Sins of Sinister #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
SINS OF SINISTER #1
“Everything is Sinister”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Guest artists: Geoffrey Shaw, Marco Checchetto, Juan José Ryp, David Baldéon, Travel Foreman, Carlos Gómez, Federico Vincentini, David Lopez, Joshua Cassara & Stefano Caselli
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan White
COVER / PAGE 1. Sinister in a central diamond, surrounded by shards with images of other X-Men and Quiet Council members.
This is a one-shot, effectively an extra issue of Immortal X-Men, which leads into the “Sins of Sinister” arc that runs over the next three issues of Immortal X-Men, Legion of X and X-Men Red – retitled for the interim as Immoral X-Men, Nightcrawlers and Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants.
PAGE 2. Carlos Pacheco obituary.
PAGE 3. Opening data page – Sinister’s red diamond logo has replaced the normal symbol. “Hell is other people” – well, “L’enfer, c’est les autres” – is indeed a line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944).
PAGES 4-5. 10 years into the future, Sinister resurrects some mutants.
This is a parody of the opening of House of X #1, the introduction of the Krakoan era and resurrection in particular, with Sinister taking Professor X’s place and copying his “To me, my X-Men” line.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits. The design retains a lot of Krakoan-era features, but with much heavier use of red. The Krakoan text on the left just says SINS OF SINISTER. The recap is covering events in Immortal X-Men.
“Everything is Sinister.” This was also the title of Uncanny X-Men vol 2 #1-4 (2011-2012), the Kieron Gillen arc that introduced this interpretation of Mr Sinister. In Gillen’s first run, Sinister already experimented with creating entire communities of Sinisters; what he hasn’t done until now is try to subsume other people into it.
PAGE 7. Sinister is sent to the Pit.
This is a reprise of the ending of Immortal X-Men #10.
PAGE 8. Professor X, Emma Frost, Exodus and Hope talk.
This continues directly from the end of Immortal X-Men #10, and confirms that all of the Quiet Council members resurrected in that issue were corrupted by Sinister. Presumably, the significance of them all being telepaths is that otherwise they’d have been around to sense that something was wrong – although there are enough other telepaths on Krakoa that this is surely still an issue in the long run. That said, these four are all pretty good at resisting telepathic probes, so maybe the bigger point is that they’re powerful enough to keep the other telepaths in line.
PAGES 9-11. The Quiet Council agree to extend resurrection to the humans.
Professor X, Emma, Hope and Exodus are all acting out their normal concerns. We see later in the issue that they still retain parts of their normal personalities – Xavier genuinely wants world peace, Emma still wants to protect children and so on – but even so, it’s fairly obvious that this is a mock debate, since Sinister’s whole scheme involves his puppets expanding resurrection to the human race and allowing him to take over the world. Of course, the mutant exceptionalism of Krakoa is one of its least appealing features to the traditional heroes, and so it’s hardly surprising that they’re on board; in a sense, Professor X is just proposing a big increase in the Phoenix Foundation programme that was announced at the end of A.X.E.: Judgment Day.
All four can evidently conceal the diamond marks on their foreheads – presumably physically, and not just as a matter of telepathic illusion.
Mystique and Destiny fled Krakoa near the end of Immortal X-Men #10, evidently because Destiny understood what was going on.
PAGES 12-15. In one year, Ben Urich tries to alert J Jonah Jameson to Sinister’s takeover.
We’ve seen Ben Urich on and off in X-Men, and he’s serving the established role here of the unimpeachable journalist.
J Jonah Jameson, in present continuity, is working for a tabloid news website called Threats and Menaces; doing the meet in this way allows that to be kept vague.
Anyway, the idea is pretty clear: resurrection is being made available to those who willingly take on an X-gene, and Sinister has rigged it so that everyone who signs up falls under his control.
PAGES 16-17. The Sinisters kill Krakoa and blame Orchis.
Forge does have a red diamond on his forehead, although it’s partially obscured by his headband. Hope is really gleeful about this, and that does seem to be intended as an echo of her normal personality.
It’s not directly explained why they want Krakoa dead (or at least brain dead), but perhaps Sinister has concluded that it’s just too difficult to subsume into his collective, and too dangerous to have out there without him. Mind you, Forge and co seem to be in Krakoa, or at least one of its extensions while making their plans.
“We have a mystical method to retrieve mutant [psychic imprints].” The Waiting Room, as introduced in X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #4.
PAGES 18-19. The heroes defeat Orchis.
Well, so much for Nimrod. He normally puts up more of a fight than this. Can it really be this easy?
Captain America is persuaded to sign up for Sinister’s programme as a show of ideology. It’s not clear whether he’s being manipulated by Cyclops here – certainly Storm isn’t yet under Sinister’s control, and we can’t tell whether Cyclops is. But part of the point is that Sinister is very easily able to co-opt a lot of the ideas that have been established during the Krakoan era.
PAGE 20. Mr Sinister returns from the Pit.
The Sinisters might be a collective of sorts, but they do have independent minds – there’s no hive mind here, just a bunch of separate mind which Sinister has forced to be similar.
PAGE 21. Sinister returns to his hidden base.
The fact that Sinister’s hidden base is under Muir Isle is new, I think.
Cy-Cat and Professor Plod are the tortoise and the cat, who have apparently starved to death and been reduced to skeletons in the time since Sinister was last here. Since these guys can talk, that’s a bit harsh on them.
PAGE 22. Data page. Sinister sets out his basic plan. Basically, as established in Powers of X, he has learned – presumably from Moira? – that humanity will eventually be consumed by Dominion AI hive-minds. He wants to avoid that, and his solution is to use resurrection to spread himself around the world, as a first step to making humanity into a Dominion first. By using Moira to explore possibilities and then jump back to his save points, he can guarantee that he gets it right.
PAGE 23. Sinister continues to explain.
As Sinister makes clear, of course his first idea was to just tinker with the DNA samples so that his takeover would be inherent in resurrection. Apparently, it’s the X-factor provided by Hope’s involvement in the resurrection process that stops this from working – hence the importance of killing Hope.
PAGE 24. Hope kills Thanos.
This is the first of a string of splash pages by guest artists showing how Sinister brutally gets rid of possible threats. In this one, the X-Men destroy Thanos by shooting him through the head with a miniaturised Juggernaut. Note that Hope borrows Domino’s powers to take the head shot – she’s really keen on head shots, which might be significant given that everyone’s got a literal target on their foreheads. Logically, surely Domino could just have done it herself. But Hope wants the head shot.
Micromax is a minor Excalibur character with size-changing powers, most recently seen in the “Secret X-Men” arc in X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic. He doesn’t normally change the size of other people, though, so an “application of Micromax” doesn’t sound fun.
PAGE 25. Namor kills Doom.
Explains itself, really, but I assume that “sole remaining Doombot” will show up somewhere.
PAGE 26. The mutants defeat the Eternals.
As the narration says, the Arakkii got the right to release Uranos and his devastating weapons for one hour at the target of their choice in A.X.E.: Judgment Day. Uranos is presumably happy to help because he resents being locked away and trapped by his people. The art shows various Arakkii characters, including Zsen, Fisher King and Khora, defeating Ikaris, Phastos, Druig, Jack of Knives and Zuras. I think it’s the first time we’ve seen Fisher King in combat.
PAGE 27. The Fantastic Four are sidelined.
Sinister’s techniques “cure” the Thing, who then gets rid of the rest of the team while re-enacting their origin story.
“Previous psychic manipulation…” Presumably referring to Professor X openly wiping Reed Richards’ memory of how to build a mutant power removal device in X-Men/Fantastic Four.
PAGE 28. The Avengers are sidelined.
The X-Men defeat the rogue Avengers and take their place as the top hero team.
PAGES 29-32. Storm learns the truth.
Note that Mystique, Destiny and Sinister have been replaced on the Quiet Council by Namor, Magik and the Beast. We know that Namor is compromised, and Magik has a visible diamond on her forehead too. It’s virtually certain that the Beast is compromised as well, since Sinister explains that Storm has been left out of his plan because she can’t be resurrected. That flows from her decision in X-Men Red to erase her mind from the resurrection protocols in order to prove her mortality to the Arakkii.
Nightcrawler has turned into a monster for reasons that are terribly vague, but presumably they’ll come up in Nightcrawlers. Sinister has covered for his absence by cloning a harmless, cutesy version – though one imagines not an outright parody, if he was meant to fool Storm for any length of time.
PAGE 33. Storm meets Mystique and Destiny.
“We must be on the same side.” Destiny has made this comment to Sinister several times during Immortal X-Men.
“This isn’t the 1990s.” Sinister spent most of the 1990s lurking around in the background with mysterious schemes of one sort of another – though to be honest, he was even more of a background schemer in the late 80s.
PAGE 34. Sebastian Shaw is ambassador to Hell.
Because of his connection with the Hellfire Club, presumably. I think the term “Infernal Parliament” is new, but the basic idea that the various contradictory Hell-Lords have some sort of forum to meet and discuss things is long established. Shaw has qualified by converting the Waiting Room – the limbo dimension which allows mutants to be resurrected without backups – into a Hell dimension. Presumably Sinister also doesn’t want people being resurrected through the Waiting Room, as it apparently sidesteps the need for his DNA. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to resurrect mutants from the past, which was meant to be the point of the place.)
But this also begs a question. Are the resurrected (but corrupted) X-Men still actually the same person? Or are their souls out there somewhere, potentially able to force a return to Earth by fighting their way through the Waiting Room?
PAGE 35. Magik banishes Asgard.
The sword that she borrows from Muspelheim will be Surtur’s Twilight Sword.
PAGE 36. Scarlet Witch is killed.
“No more Wanda” is a reference to “No more mutants”, the line with which she depowered almost all the mutants at the end of House of X.
PAGE 37. Sinister starts producing chimeras.
Chimeras – mutants blended from two or more separate mutants – were a feature of one of the timelines seen in Powers of X, and have been mentioned periodically throughout the Krakoan era as something we ought to be looking out for. Obviously, one of these guys is Colossus and Beast, and another is Cyclops and Wolverine. The other two aren’t so obvious – Sunfire and Rockslide, and Kitty Pryde crossed with someone hard to place.
PAGE 38. Mars is destroyed.
The combatants here seem to include multiple Ora Serratas, Storm, Wrongslide, Warpath, Sunspot, Sobunar and… for some reason, the Sugar Man. Again, Storm has her own book in this crossover, so maybe we’ll learn more. The Sugar Man is the guy with the huge head and multiple arms; he comes from the Age of Apocalypse timeline and he’s a mad scientist type.
PAGES 39-40. Foggy Nelson tries to protest.
Sinister makes sure to tell us that the people queueing up here are not yet mind-controlled; they’re just following the herd.
PAGES 41-45. The Quiet Council show worrying signs of independence.
Note that Nightcrawler is back in his seat – Sinister claims that he sorted the problem but doesn’t know how he did it.
The Quiet Council vote to take the fight to the stars in a pre-emptive strike – which is not what Sinister wants. This is supposed to be a Dominion in the making; these guys still have minds of their own. Sinister concludes that he’s run this timeline as far as he can, because the Quiet Council are about to start an unwinnable war… but unfortunately for him, someone (presumably Destiny and co) has stolen all his Moira’s so he can’t go back to his save point.
PAGE 46. Checklist. Again, the Krakoan just says SINS OF SINISTER.
The Shaw thing is likely the result of whatever deal he made with Mother Righteous in IXM 6
I thought this was a fairly good start to a crossover. It’s nice to see most of my theory on Sinister’s real plans from last week’s annotations came true.
The elephant in the room is that this is basically another AU story at this point (Age of Sinister, if you will) that will most likely end with someone killing Moira Clone VII, resetting the timeline to the beginning of IXM 10. But that doesn’t mean the story itself can’t be entertaining.
Paul > although there are enough other telepaths on Krakoa that this is surely still an issue in the long run
Most of the other big telepaths (Jean Grey, Psylocke, Captain Britain, Rachel Grey, Cable) don’t currently live or work on Krakoa so they wouldn’t find out about this until it was too late (or got turned into Sinisters themselves). The lesser telepaths on Krakoa (the Cuckoos, the kids, etc.) probably got mind-controlled by Xavier and Emma.
Paul > depowered almost all the mutants at the end of House of X
This should be House of M.
Paul > Kitty Pryde crossed with someone hard to place.
I believe that’s a chimera of Shadowcat + Archangel.
Paul > for some reason, the Sugar Man
It looks like the Sugar Man is attacking Storm. Maybe he’s part of the forces Sinister sent to attack Arakko.
Paul > Are the resurrected (but corrupted) X-Men still actually the same person?
I’d say partially – the mind is the same, but it’s being loaded into a Sinister-hybridized host body. So they start off being the same person, but drift away into someone new over time.
The Moiras were probably stolen by Mother Righteous, not Destiny and Mystique. Keep in mind that in Immortal X-Men 1, Sinister is surprised when Selene nearly destroys Krakoa- he didn’t detect it with the Moiras. And in issue 6, we learn that Selene was working on behalf of Mother Righteous. Presumably, the reason why Sinister didn’t learn of Selene’s plans is that Mother Righteous stole his Moiras in those timelines.
Re: Nightcrawler- he was turned into a monster by Margali in Legion of X 9- I just assumed he never turned back in this timeline.
Keep in mind that original Nathaniel Essex created all four Sinisters in 1896 to stop the machines, as per his conversation with Destiny in Immortal X-Men 8- so Sinister is unconsciously doing what he was created to do.
Note that various alien races are talking about opposing Sinister- this is probably the work of Orbis Stellaris.
Mostly good but I don’t buy Doctor Doom being taken out so easily.
Personally, I hope the Moiras were stolen by RoboMoira.
I liked this issue a lot, but I’m a little annoyed Omega Sentinel has just been missing for a year or more now
Yes, I thought Moira should have been more prominent in the story. Maybe she escaped with the Orchis remnants. It would be interesting to see her reaction to having failed once again, but this time she has given up her mutant powers so there’s no way out. Of course, it would be even more interesting with a nuanced interpretation of Moira instead of whatever Percy turned her into after Hickman.
This is like Moira’s Life Six or Life Nine except from the other side of the equation.
If I had to guess the way this gets reset: the Moiras have been spirited away so somewhere Sinister can’t find them… so he just has to run out the clock, and learn what he can, until the Dominion-status A.I.’s consume Earth in 1000 years or so and everyone dies (as in the ascension that the original Moira’s sixth death prevented). And he appears to have used up the save-point of this particular iteration.
That Captain America on pg. 28 is very odd-looking, though that image is very much like the cover of Captain America Annual #8.
I wonder if the reason the text on pg. 35 is cagey about naming the Twilight Sword is that a sword of the same name is what divided Arakko from Krakoa?
This appears to be the first X-book whose design credits Jay Bowen but not Tom Müller!
Speaking of Sugar Man, does anyone know why he’s called Sugar Man? Is it some pop culture reference I’m not getting?
There’s a song called Sugar Man of course, but I don’t think that’s important. I think it’s more that in his original appearance he was a kind of of bogey man, with serious hints toward institutional sexual abusers. So he had the kind of innocent/horror name like what kids give their monsters.
@Michael – I agree that the other three Essexes are fostering a rebellion against Mr Sinister: Mother Righteous is pulling the strings behind Shaw (and is probably behind Nightcrawler being cured), Doctor Stasis is behind the ORCHIS rebellion against the Sinister Empire and Orbis Stellaris is behind the alien empires assembling against the Sol System.
That said, I don’t agree that MR is behind the theft of Sinister’s lab. If MR stole the Moira clones in previous timelines, how did Sinister reset those timelines to begin with? I think it’s more likely that the MR-empowered Selene was a new occurence – one Sinister had never encountered before. (Which begs the question what prompted MR to return this time?) Sinister was tempted to reset the timeline when he saw Selene but Destiny discouraged him.
I think it has to be Destiny behind the theft of the clones. She found out about the Moira clone scheme in IXM 3 through precognition. She’s been using reverse psychology to stop Sinister from reseting the timeline since then. After the QC attack, she misled the heroes (she sent them to Alaska instead of Muir Island where he really was). Now I suspect she’s taken away his clones to ensure no more timeline resets until the right time.
I believe Irene’s plan is to allow Sinister to achieve his goals, and then lock him into this timeline so that he’s forced to witness his win erode from under him over a 1000 years. When the timeline eventually resets, Sinister will simply surrender and not seek genetic dominion anymore. Irene’s main goal is to defeat Sinister without risking Mystique’s death.
I think it’s likely that Destiny’s plan is for Sinister to discover something about defeating the Machines in the far future, hence wanting to prevent him from resetting the timeline until he has that information.
Sinister helped make sure Destiny was resurrected in Inferno. It seemed like he just wanted to upset Xavier, Magneto, and Moira’s plans in the pages of Inferno. However, we later found out that Destiny and Sinister formed a pact in the past. So, it would seem odd that Sinister could have achieved his goals without dealing with Destiny’s opposition had he just left her dead. Which would seem to hint that Destiny’s objective is something more than just stopping Sinister.
We also know that Essex was always concerned about machine evolution.
Destiny is allowing Sinister to succeed to discover something that the mutants need to know to stop the Dominions, but she doesn’t want the dystopian future created by Sinister as the alternative to the Machine Ascension.
Struck me that despite being on the cover and being War Captains of Krakoa, neither Bishop nor Psylocke show up in this issue. And that all three replacement members of the new Quiet Council are all white and the sole Black member is driven out. Meanwhile, all four of the human members of the Brotherhood are all non-white (Storm, Thunderbird, Sunspot, Rockslide). Given that this is setup for an Al Ewing story, no way that’s accidental.
Wonder what Bishop and Psylocke are up to in the +10 years era.
Random stuff:
Yeah, Doom went down easily, and for that matter all of the FF. But if you’re doing one-pagers to show what happened to threats, I think both of them give enough of an idea for how it could have worked to pull it off. It was probably more complicated than just “STAB, done”, but I can accept that an evil Namor could pull off the stabbing part. Maybe not the “immediate defenses all reduce Doom’s killer to a red mist and start contingency plan 328A to bring him back, until they’re suborned by a Doom clone and a new Namor clone”, but I can let that go.
I enjoy the irony if Uranos being the one to help take down the Eternals.
The FF death was pretty cold. Thumbs up.
I love that Storm gets to point out that that’s not Kurt, considering her early duties in verifying and announcing the newly reborn clones to people.
I’d forgotten that Sugar Man did have multiple arms, so assumed that was a Sugar Man/Forearm chimera at first. Which is as equally random seeming. 🙂
From Hope’s mention of hearing word from “Dad” about the state of space, I wonder if Cable’s been changed or not. If they’re going to stop hiding the red diamond at that point, then the population of Krakoa itself is probably all converted at that point.
I believe each of the first-generation chimeras is a mix of one of the original 5 with one membre of the second iteration of the team. So they would be :
Cyclops + Wolverine
Beast+ Colossus
Angel + Shadowcat (wings + part of the leg id phasing)
Iceman + Sunfire (the chimera looks like Rockslide but could also be made of ice).
Turns out I like events that read like issues of the main series leading into it. Nice of Gillen to write the second in a row like that.
And yet I wonder if I wouldn’t have preferred to have the corrupted council members be a long-term plot in the, say, next year of Immortal X-Men, instead of turning it into an event. You’d obviously have to lose the flashforwards to year +10, +100 and +1000, so it wouldn’t be mirror to Powers of X anymore. So I’ll go back to this assessment after the Sins are over, when we’ll know how much will be gained from those flashforwards.
Since, obviously, everything past the ‘+0’ parts will be rolled back at the end of the event.
(By the way, I’m putting my money on the issue being resolved within the +0 chapters in Sins, and not going all the way back to Immortal X-Men #10.)
@Gackthegack: That was my initial thought too, but I couldn’t find a way to make Iceman fit that chimera. That has to be Rockslide, or some other rock based mutant.
My second thought was that none of these first-generation chimeras have Omega mutants in them – no Jean Grey, Iceman or Storm. Sinister did use a Legion clone to destroy Planet Arakko, but that was not a chimera. Which leads me to believe that the Omega-based chimeras will be created at a later stage, when events begin truly escalating.
Paul, this is a small detail, but in the opening Sinister isn’t resurrecting ‘some mutants’ – specifically, these are all Cyclopses. Cyclopes.
Cyclopi?
Commenting to just note Ben Ulrich as Rorschach from Watchmen (clothing, paranoia, grappling hook as anti-surveillance gun).
“It’s nice to see most of my theory on Sinister’s real plans from last week’s annotations came true”
Many of us thought the same.
X-Trivia : in the Blink mini-series from 2000 which provides the backstory for the version of AoA Blink that became the star of the Exiles series , it was established as canon that as a young girl prisoner in the slave pits of Apocalypse , she was repeatedly/regularly raped everynight by her version of Sugarman , who afterwards also did the same to her version of Illyana Rasputin (apparently he liked Blink more than Illyama)
GN-Thar is following the template from Moira’s Life Nine. The first generation were clones. The second generation was made up of the first Chimeras. The third generation was made up of Chimeras combining five different mutant genes. The final 4th generation was the Omega-based Chimeras, which Sinister sabotaged in Life Nine. However, it would seem that these Omega-based Chimeras could also figure into the plans of Sinister to create his own Dominion. It said the fourth generation Chimeras formed a hive-mind and collapsed themselves and Mars into a “self-singularity”. This isn’t necessarily the flaw purposely introduced into those Chimeras by Sinister, as Hickman explicitly points to a “corrupted hive-mind” and that the Omega-based Chimeras attacked and destroyed Krakoa.
If you look at the creation of a Dominion, you see a similar description. A Titan is a society which has become so advanced, it collapses space-time into a singularity. A Stronghold is a collection of five Titans. A Dominion is made up of ten or more Titans.
Like almost every “What If…?,” this issue got rid of the characters (seemingly) not germane to the story fairly quickly. Due to the nature of the story, I have no problem with that.
Honestly, I don’t care about the far future/Dominion plot. I’d be fine with keeping the event in the near-(alt)future. That said, I’m sure it will be good, and this issue was a fun opener.
“Presumably Sinister also doesn’t want people being resurrected through the Waiting Room, as it apparently sidesteps the need for his DNA. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to resurrect mutants from the past, which was meant to be the point of the place.)”
I’m not sure about that. For the one Waiting Room mutant we’ve seen the resurrection scene for, Thunderbird, we saw Hope inject DNA from a needle into his egg. I imagine their DNA was obtained the same way Sinister obtained the DNA for anyone. He’s been collecting for a long time.
He obviously does have Thunderbird’s DNA, as that was the X-gene he revealed he used to genetically engineer himself as a mutant.
The “Waiting Room” is for those mutants who died before Forge upgraded Xavier’s Cerebro to record the minds of mutants, it’s not related to Sinister’s DNA database.
@Chris V
The question is whether Waiting Room mutants still require DNA records to be resurrected. I lean towards yes.
I know. I was agreeing with you. The “Waiting Room” wasn’t necessary due to a mutant dying before having their DNA collected, it was created to deal with mutants who died before Xavier’s Cerebro was upgraded by Forge. The Cerebro upgrade was to download the minds of every individual mutant, nothing to do with DNA samples. Without the DNA samples, there is no body for the minds recorded by Cerebro/“souls” in the “Waiting Room” to inhabit. They would be stuck as disembodied minds or ghosts without the DNA sample.
I’m not sure that Sinister is still using the Krakoan resurrection process anymore as the timeline progresses and he’s moved to the creation of Chimeras. In Life Nine, Sinister was creating his Chimeras without Cerebro or a “Waiting Room”. Each Chimera had their own personality, being an amalgamation of multiple mutant genes. I don’t think it’s possible to use Cerebro or, obviously, the “Waiting Room” in such a manner. Hickman said that Cerebro could download the mind of one mutant into the body of another, but it was never mentioned it would be possible to download two or more mutants’ minds into one body.
@Allan That’s an interesting observation but for whatever it’s worth, Santo Vaccaro aka Rockslide/Wrongslide is (like me) Italian-American from New York City, and thus doesn’t really fit that pattern. That said, I’m glad he’ll be part of the cast and Wrongslide won’t just be shunted aside.
The Waiting Room is as poorly thought out and I’ll defined as pretty much everything about Krakoa.
The Avengers are used to facing Ultron, who is usually presented as a considerably Bigger Deal than Nimrod in terms of power levels. Just on that basis I’m not surprised that they managed to beat Nimrod with the help of Tony Stark and Reed Richards, though it’s of course anti-climactic (though perhaps no less so than the X-Men headshotting Thanos, the thorn in the Avengers’ side).
Also that Sugar Man seems to be a chimera, as his hair resembles Legion’s.
“The Waiting Room is as poorly thought out and I’ll defined as pretty much everything about Krakoa.” I disagree. I think it’s been thought out and through A LOT for years now by many brains. They just can’t produce more pages with more nuance because their just aren’t enough comic book readers like their used to be, sadly.
@ Joseph S. Thank you for the correction. I thought Wrongslide was Latino, probably because this is the first I’m learning of his last name. General point does stand that the Brotherhood are more diverse than the Sinister Council. Is Sinister canonically racist? It 100% fits him, but I don’t recall it being a plot point.
It was brought up in…I’m pretty sure Immortal X-Men. Something about him genetically engineering out his racist ideologies so that now he is bigoted equally against everyone, seeing himself as the sole superior being on the planet. It was never explicitly shown that Sinister harboured racist views though. He was obsessed with eugenics, but I always felt his interest in genetics wasn’t based on race.
I wouldn’t say Sinister is anymore racist with his Sinister Council than Xavier with his original X-Men. It’s not that Sinister didn’t want Storm on his Council, it’s simply that she deleted herself from the Cerebro backups, so he had no way to infect her as he did with the other Quiet Council members. Then, Storm saw through the charade and escaped to Mars.
Sinister’s ultimate goal was to create a hive-mind using the entire population of Earth, leading to the creation of his own Dominion, and then spread his genes across the universe, leaving a homogeneous existence of nothing except him for all of time and space.
Yeah, it’s Santo, not Santos. Though I guess to a 19th century eugenicist a southern Italian (as most Italian-Americans immigrants were) that wouldn’t make much difference. Then again, Kate Pride is Jewish. It’s probably just a coincidence, and if anything speaks more to the relative lack of diversity amongst the cast in general (no South Asians or East Asians, no Latinos, etc) compared with real world populations. Seems unlikely angle to work in without undermining the core characters futures.
I was more surprised that Marvel, who seem to have largely pumped the breaks on the Russia storyline, are publishing a book that has so many parallels to vaccine conspiracy theories. It really jumps out in the scenes with Ulrich and JJJ.
@GN The artist has confirmed on Twitter that the chimera is Iceman and Sunfire.
I liked this. I wonder if the point of this business is to remove the Dominions threat as it’s pretty much the one open bit of Hickman plottage still around. If it’s done with then they could pretty much roll up Krakoa when they feel a need to return to the boring old mansion and the stale status quo.
I also wonder whether there’s anything significant to Sinister apparently being unconcerned about transforming the Earth into a Dominion, or whether he’s just such an egotist he assumes he will survive and be a recognisable intelligence controlling that level of power. I just can’t imagine a world without me and all that.
I admittedly haven’t been keeping up with all the intricacies after being disapointed by both The Trial of Magneto and Inferno, but I don’t really understand ‘The Waiting Room’ at all.
My gloss of it is that it was a plot device that magically solves the problem of resurrecting characters who wouldn’t have otherwise had Cerebro backups according to the system set up in the original HoxPox stories…
I’m sure I’m missing some of the details, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame the vagueness of the concept on the limited number of pages of X-Men comics that get published, especially not when the line is more robust than it has been for many years.
Loz-The original Dominions are “machine gods”. Sinister wants to create his own Dominion through a hive-mind connecting all inhabitants of the planet (then beyond) through his Sinister X-gene. Basically, he’s saying it’s the only step forward for him after the point of ascendancy he has achieved. The next step is to become a god, and exist for eternity outside of time and space. Just like the ultimate purpose of the original Dominions was that nothing would exist in the universe except The Machine, Sinister’s goal with his Dominion is that nothing will exist in the universe except Sinister.
@Aro
If you’ve read the final issue of The Trial of Magneto, you now possess the whole printed knowledge of the Waiting Room.
It hasn’t been explored at all since being introduced. It’s only been vaguely mentioned at times.
And other than Thunderbird, I’m not sure we’ve seen any resurrections that were not possible without the Waiting Room.
All that being said, the line ‘The Waiting Room is not a heaven anymore’ was chilling.
Hmmm, Waiting Room resurrectees: John Proudstar. Northstar’s one-shot HIV-positive baby (which also buries the stupid thing about mutants not getting AIDS). I think early X-Men Red mentioned the real Petra and Sway were going to get resurrected? Maybe the Threshold Three – it’s not whether Xavier copied them when they were first in the present or not.
No-Prize (I.E. Marvel crowdsourcing continuity spindoctoring) Maybe X-gene mutants cannot get AIDS anymore once their powers already activate LOL
And the Threshold Three did not need the Waiting Room , they had the Black Box and Steve Orlando’s version of XMen 2099’s Cerebra
ANy chance that Ben’s one bad lens is a reference to the similarly styled Phil Sheldon from Ross’s Marvels saga?
I wrote that after I saw his initial panel but before anything else where his eyes and glasses are unmarred, but it still evoked Marvels to me. XD
Didn’t Elizabeth Braddock’s old STRIKE comrades also get resurrected via the Waiting Room?
@Donnacha DeLong- No, Egg specifically says he used the “Cerebro files” to resurrect them. They were killed in Daredevils 3, which came out the same month as New Mutants 1 and Uncanny 167, so they were probably killed after the Mansion was destroyed by the Side and rebuilt with Sh’iar technology- the backups were probably up and running by that point.
@Krzysiek Ceran
I don’t think those are Cyclopes, I think they are chimeras of Sinister and Cyclops’s son(s) X-man/Stryfe/Cable. That would be more in line with his obsessive history.
Vague enough that I would argue Paul nailed the best answer yet again, but the art felt clear to me.
“No more Wanda” is a reference to “No more mutants”, the line with which she depowered almost all the mutants at the end of House of X.”
Meant to say “House of M”?