Yet, I was surprised throughout Sins of Sinister #1, much to Gillen and company’s credit.
I think what surprised me was the straight ahead boldness of the issue. There was no pussyfooting or dancing around the topic: it was pure, straight ahead Sinisters take over the world in an unrelenting, methodical way. And, eventually, Sinister grows weary of how things are progressing and looks to pull the plug and something gets in his way. When boiled down, it was everything that I expected, executed in a manner that left me somewhat speechless. It was about halfway through, right at the end of the first series of splash pages by the guest artists that I also realised that the trick here wasn’t just that it was Sinister turning the world into what he wants, it was him doing so by making Krakoa succeed. This issue is the overlapping area of a Venn diagram of Krakoa’s plan for success and Sinister’s plan to turn everyone into him. The only thing that’s missing in the issue is Hope walking around in a “SINISTER WAS RIGHT” t-shirt.
That element of showing the Krakoa experiment actually succeed on the global stage through manipulation and betrayal and pure, logical ruthlessness is what makes this issue so surprising. It’s a surprise to see that Sinister’s plan not only works for his purposes, but is also the key to the elimination of Orchis, uniting humankind and mutantkind, and setting up Krakoa as a respected world power with the X-Men as the world’s premier superhero team. Sinister makes the dream come true – albeit in ways that Xavier, Emma, Hope, and the rest would never sanction under normal circumstances. It’s utterly surprising to see how easy it would be for this to happen if everyone put their personal morals aside and just focused on accomplishing the goal. It’s shocking in how quickly it all happens. A few scenes, a montage of splash pages and, bam, Krakoa is everyone’s favourite country and almost all opposition has been neutralised.
It’s what we’ve all wanted since House of X/Powers of X, isn’t it? The X-Men eliminate Thanos, Doom, the Eternals, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Orchis, the Scarlet Witch... anything and everything that could prevent the unchallenged rule of Krakoa is done away with (save Storm). Moira was wrong; mutants do win. All they needed was to stop acting nice and get a little Sinister. Oh ho ho... Like Hickman’s reinvention of the X-Men franchise, this issue does a lot of things very quickly, making broad, sweeping changes to the status quo in an effort to set up what comes next: the +10, +100, +1000 timelines of the next three months of comics. Yet, I’m struck that we’re +1 from Jonathan Hickman’s departure at the end of Inferno and Gillen gets to write the success of Krakoa in a single issue.
In his essay “Football” in Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman discusses the way that football seems like a conservative, never-changing sport, when it’s really a constantly evolving, ever-changing spot. He discusses the way that offensive and defensive schemes change over time and the way that radical thinking has a tremendous effect on the spot. There’s one quote, in particular, that came to mind when reading Sins of Sinister #1: “But this is how football always evolves: Progressive ideas are introduced by weirdos and mocked by the world, and then everybody else adopts and refines those ideas ten years later.” It’s not quite that extreme in comics. It’s more like “Progressive ideas are introduced by weirdos and praised by the world, and then everybody else adopts and ruins those ideas ten years later.” Basically, I kept thinking about Sinister’s influence on the world, the way things go from the point where his influence takes effect, and, how at the end of the issue, he hates what it has become and wants to wipe his influence from the world entirely and cannot. I kept thinking about Alan Moore, honestly. Not the most flattering comparisons (though, with Moore, not the worst comparison anyone has ever made either) and it only works if you tilt your head and squint a little.
But, let’s confine ourselves to the X-books for our meta reading too much into the event comic discussion. You could look at Sinister and see Hickman if you wanted. His influence and direction reshaped the X-Men franchise, turned it into not just an exciting and popular line of books again, but a critically praised one at that. And, down the road we go, and he wants to keep doing his plan, while the rest of the room who had been operating under his plan go “Well, actually...” and make their pitch to do something different. He, of course, was much more gracious than Sinister in accepting their desires and taking a step back. But, the point remains that, like Sinister, he provided the framework for success and, when he was ready to move on to the next stage of the plan, he was outvoted. It’s a gentle echo – particularly the use of similar language to when Hickman left (I think he called it the second act of his plans) and this is Sinister’s second stage of the plan...
I also can’t help but see the coincidence that we’re +10 in the comic from Sinister putting his plan for Krakoa into motion successfully and we’re also +10 from the dissolution of Sinister’s plans and Gillen’s departure from Uncanny X-Men in the real world. The building on his Mr. Sinister stories from his time on Uncanny X-Men, especially the Sinister Society that he created is a key touchpoint/foundational work for what’s going on here. We’ve seen one attempt by Sinister to make a society that is all him fail, mostly due to the intervention of the X-Men and Phoenix Five. Here, he’s trying again – both ten years on, and finding the same people responsible for screwing up his desired plans. When Gillen left Uncanny ten years ago, it was due to Brian Michael Bendis coming aboard as the new writer of the franchise, leaving the Avengers books are turning them into Marvel’s premier franchise. I don’t know how much more Gillen had planned or desired to do with those characters – his final issue of Uncanny X-Men featured a discussion between and imprisoned Scott Summers and a Sinister-posing-as-a-trusted-ally where the issue ends with Sinister throwing down the gauntlet for Scott to stop them from whatever they cook up in the future. The issue, Gillen’s last, literally ends with Scott saying to himself, “This isn’t over.” (Gillen, of course, then wrote the five-issue Consequences mini-series that bridged the gap between Uncanny X-Men #20 and All-New X-Men #1 written by Bendis, so...) And, here we are, +10 and it’s not over...
But, what does it mean to put something out into the world and have no control over what’s done with it? That seems, to me, to be the fundamental question at play here. It’s why I thought about Moore and Hickman and Gillen. They write stories and that leads to other people writing stories and even more people writing stories and, very quickly, it’s beyond them. They can’t control their influence or steer the direction of characters that they don’t own when someone else says no or even force their hand-picked group to do what they want (if they actually wanted to try). What’s it like to put something out into the world that changes a part of it and leads to unexpected consequences and be able to do nothing about it? I genuinely don’t know what will happen in the remaining ten issues of this event. Even if I thought I did, Sins of Sinister proved that knowing what will happen isn’t the same as knowing how it will happen.
Next: Storm & the Brotherhood of Mutants #1.
