Mister Sinister

• 1. Introduction

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  Mister Sinister once helped sell pasta. In 1994, Chef Boyardee put the Marvel Comics villain in its advertising, which is an odd career for a character who experiments on mutants and orphans. He was popular enough by then to carry a brand.

  The man under the chalk-white skin began as Dr. Nathaniel Essex, a biologist in Victorian London. Somehow he became ageless, obsessed with two particular heroes, Cyclops and Jean Grey, and nearly impossible to kill. Stranger still, the comics eventually revealed that there was never just one of him.

  This documentary follows three questions. How does a Victorian scientist end up as an enemy of the X-Men? Why does his attention fix so stubbornly on one pair of lovers? And when a story says Mister Sinister, which Mister Sinister does it mean?

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• 2. A Child's Nightmare

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  Writer Chris Claremont was tired of reaching for Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants whenever the X-Men needed an enemy. Working with artist Dave Cockrum, he sketched something far stranger. The villain would be a mysterious boy, apparently eleven years old, who secretly ruled the orphanage where Scott Summers grew up.

  In truth the boy would be around fifty, living a life that stretched across roughly a thousand years. Claremont imagined a mind with grown-up urges stuck in a body that could not handle them, which left him cranky. Who in the criminal world would take a child seriously? So the boy built an agent, and that agent was Mister Sinister. Claremont said the face and costume were meant for one purpose: "it's what would scare a child."

  Readers met the result in pieces. In December 1986, The Uncanny X-Men #212 had the assassin Sabretooth mention an employer behind the Marauders, a team sent to kill the Morlocks living beneath New York City. The next issue, drawn by Alan Davis, showed only a generic silhouette when the telepath Psylocke scanned Sabretooth's mind. Not until issue #221, in September 1987, did artist Marc Silvestri show the villain in full, on the opening splash page. Silvestri also designed his look.

  The orphanage idea surfaced again in December 1989. Backup stories by Claremont in the reprint series Classic X-Men, issues #41 and #42, set the scene at an orphanage in Nebraska. A boy named Nate shared a room with young Scott. Scott said he did not much like Nate, yet Nate clung to him and blocked him from making other friends.

  Claremont meant Nate to be Sinister's true form, with the armored villain as an illusion used to frighten people. He left the X-Men comics before he could say so. Fans later flipped the reading, taking Nate as a disguise and the adult as the real man. In 2009, the series X-Men Forever showed how Claremont would have continued, and its 2010 sequel gave Sinister his original shape, a boy over a century old who commands a robot proxy.

  Official continuity went another way. A 1995 annual had already shown an adult "Nathan Essex" in 1930s Los Angeles. Then, in the 1996 limited series The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, writer Peter Milligan, with artists John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson, set out a new origin. Sinister had been a Victorian scientist named Nathaniel Essex all along, and the immortal child was set aside. That Victorian life begins in a house called Milbury.

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• 3. A Century of Experiments

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  Milbury House in Victorian London is where Nathaniel Essex was born, son of Admiral Erasmus Essex and Mary Essex. A full scholarship took him to the University of Oxford. In 1859 he became a biologist and married a woman named Rebecca. He lived in the age of Charles Darwin, and the new thinking about evolution and survival of the fittest took hold of him.

  Essex came to believe humanity was mutating faster because of what he called Essex Factors in the human genome. Then his four-year-old son Adam died of birth defects, and his research turned toward perfecting the human race. He argued that science sits beyond morality. Suspicion and mockery followed, and finally the Royal Society threw him out. Bitter, he decided that being seen as a monster might be the price of his goals.

  He hired a criminal gang, the Marauders, to kidnap homeless people as test subjects. Through this work he learned that some humans are born with mutant genetics, and that one of them, En Sabah Nur, was lying in hibernation. The Marauders woke him. The being later called Apocalypse offered an alliance, sure that they both wanted to perfect the world.

  Apocalypse planned to conquer nineteenth-century England, but Cyclops and Phoenix arrived from the future to stop him. He beat them and left them for Essex to experiment on. Phoenix warned the scientist that serving Apocalypse would end in worldwide destruction. Essex let both heroes go and turned back to his family, because Rebecca was expecting again.

  Rebecca then found his laboratory, with its captives and the remains of their son. She freed the prisoners, went into early labor, and lost the baby in a stillbirth. Essex found her bleeding to death and begged her forgiveness. She refused, and with her last breath she said, "To me, you are... utterly... and contemptibly... sinister!"

  Afterward he stayed with Apocalypse as his first prelate. Using technology left by the Celestials, god-like beings who had meddled with humanity long before, Apocalypse put him through a painful genetic transformation. It left him ageless, with chalk-white skin and a form of telekinesis. Told to shed his old identity, he took the name Sinister. He insisted his humanity was gone, yet he kept Rebecca's photograph until 1882.

  He balked when Apocalypse proposed a plague to wipe out most of humanity, and Apocalypse returned to hibernation. After Darwin died, Sinister crossed to America. He posed as the obstetrician Nathan Milbury, borrowing the name of his old family home, and ran the Essex Clinic in New York during the 1890s. Around then he met two mutant time travelers, Gambit and Courier. A cell sample from Courier gave him full control of his own body, with regeneration and shape-shifting, and left Courier trapped in a woman's form.

  In 1899 Apocalypse woke again and approved of the work, including a deadly techno-organic virus. Sinister injected it into his master, but it only weakened him. Apocalypse promised to kill him at their next meeting. Sinister resolved to engineer a mutant strong enough to kill Apocalypse first.

  The twentieth century became a long string of quiet interventions. In 1907, at the Ravencroft Institute, he employed Sabretooth, who brought him a mutant called Logan for experiments until a coworker, Dr. Claudia Russell, freed the man. In 1912 he met Grigori Rasputin and urged him to father many children, promising they would carry superhuman potential. Their descendants include Colossus, Magik and Mikhail Rasputin. He also gave shape-shifting powers to Jacob Shaw, father of the villain Sebastian Shaw.

  During World War II he worked with the Nazi Josef Mengele, experimenting on children, and met a young Max Eisenhardt, who would become Magneto. He left because he judged that the Nazis would lose, and his research was later recovered by the Weapon X project. After the war, again as Dr. Nathan Milbury, he joined Project: Black Womb with Dr. Kurt Marko, Dr. Alexander Ryking and the precognitive mutant Irene Adler. They tracked families likely to produce mutant children.

  Fearing his body might fail, he used the Cronus Device to hide his genetic cells in the Marko, Ryking, Shaw and Xavier family lines, so descendants could one day host his mind. Later he built a laboratory in Saigon during the Vietnam War, supplied with soldiers and civilians by his agent Scalphunter. He even taught at Oxford, where Moira MacTaggert and Charles Xavier were among his students, and Xavier found he could not read his teacher's thoughts. Of all the families Sinister watched, one drew him back to an orphanage in Omaha.

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• 4. The Summers Obsession

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  The State Home for Foundlings in Omaha, Nebraska, hid a high-tech laboratory underground. Sinister founded it to keep an eye on children from the families first noted in Project: Black Womb. Its most important residents were two orphans, though he had followed their bloodline for far longer.

  In the 1890s he had arranged for the long-lived mutant Amanda Mueller to marry Daniel Summers, one of his former test subjects. When she was pregnant, he paid her to fake a miscarriage and secretly hand over the child for study. Seeing great potential in the Summers line, he decided to monitor it.

  Jean Grey came to his attention when her telepathy switched on early, after she watched her best friend die. Sinister planned to kill her parents and take her to the orphanage. But the Greys had already called on Charles Xavier, who was a respected geneticist and an expert in trauma cases. Not wanting to be detected, Sinister took a DNA sample from Jean and kept his distance.

  Scott Summers was a recently orphaned boy whose eyes released the same optic blasts as the time-traveling Cyclops. Scott and his younger brother Alex had survived an airplane explosion that seemingly killed their parents. Waking in hospital, Scott blasted again and could not turn it off. Sinister put him into a coma, moved both boys to the Home, and arranged for Alex to be adopted by people easy to watch.

  A full year of experiments on the comatose boy taught Sinister that ruby quartz lenses could block the blasts. He placed temporary mental blocks in Scott and let him wake. The boy suffered migraines until he was given ruby quartz glasses.

  Wanting an isolated warrior who could be steered, Sinister let a criminal named Jack Winters adopt Scott. Winters abused the boy and forced him to help with crimes. Scott resisted, and Professor Charles Xavier and FBI agent Fred Duncan found him. He became Xavier's ward and the first official recruit of the original X-Men, with Jean Grey joining weeks later.

  Sinister then hired the villains Blob and Kraven the Hunter to fight and wound each of the X-Men. The battle drew in the teenage Spider-Man. Kraven carried blood samples from the X-Men and Spider-Man back to Sinister, along with a sample of his own DNA.

  Sinister reasoned that a child of Jean and Scott could be the ultimate mutant, possibly one able to destroy Apocalypse. From Jean's cell sample he made a clone and aged her rapidly. She showed no sign of the X-gene, so he left her in a hibernation chamber.

  Years later Jean suffered catastrophic radiation poisoning and was saved by the cosmic Phoenix Force, which wanted her as a host. The Phoenix later turned deadly as Dark Phoenix, and Jean killed herself rather than let it rise again. Remorseful, the Phoenix Force restored her consciousness to her original body, now healed. At the same moment it set off a spark of life in Sinister's clone.

  Sinister decided the clone might be useful after all and named her Madelyne Pryor. The name was a joke on her origin in a "prior" existence. He gave her false memories of a pilot who survived a plane crash at the moment Jean died, and shaped her personality to appeal to Scott. He placed her in a job with Scott's grandfather in Alaska.

  At a Summers family reunion, Scott noticed her resemblance to Jean and wondered if his first love had somehow returned. Madelyne said she cared for him but insisted she was her own person. Scott accepted that, and over time they fell in love and married. They had a son, Nathan Summers. Sinister later influenced them to choose the name, which echoed his own. Scott left the X-Men to raise his family in Anchorage, Alaska, near his grandparents.

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• 5. Massacre and Inferno

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  Beneath Manhattan lived the Morlocks, mutants who made their home in the sewers, and Sinister studied them closely. He decided they should not mix with the wider gene pool of mutants and humans. He also saw that several Morlocks showed signs of genetic tampering that matched his own methods.

  The source was Dark Beast, a corrupt version of Hank McCoy from the alternate Age of Apocalypse timeline, who had been a student of that reality's Sinister. After entering the main Marvel reality, Dark Beast experimented on mutants in New York using his teacher's techniques. Survivors were left deformed or disabled by their own abilities, and they hid underground with the Morlocks. Sinister was enraged that someone had used his signature without permission, and he decided to wipe the Morlocks out.

  He hired the mutant thief Gambit to recruit a new group of Marauders to work with Sabretooth and Scalphunter. In return, Sinister performed surgery on Gambit that would prevent him from one day losing control of his powers. Gambit had not yet traveled in time, so to him this was a first meeting.

  Then the Avengers discovered Jean Grey alive inside a healing cocoon. Sinister saw his chance to take Nathan Summers at last. When Scott heard Jean was back, Sinister mentally pushed him to leave Alaska at once. He kept pushing until Scott stayed in New York, where the old friends formed a team called X-Factor.

  With Cyclops gone, the new Marauders attacked the house in Anchorage, left Madelyne for dead and took Nathan to the State Home for Foundlings. Sinister erased every record of her and had the furniture removed from the house. He did not know she had been taken to a hospital, where she survived in a coma.

  In New York, Gambit led the Marauders to the Morlock community, then abandoned them when he learned they meant to murder. The slaughter that followed became the Mutant Massacre. Battles drew in the X-Men, the new X-Factor and other heroes, including Thor, and some Marauders died.

  Months after the kidnapping, Madelyne woke with amnesia. Once her memory returned, she found the X-Men again. She was bitter and desperate for her missing child, and she believed Scott had never cared enough to look for her. The demons S'ym and N'astirh exploited her state of mind and turned her into the Goblyn Queen, which led into the storyline called Inferno.

  During it, Irene Adler, now calling herself Destiny, sent X-Factor to Sinister's laboratory. There they rescued Nathan and other children. The Goblyn Queen then took Nathan and several other babies as sacrifices for a demonic ritual.

  Sinister rebuilt his Marauders and, with his cloning perfected, brought back the dead ones. He told Madelyne the truth about where she came from. At the end of Inferno she died, and her life-force and memories merged with Jean Grey's.

  As X-Factor and the X-Men fought him, Sinister revealed years of manipulation, including how he had pushed Scott to abandon his family, and his plan to produce offspring from Scott and Jean. Cyclops realized his power might hurt the scientist and fired a blast that seemed to atomize him, leaving only charred bones. In truth Sinister was alive and had faked the death to retreat. Scott and Jean chose to raise baby Nathan together.

  Nathan was later infected with a techno-organic virus. Rather than watch his son die, Cyclops sent him to the future, where a cure existed. Months afterward the X-Men learned the boy had grown into Cable, a powerful time traveler and one of Apocalypse's most persistent enemies. That also made the terrorist Stryfe, a clone of Cable, a son of Cyclops in his own way.

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• 6. Many Bodies

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  In 1992, X-Factor was shocked when the supposedly destroyed Sinister turned up leading a team called the Nasty Boys. He could now regenerate from damage. In X-Men volume 2, issues #22 and #23 in 1993, he admitted his death had been a ruse so he could retreat rather than fight two teams at once.

  He allied with Stryfe, leader of the terrorist Mutant Liberation Front, and took a cover identity as "Mike Milbury," a neighbor of Scott's grandparents. During the "X-Cutioner's Song" crossover, Stryfe handed him a canister said to hold a sample of his own genetic material, in return for a service. Sinister was angry to find it seemingly empty. Later he realized he had set loose the Legacy Virus, a pathogen Stryfe built to target mutants.

  When Scott met his new neighbor, Milbury revealed himself as Sinister. He warned about the virus and hinted at a third Summers brother unknown to Scott and Alex. When the Dark Riders arrived to attack Cyclops, Sinister declared the hero under his protection.

  Plans in the 2000s turned on a fading body. The Neo, a community of evolved mutants, died in large numbers after Sinister, disguised as an elderly "Dr. Essex," persuaded the High Evolutionary to strip the powers of all mutants. Sinister then took over the High Evolutionary's satellite, intending to turn Earth into a giant laboratory. The X-Men restored the powers. Surviving Neo hunted Sinister for revenge and killed 17 of his clone doppelgangers.

  His powers kept weakening, and he grew desperate to restore them. He was eventually confronted by Mystique, who pressed his face against the unconscious Rogue, whose absorption power was amplified at that moment. The contact killed him almost instantly. In New X-Men volume 2, issue #46, in 2008, he died again. That year, a contingency plan in X-Men: Legacy #214-215 to take a new host body failed.

  In X-23 volume 3, issues #5-6 in 2011, another resurrection plan produced Miss Sinister and put his mind into a clone of himself. The Uncanny X-Men #544, also 2011, revealed that Sinister had become a colony of clones living together, each slightly different. When one was killed, a new clone with the same consciousness replaced it, improved.

  The colony struck outward in San Francisco. Dressed in Victorian clothes and merged with the alien giant called the Dreaming Celestial, Sinister turned the city's residents into copies of himself. He hoped to get the Celestials' attention so they would judge humanity too chaotic and wipe it out. The X-Men restored the city and he lost his borrowed power.

  He next told the young mutant Hope Summers about the Phoenix Force, planning to steal its energy using clones of Madelyne Pryor. During the "Avengers vs. X-Men" storyline, five hosts, including Cyclops, tracked him to Subterranea. There he had built a city modeled on Victorian London, filled with copies of himself. The Phoenix Five killed every clone present.

  The colony in the Uncanny X-Men volume 2 ended in issue #16 in 2012. Issue #17 revealed that one copy of his mind had survived by hiding inside the X-Men's public relations manager Kate Kildare. That Sinister killed her and grew a new body to wear. The question of which Sinister was truly the survivor got an answer in the 2019 series Powers of X.

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• 7. Krakoa and Enigma

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  Powers of X, in 2019, placed Sinister's first clone community on an island in the South Pacific, called Bar Sinister. Professor Xavier and Magneto visited him there. They asked him to build a thorough, secure and redundant database of mutant DNA, and offered samples he could not easily obtain. The lead Sinister clone was not interested, but another clone with a working X-gene killed him on the spot, and in doing so became the community's leader.

  That mutant clone agreed to have his memory of the deal telepathically repressed until Xavier and Magneto told him to remember. The twist solves a puzzle. In X-Men volume 2 #94, in 1999, Sinister was classed as an "Alpha-level mutant," even though earlier stories said Essex was born human.

  Later this version joined the mutant nation on the island of Krakoa and took a seat on the ruling Quiet Council beside Magneto, Professor X and Apocalypse. He agreed to drop his schemes to harvest mutant DNA. Within the 2019 relaunch called Dawn of X, he was already bored and found a loophole in the council's rules. He started a file on Franklin Richards, the mutant son of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman.

  A scene from 1895 London arrived in Immortal X-Men #8, in January 2023. The powers Apocalypse gave Essex were slowly killing him, and survival required him to eat the flesh of innocent people he killed. Two long-lived mutants, Mystique, posing as Sherlock Holmes, and Destiny, who was Irene Adler, imprisoned him. He told them Apocalypse had also given him sight of the future, including bigger wars and the rise of machines as the planet's dominant beings.

  Mystique secretly killed Essex in his cell and covered it up in her Holmes form. In a basement, Destiny found four human-sized tanks, each marked with one of the four suits of a deck of cards. All four had been smashed open and were empty.

  The diamond clone continued as the Mister Sinister the X-Men know. The club clone, Doctor Stasis, sought ways beyond humanity and was involved in experiments behind the origins of Captain America, the Hulk and Spider-Man. He later directed the Orchis Petal of Human Resources and wears a full mask against psychic attack. The spade clone, Orbis Stellaris, left Earth, became an intergalactic arms dealer, prolonged his life with alien technology and took over the World Farm. The heart was a clone of Rebecca, who became the magic-user Mother Righteous.

  The three male clones long believed themselves the original Nathaniel Essex. Each, in different possible futures, reached godlike status as a Dominion, only to be blocked by an AI imprint of the original Essex. That imprint, called Enigma, took their progress and brought itself into being, described as a force above all creation and outside time. It was a fifth "child" of Essex, marked with a crown symbol like the king in a card deck.

  Emma Frost later told Sinister that Moira MacTaggert was still alive and a mutant with timeline-resetting powers. Sinister used the Moira Engine to insert his DNA codes into every mutant, and Hope Summers undid it. During the "Sins of Sinister" storyline, a corrupted Quiet Council conquered Earth and turned everyone into beings like him. A clone of Rasputin IV from another timeline helped capture him, and he was sent to the Pit of Exile.

  While he was confined, the genetic code he had planted in assassinated council members was nullified by Forge, with one exception, Professor X. As Krakoa fell to Orchis, the part of Sinister inside Xavier began to pilot his body while he slept. When Xavier found out, Sinister opened his mind and persuaded him not to kill himself, and they worked together against the Sinister Dominion.

  Sinister later hid by placing his memories in a modified clone of Cypher. Professor X let Rasputin IV kill him, but the Five revived him after Krakoa relocated to the White Hot Room. At a S.H.I.E.L.D. Black Site in Green Point, Florida, X-Force fought him and the Nasty Boys he had revived. He took control of Archangel as Blood Angel. Hellverine sliced off Sinister's right hand, Archangel reverted, and the Death Seed destroyed Sinister's body.

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• 8. Other Worlds and Screens

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  In the Age of Apocalypse reality, Sinister sat on the council ruling Apocalypse's dominion as one of the Horsemen. He adopted Alex and Scott Summers as foster sons, which bred resentment in Alex, since Scott was his obvious favorite. Disillusioned with Apocalypse, he cloned a boy from Scott's and Jean's genes and named him Nate Grey. Cyclops found and freed the teenager from a lab in the Blightlands. In a later limited series, Jean bombarded Sinister with Phoenix energy, and Weapon X and Kirika impaled him.

  Other universes bent him further. In Mutant X he joins a villainous Xavier, and Xavier eventually kills him. In X-Men: The End, he is the genetic donor of Gambit, built from his DNA and Cyclops's, and Mystique kills him. In the Earth X reality, an older Colossus reveals that he was Sinister all along.

  In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, he is a tattooed street thug and former OsCorp scientist who experiments on himself. In Marvel 1602, Lord Nathaniel Essex is a former advisor to King James II and a murderer of women, caught by the witch hunters Angela and Lady Serah.

  He has also played across screens. In X-Men: The Animated Series, voiced by Christopher Britton, he mutates himself while trying to save his ailing wife, which becomes an obsession with Cyclops and Jean Grey. In Wolverine and the X-Men, voiced by Clancy Brown, he is born a mutant and leads the Marauders in collecting mutant DNA. He turned up in a M.O.D.O.K. episode voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson.

  Video games used him as a boss and a playable fighter. Christopher Corey Smith voiced him in X2: Wolverine's Revenge, and Daniel Riordan in X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse. Steve Blum voiced him in Marvel Heroes, and Keith Ferguson in Deadpool, where he is the final boss. He is playable in Marvel Contest of Champions, Marvel: Future Fight, Marvel Puzzle Quest and Marvel Strike Force.

  Critics have kept him near the top of villain lists. IGN placed him 29th in its top 100 comic book villains of all time. WhatCulture ranked him 4th among the most evil X-Men villains in 2017, and CBR.com put him 4th among the most powerful mutants of the 1980s in 2018. When the series X-Men '97 arrived, the voice behind him was again Christopher Britton, the actor who first gave him one on the animated series.

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