other dimensions to this. Even if you’re not going to have the Krakoans go out there and bribe their own TV shows, a big part of the premise of Krakoa is that the mutants are transforming people’s lives with medicine, they’re embedded in the economy, they’ve got the power and influence they never had in the past… shouldn’t they have at least some strategy for this? Even if the idea is meant to be that they took their eye off the ball and didn’t pay enough attention to their relations with the human world, this doesn’t feel like that story – it just feels like the X-Men playing the hits. It’s nice to see some of the more obscure characters get an outing, mind you. As for the art… well, it’s patchy. Judas Traveller’s control room looks great, some of the Watchdog sequences look good, but the scenes with Thunderbird look really off.
BISHOP: WAR COLLEGE #5. By J Holtham, Sean Damien Hill, Victor Nava & Espen Grundetjern. Well, it didn’t come together in the final issue. This is a weird miniseries in which a bunch of unrelated concepts, all perfectly viable on their own, seem to coexist without really having much to do with one another. Bishop is training a bunch of students and pushing them too hard. They stumble into an Orchis attack on Krakoa and the kids have to rise to the occasion and prove themselves to Bishop. That’s fine… but then Bishop himself gets transported to another world for most of the miniseries, where the story is about (i) a world where only black people are mutants (except in practice it means that all the established mutants are black), and (ii) Tempo trying to recreate her life with her late father. You’d think the idea would be that Bishop learns something that makes him go easier on the kids, and he does meet himself as a more relaxed teacher, but any change doesn’t really come across – and he’s not actually there to see his charges prove themselves individually. If anything it feels like a story where Bishop doesn’t change and winds up making the other world more like him, which is just a bit odd. Our Bishop comes back learning about the importance of defending paradise when it exists… which is what he was doing in issue #1 anyway. The Tempo thread feels disconnected and the black angle underdeveloped. It doesn’t work, I’m afraid.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #90. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. Mostly another issue of Nature Girl fighting the X-Men, up until the point where they finally get the upper hand and she gets yanked off for the big confrontation. We’re kind of repeating the points here, but I think that’s probably the right choice for pacing, and I’m glad that the ending of this storyline isn’t just going to be “the X-Men defeat her”.
DEADPOOL: BADDER BLOOD #1. By Rob Liefeld and Chad Bowers. This is a sequel to Deadpool: Bad Blood (which I haven’t read and came out when Deadpool wasn’t in the X-office), which established that Deadpool’s childhood best friend also signed up for Department H and wound up as an uncontrollable super-soldier with the improbable name of Thumper. Deadpool feels responsible for the guy. He finds out that Thumper is now making a move into supervillainy, and sets out to cut him off. I was braced for another haywire stream of consciousness, like the last few stories that Liefeld contributed to the X-office, but this is actually fairly straightforward and coherent. Bowers’ script helps to keep it together, but it does feel generally more focussed than I was expecting. That’s not to say it’ll appeal much beyond Liefeld’s core audience. It’s still pretty slight, and it could actually use a bit more manic energy. But it does exceed expectations.
I felt Hickman’s House/Powers had already rehabbed the Sentinels as a passable threat. Moira’s past lives featured the idea that the Sentinels were being used to cull the mutant population and keep them occupied while a segment of humanity went about pursuing the technology necessary to become post-human. We also learned that AI was evolving and that machine intelligence was something which humanity discovered rather than created. In Moira’s seventh life we saw her decision to kill the Trask bloodline to prevent the creation of the technology, only to find that the Sentinels still came into existence.
Sinister’s appearance in the Bishop series was odd. We see him in the Pit seemingly calm and collected. The last time we saw him he was panicking over the Dominion. Which is odd. (Yes, Blindfold’s dialogue implied that she saw a way to stop the Dominion and it involved Kurt but Sinister doesn’t know that. Unless Blindfold or Legion contacted him off panel and nobody told the readers.)
Also, Sinister talks about how he hates being trapped with Nazis. He worked with Nazis during World War II.
I think one purpose of this series was to shill Armor as a future X-Man, since he kept losing the votes. And Gimmick’s cameo at the end was to remind us that Gimmick existed since Gimmick will soon be joining Maddie’s team. But we didn’t need a whole limited series for either of these.
Wasn’t the idea behind the Pit that it pacifies the individual. The person is kept in stasis while still aware of everything happening around them.
I had higher hopes for Bishop:War College, but it fell flat for me as well. I thought the alternate world would be the focus, but it wasn’t. I didn’t care about what happened to the recruits at all. Total misfire.
Chris V
That was one of the things I really liked about that storyline – that it made the Sentinels feel like a threat again for probably the first time since Morrison.
I feel like Bishop: War College might have made a decent first arc to an *ongoing*. In that case, the lack of narrative unity wouldn’t have been a problem. As is, I agree that it failed to cohere.
MUTANT FIRST STRIKE feels like it could have been an Unlimited story. But read alongside this week’s X-Men, it does feel like the office is intentionally playing the hits before the status quo changing event begins. Beside a parade of obscure characters, the premise also finds practical uses to showcase what are often quite impractical powers, and that level of cooperation and creativity is very Krakoan, eg Tag and Karma organizing evacuations, Thumbelina doing field surgery, and so on.
The Bishop story really is an odd one. I expect that someone had the idea to imagine a black version of the X-Men to coincide with Black History Month (the first issue was released in February), but the contrivance of that storyline raise some issues. Bishop himself, as the son of Aboriginal Australians and the great-grandson of Gateway, is not African American. “Blackness” and race are not genetic concepts, there is no “Black gene,” and so linking the x-gene (which itself is quite an outdated understanding of genetics) to blackness strikes me as problematic. Perhaps I’ve misread, and it’s better off not overanalyzed. But man of the designs for the Black X-Men are quite good, especially with regards to the depiction and creative use of hair styles, which really suggest much more characterization than is on the page. (Wolverine for instance, or Beast.) Which again leads me to believe that the story started there.
The trainees do have some nice moments as well, and I like the use of group chat as a data page. (Squirrel Girl probably did that kind of thing best, but happy to see contemporary communications reflected in the books somehow.)
Chad Bowers of X-Men 92, that makes sense that he would restrain the Rob.
Regarding Sinister working with Nazis: Most writers seems to have quietly decided to never speak of it again. In the first issue of Immortal, Gillen makes an oblique reference, while also trying to paper it over: “I used to be a huge racist. I surgically excised that bit of my personality.”
“By Rob Liefeld and Chad Bowers”
Whatever happened to Chris Sims? Did he get (rightly and inevitably) Metoo’d?
Joseph S, I wonder how many at Marvel (a) remember that Bishop is of indigenous Australian descent, and/or (b) know that indigenous Australian and African American are not the same.
The confusion with Bishop’s ethnicity is that at least one writer has suggested that one of his grandmothers was Storm or a relative of Storm.
Bishop’s ethnicity is even more complicated when you add in that Whilce Potacio designed him to be Philippino
It’s funny that in some quarters in 2023, being a megalomaniacal, mustache-twirling super villain isn’t apparently as bad as being a racist or fascist.
Mr. Sinister, whose whole thing is eugenics and genetic essentialism, looking askance racism is a bit like Dr. Doom crying over 9/11.
Mark-Did you read the Joe Casey Zodiac comic? It was published during the “Dark Reign” Marvel event. I quite liked it. The premise of the character was that with the US government now composed of people who were formerly known as “super villains” (such as Norman Osborn, his Thunderbolts, and HAMMER), that the only people left to be considered heroes were the ones currently known as “super villains”.
I like the premise. If the current government is beyond corrupt and the only alternative is worse, then it’s the “super villains” who are the last defence.
@ASV
Arguably one of the worst decisions in modern comics history.
@Chris – don’t remember that. I wrote a paper in the 90s about how emblematic it was that the 90s “heroes” were not just 80s anti heroes like Wolverine but becoming full on villains like Venom. I can only imagine what I would have written about the last 30 years.
Yeah, the difference with the violent vigilante antiheroes, like Venom, was that they were fighting to preserve the status quo through the same methods as the criminals. They were fascists.
Casey’s Zodiac was different in that in that series, those who were fighting against the status quo and order (those seen as “super villains”) were seen as the new type of heroes.
I will look to see if thats on Unlimited.
I do like that they made that change to Sinister. Making a Nazi short-hand for “evil” has become far too overused. Outside of one poorly conceived story, Sinister had never been shown to harbour racist/nationalist beliefs before or after. It’s like the writer of that story didn’t think that the character’s name was obvious enough, so better put him with the Nazis to make sure everyone gets the point.
I always thought of Sinister’s views on eugenics being based within the elitist strain rather than racist or nationalist ideology.
@Chris V- I never saw Sinister as having racist beliefs before Gillen’s story either- I thought he just worked with the Nazis because they gave him a large pool of victims to experiment on.
Gillen, on the other hand, seems to view Sinister in the context of 19th century British imperialism, which no other writer does.
Was the story with Sinister as a Nazi before or after the X-Men: First Class movie? That had Sinister running a concentration camp, although I can’t remember if he was portrayed as a Nazi or just a guy, as Michael said, taking advantage of the ready supply of people to experiment on.
It was long before the movie. It was in Weapon X #14 from 2003.
It was SHAW in the X-Men First Class movie running the concentration camp, not Sinister. Shaw in the First Class movie was a composite of Shaw and Sinister. And yes, Sinister was first shown to be a Nazi in Weapon X 14, long before the First Class movie.
I’m pretty sure Kieron Gillen has said in interviews that he doesn’t like Sinister’s Holocaust back story. In fairness, the problem isn’t with the idea that Sinister would be willing to ally with the Nazis – of course he would. It’s the fact that Sinister is a melodramatic, campy, over the top, faintly ridiculous character who has no place being anywhere near a historical atrocity.
And that’s how you describe Sinister, he sounds more like someone that would be a target for them, not an ally.
If you ever do get around to reading Deadpool: Bad Blood, I think you’d have fun with it, Paul.
Among its other offences, it includes a memorable sequence where Deadpool and Domino discuss the fact that Vanessa was impersonating Domino when Deadpool first attacked X-Force in New Mutants #98, then a few pages later Domino reminisces about that day as if she was there.
Well, Kevin Bacon’s fashion sense (which is apparently about all I remember of the movie) makes a lot more sense if he was playing Sebastian Shaw than Mr. Sinister.
This will probably seem like a ridiculous comment to most, but has the consensus on Sinister always been that he’s campy and silly?
It makes total sense in my head for him to work with the Nazis because I got into the franchise through the 90s series along with the cartoon at the time, and he always just seemed like a cold and unpleasant manipulator type who, at best, could be occasionally pithy.
Now, granted, when I was 13, the X-Men were a total obsession for me and I took the whole thing super seriously. I do get that he has a flamboyant design and a silly name (and was meant to be a kids idea of a supervillain), but he never struck me as any more ridiculous than the next bad lad in tights and black lipstick (I miss his creepy mouth full of sharp teeth).
So did everyone think he was daft all this time? It may well just be the nostalgia talking – I really did think all of those cryptic hints he kept dropping were going somewhere…
Chris Claremont originally intended Mr Sinister to be a front used by a character who was actually an eternal child, and he was supposed to look like a child’s idea of a villain. That origin gets rejected by Marvel and the 90s writers wind up playing him more or less straight, to the point of giving him a tragic (if melodramatic) origin story. And of course the 90s was a fairly histrionic time in superhero comics anyway, where he didn’t stand out quite so much by comparison.
And of course it wasn’t until “relatively” recently that Sinister was given the personality overhaul from over-the-top supervillain to campy over-the-top supervillain (in Gillen’s Uncanny run circa the 540’s…) so we can lay all the groundwork for the current take on Sinister on Gillen, I’d say.
For a long time after his initial debut, he really was just an enthusiastic master planner with a taste for cloning and mutant massacres. On the whole, I do prefer this version to the ’80s version.
Trivia: Whilce Portacio admitted in online interviews that while he did design Bishop to be a typical cishet adult male Pinoy*/Fil-Am(*what we most commonly call ourselves in iur Old Country, ** abbreviation for members of the diaspora in the New World) with a happy-go-lucky work-hard play-hard personality , Bob Harris asked him to modify his design to essentially become a African-American version of say, Frank Miller’s Bruce Wayne or Garth zen is’ Frank Castle (hard boiled badass all-business no-nonsense) LOL and WP , being a happy-go-lucky guy himself gamely acquiesced and decided to make fellow XSE mutant supercop (and one of Bishop’s two subordinates) Randall be his self-insert instead (Randall even looks exactly like WP in his 20’s during the 1990’s)
I remember that years later in the 00’s, after his ethnicity and/or origin was retconned by Chris Claremont it was suggested by a number of African-American X-fans themselves in online forums, that Bishop always felt slightly “off” due to his hair (long and shaggy , not curly) , which apparently was supposedly distinctively uncommon for the average male of Black African descent, but which was more common for the average male of Aboriginal Australian descent .
Also Cosmic Serendipity: Bishop’s sister , “Shard” * , was introduced in 1994 as having natural blonde hair (it looks like Street Fighter’s Cammy) and the later retcon in 2001 that she is actually Australian Aborigine is what TvTropes calls “Fridge Brilliance” as the only POC on Earth with natural blonde hair are in fact Australian Aborigines and Melanesians
* apparently their parents never bothered to give her a proper name , as they had already become alcoholics living in a migrant/refugee detention/prison concentration camp by the time she was born (they fled Australia the day before it was literally nuked in the “6 Minute [World] War” by what was heavily implied to be China) , I feel that Lucia would be perfect for her , it goes with Lucas , and it means “light” which fits with her mutant powerset to generate photons/become a living hologram
“It’s funny that in some quarters in 2023, being a megalomaniacal, mustache-twirling super villain isn’t apparently as bad as being a racist or fascist.”
Ideally this is true in all quarters in 2023, because one is a fictional cliche and doesn’t actually cause real-world harm, and the other is an ever-encroaching legitimate threat to democracy, liberty, and human rights.
“This will probably seem like a ridiculous comment to most, but has the consensus on Sinister always been that he’s campy and silly?”
Not really. Silly, yes, in the way a lot of ’90s villains (I know he was created in the ’80s) were silly and overly earnest and oh-so-mysterious, but not campy.
However, this is rather incompatible with nazis, who have never been shy about their agenda or goals. You can’t really have nazis without the propaganda component. If Sinister was secretly performing eugenics experiments to wipe out Jews or something comparable, it still wouldn’t be particularly nazi-like, it would just be nazi-adjacent.
I remember Gillen talking about playing down Sinister’s Nazi ties. He felt connecting the character to real world atrocity that way was… I can’t remember precisely how he phrased it, but he likened it to sort of a reverse version of stolen valor. Using real people’s trauma to spice up a costumed funnybook character.
@ylu, Yeah, that’s entirely reasonable. It’s not like he wasn’t already established as a monstrous eugenicist.
For what it’s worth, I do think that the current version of Sinister is engaging, and probably superior to the old one in terms of supporting good stories, I just can’t turn off the part of my brain that says it’s not the proper character, no matter how much cloning is involved!
Formative reading experiences, I suppose. There’ll be new readers, no doubt, for whom this version of Sinister is the only one they know. So it goes for aging nerds. I’d hate to be remembered as the man who tried to gatekeep Mr. Sinister.
@Another Sam, you probably feel that way because Gillen’s take was such a deliberate reinvention of the character. There was no attempt to bring the two versions, it was a clean shift.
I don’t really blame him. He could’ve done the work, if he’d wanted, to tell a story of Sinister changing, but the book had become kind of a slog and needed a kick in the pants.
I don’t really think Gillen achieved that kick, though.
I like how even more recently, we’ve had explicit depiction of Sinister actively rewriting his own personality, so all of these takes on him are valid, from the cackling master planner to the camp master cloner and even the “performed experiments in the concentration camps” version.
It’s silly, yes, but it actually works in this instance. Sinister alters himself as necessary, possibly even past the point of knowing why he does it. Who’s even to say what his true personality is at this point?
FWIW, I can easily buy him as a eugenicist in the same manner as the High Evolutionary and unfortunately, this means that of COURSE he’d be working with the Nazis during that period, because they WERE doing groundbreaking (if horrendous, unethical, inhuman, inexcusable) work regarding the human body. (It’s like the old ethical debate over what the Allies should do with the medical knowledge derived from Nazi experimentation afterwards…) Was it in Sinister’s nature to benefit from this? Absolutely. Was he an actual Nazi? No. Just an opportunistic monster who went where the knowledge was.
So of course he hates the Struckers on general principle. They legitimately suck. Sinister feels superior to -everyone- because he -is- superior (in his own mind/personality overlay), not because anyone else is specifically -inferior-.
I’ve seen the thing about Bishop being originally imagined as Filipino before editorial mandate made him Black, so it’s always interesting to see how his actual ethnicity and cultural heritage is explored and handled.
Has Sinister been confirmed as a eugenicist in anything other than that Weapon X story? I haven’t read tons of his appearances. I could see him starting with an interest in eugenics, but abandoning the theory after he realized it was nonsense. He uses his X-gene experiments to clone, combine powers, and develop biological weapons. I don’t think that’s eugenics, exactly, as he looks at the genes themselves rather than the “mutant race” as a group or even on an individual basis.
Well, Sinister is specifically looking for powers that are useful, not “can turn hair blue at will” or “can poop ice-cream”. I think he clearly has an Apocalpse-esque understanding that some mutants are more valuable than others, and by extension that there’s no good reason for some mutants to exist.
In this same series we saw Sinister performing experiments on mutant children in New Mexico, so I don’t think Sinister working with the Nazis is far-fetched. I always assumed he was looking for hidden mutants in the camps, and I doubt he’d balk at anything Mengele did.
Yes, Sinister attempting to breed Summers DNA with Grey DNA in order to create a superior child would mean that Sinister was pursuing eugenics into the current day.
Sinister technically wouldn’t be opposed to Mengele’s work, on principle, but The Other Michael’s interpretation of Sinister is spot-on. He’s an elitist, not a believer in a “master race” or nationalism, which would reek of populism to Sinister.
Gillen’s decision to want Sinister to be distanced from the Holocaust is perfectly reasoned. It’s become far too over-used in fiction as shorthand in fiction for “evil” which has greatly trivialized the Nazis.
One of Sinister’s long-time obsessions was getting that Scott/Jean kid, even making Madelyne for that purpose. That might be a different take of eugenics than what the Nazis practiced, but it’s still breeding people.
^^Like Chris V said.
Mind, Gillen’s version of Sinister is a bit more creative than his old “make a powerful mutant plan”. He could probably figure out a terrifying chimera of Eye-Scream.
And let’s not forget that one of Sinister’s earliest depicted schemes was the Mutant Massacre–the wholesale slaughter of the Morlocks.
His ultimate motivation for that action, while a retcon, still made sense in context: the Morlocks were byproducts of experiments conducted by Dark Beast, who studied under AOA Sinister… so they represented branches of his work that he clearly wanted to eradicate. Also, he felt that the Morlocks were substandard as far as mutants go, and needed to be wiped out for the good of the mutant gene pool.
Given his initial desire to create a perfect race, his obsession with breeding certain powerful mutants, and his willingness to prune the gene pool in order to preserve its strength… yeah, he’s a pretty loathsome individual especially since his own obsessions transcend any one particular cause, nation or belief. (Which also means he was always going to sell out Krakoa the second it no longer factored into his greater plans. Xavier and Magneto were fools to think they could ever play nice with him.)
Also, an Eye-Scream chimera? Let’s see… a mutant who can turn into ice cream.
There’s the obvious Soft Serve, who either poops ice cream or is a portal to an ice cream dimension.
I’d say a chimera made of those two, plus Iceman, and you can have infinite ice cream…
Now add in someone like Cyclops who also technically generates portals (to an energy dimension) or Nightcrawler or Darkstar.
Or perhaps, and more likely, get someone who has power over dairy, sugar, or other ice cream components. Turn sugar into acid, for instance and you have infinite amounts of acidic cold stuff.
Furthermore, what are the limits of their powers in the first place? “Almost any flavor” means what, exactly… is it straight, unadulterated ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry…) or do flavors with ingredients count? (Mint chocolate chip, rocky road, Americone Dream…) Because if you can generate mix-ins as well, this opens up SO MANY OPTIONS. Also, what defines ice cream? We have all manner of kinds, including dairy-free, vegan — so can either Eye-Scream or Soft Serve generate frozen dairy desserts which are considered ice cream even if they deviate from the standard?
So yeah. A chimera which combines Eye-Scream and Iceman is already getting into scary territory. Let’s add someone who can provide them with the moisture needed to take this to the next level: Storm. And finally, someone who can affect elements: Thomas Jones, aka Alchemy.
Bam. A chimera capable of generating the moisture needed to become a truly gigantic ice golem, which can then transform itself into any flavor of ice cream… and then transform that ice cream into any other element it wants. Like gold, plutonium, or ammonia.
Incidentally, has Sinister’s involvement in the Morlock Massacre come up much on Krakoa? That definitely reeks of eugenics, even if it was retconned to be irritation at AoA Beast (which I guess at least directs his motives away from Nazi-dom).
I remember some Morlocks confronting Greycrow in Hellions, but bounced of off a number of the Krakoa books so am probably missing some developments here and there.
I remember Gillen talking about playing down Sinister’s Nazi ties. He felt connecting the character to real world atrocity that way was… I can’t remember precisely how he phrased it, but he likened it to sort of a reverse version of stolen valor. Using real people’s trauma to spice up a costumed funnybook character.
It certainly doesn’t help that the Weapon X story was titled “Sinister’s List,” playing on the title of the Spielberg film about the actual Holocaust.
Casey’s Zodiac was different in that in that series, those who were fighting against the status quo and order (those seen as “super villains”) were seen as the new type of heroes.
In the sense that they were being true to themselves when no one else was, yes. But the story still shows its version of Zodiac gleefully killing folks and manipulating his own allies to get what he wants.
I took it as a play on the old observation that in stock superhero genre narratives, the villains often function more like classical protagonists because they have distinct goals that the story follows.
The heroes — who mostly act to thwart the villains — are more like the obstacles.
Zodiac spends much of that miniseries angry at Norman Osborn for basically putting villains in the reactive “hero” role, but Zodiac also seems to want to go back to the stock genre tropes where the guys with the big evil schemes are open about it, and are actually driving events.
Didn’t Sinister initiate the Mutant Massacre to wipe out inferior mutants? Sounds pretty eugenic to me.
Also, Bishop was listed as being Filipino on a trading card, back in the day. I wasn’t into trading cards, but I had that one for some reason. It confused me at the time, but as JDSM mentioned above, thanks largely to the US war effort, there’s any number of Filipinos with African ancestors. One of the guys from Black Eyed Peas is Filipino. Of course, being Australian, I’m happy with the change.
“Sinister attempting to breed Summers DNA with Grey DNA in order to create a superior child would mean that Sinister was pursuing eugenics into the current day.”
Exactly.
“Sinister technically wouldn’t be opposed to Mengele’s work, on principle, but The Other Michael’s interpretation of Sinister is spot-on. He’s an elitist, not a believer in a “master race” or nationalism, which would reek of populism to Sinister.”
Yep. He’s not a nazi, just nazi-adjacent in some respects.
Looking at everyone’s posts: yeah, Sinister is a eugenicist, but in the Marvel Universe… eugenics can work, at least if one focuses on the X-gene? That’s a bit loaded, good thing it’s all fictional…
Anyway, I’m glad Gillen distanced the character from the Nazis, even if he shared some of their ideology. It’s easier to enjoy reading about this awful, evil person.
I forgot about “culling inferior mutants” being Sinister’s motivation for the mutant massacre (I ignore the Dark Beast retcon because it’s stupid, and irrelevant these days). That makes Apocalypse a better mastermind, with his early motivation being twisted Darwinism.
Eugenics are bad and Sinister is still an amoral, unethical, despicable monster whose only saving grace at the moment is being narratively entertaining.
As you say, it’s easier to read about him when we draw a line between his lifelong goals and his comparatively brief association with Nazis, and put them into context.
Also, there’s the likelihood that the WW2 era Sinister is actually dead, maybe several times over, replaced by one or more clones with new personality overlays, which brings up the question of culpability through multiple lives. Aren’t comics fun?
“but in the Marvel Universe… eugenics can work”
I think notions like this can make for potentially interesting stories, if a writer actually takes a serious jab at exploring them. It’s why, on its face, the premise behind Civil War was solid, because superpowers are legitimately threatening to human lives, even when wielded by recognized heroes. It’s just the execution was garbage.