The future of the X-Men is going to be a lot darker, a lot stranger, and utterly fabulous.
The big news from Marvel Comics’ Next Big Thing panel at New York Comic Con 2022 is the X-Men crossover event sins of evil. Start in January with a Sins of Sinister One Shot Directed by author Kieron Gillen, the story will set the entire X-Men series in a twisted alternate universe where the future of the mutants has been rewritten in the image of Krakoa’s most scheming and least trustworthy evil geneticist, Mister Sinister.
Gillen built Sinister’s plans into his flagship Immortal X-Men
It’s a venerable X-Men event model that started with the year 1994 Age of Apocalypse Crossover that used time-traveling shenanigans to replace the Marvel Universe with a universe ruled by and built in the image of the authoritarian rulers of Apocalypse itself. Since then, bizarre alternate timelines have become something of a staple in the X-Men books. Age of Apocalypse 2011 followed Age Xwho envisioned a future where persecution by mutants reigned supreme. Still wild and whimsical lately Age of X Man envisioned a sex-free universe ruled by mutantkind courtesy of insane mutant Nate Summers.
Sinister’s great passion has always been tinkering with genes, so it wouldn’t be a leap to assume that the reality we’re getting will be the result of some rogue genetic modification. Is it really a coincidence that Immoral is only Immortal “minus a T” – what happens to be one of the four letters in the human DNA code?
Sinister has been the weapon of the diamond-headed Checkhov since the beginning of the Krakoa era: Way back in Powers of X, we saw a possible future where Sinister was responsible for the downfall of the mutants himself. And at the beginning of Gillen’s Immortal series, we learned that he’s secretly experimenting with clones of Moira MacTaggart. Since Moira used to possess the ability to restart reality each time she died, this gives Sinister a simple mechanism to build the universe of his decadent dreams.
Of course, Marvel also promises that the event will prove Sinister could be his “own worst enemy.” And since it was Gillen who first pitched the idea that Sinister isn’t an individual but a system of entirely autonomous and often competing clones, that’s a promise that could be very literal indeed.