User blog:Mattia Garavini/Pure Evil proposal: Mister Sinister

This is my last PE proposal before Christmas.

What's the work?
The Strangest Superheroes of them all. The Uncanny Misfits. The Heroic Outcasts. The X-Men are a Super Team in the Marvel Universe created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby (but made famous by writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne) and first appeared in The X-Men #1 (September 1963).

The team are members of a human subspecies, Homo superior, colloquially referred to as "mutants". Mutants are humans who possess the "X-gene", a gene that gives them special superpowers and unique capabilities. Said to be humanity's next evolutionary phase, their presence has incited massive dissension as humans believe they will soon become extinct. While most strive for a civil coexistence, mutants are generally met with fear, hatred, violence, envy and discrimination. Under increasing anti-mutant sentiment, mutant telepath Charles Xavier creates a haven at his Westchester mansion to train young mutants to use their powers for the benefit of humanity as well as to prove mutants can be heroes. Initially, he recruited Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Beast and Jean Grey, calling them "X-Men" as they had power from the X-gene. Starting with just five members, many others joined the team as the years went on. Just as many left, and some even returned.

Early issues introduced the team's archenemy, Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who would battle the X-Men for years. Although the original team was composed entirely of white americans, as was typical of the time, the All-New, All-Different team of 1975 was incredibly diverse (and for the most part averting goofy Captain Ethnic stereotypes), and subsequent team makeups have kept this aspect. Since its debut, the comic has been a major allegory of civil rights, specifically the American Civil Rights Movement and, more recently, the LGBTQ Rights Movement.

Who is he and what he has done?
Dr. Nathaniel Essex, aka Mister Sinister, was a respected Victorian scientist and a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who read Darwin's theories with interest but thought they did not go far enough. Uncovering evidence for the existence of mutants and viewing them as the next stage in human evolution, Essex put a radical kind of eugenics forward to the scientific community, arguing that children from the families of these unique bloodlines he was discovering (i.e. the children or descendants of mutants) should be taken and raised as lab rats in order to direct the human race more clearly and quickly to its future. Unsurprisingly, the scientific community didn't like the idea and turned against him, and on her deathbed even his wife denounced him as "Sinister" after she discovered he had dug up their dead son for his increasingly twisted research.

But Essex found a patron receptive to his ideas, the ancient egyptian mutant Apocalypse (En Sabah Nur), who transformed him into an immortal and vampire-like creature who takes the name his dead wife gave him, Sinister. Though he eventually turned against Apocalypse, Sinister continued his unethical experiments throughout the ages and has cast a dark shadow over the lives of many young mutants and innocents. Magneto knew him as "Nosferatu", a Nazi Mad Scientist who took blood samples from children in the camps in exchange for sweets; Juggernaut, Prof. X and Sebastian Shaw were amongst a group of children experimented on as part of a long-term plot of taking over their bodies in the unlikely event of his death, and Cyclops was raised in one of his orphanages, after he recognized the potential for the Summers' bloodline as part of this he created a clone of Jean Grey called Madelyne Jennifer Pryor. Sinister was behind the massacre of the Morlocks and a host of other atrocities over the years, but with centuries of study backing him up he is likely the foremost expert in mutant genetics in the world. The combination makes him one of the X-Men's most intelligent, despicable and dangerous enemies.

Betraying Apocalypse, Sinister struck out on his own. Recognizing his own work in some of the Morloks, a group of sewer-dwelling mutants, Sinister hired the Marauders to exterminate them, just because he viewed their existence as failed experiments. Obsessed with Scott Summers's bloodline, Sinister cloned Jean Grey, and sent the clone, Madelyne Pryor, to have a child with Scott, so that he might then steal the child. He later tried to use the High Evolutionary space station in order to alter the genetics of the entire planet; failing in this endeavor, Sinister later sent out the Marauders to murder everyone who knew about the dark future where Apocalypse ruled the world in the Age of Apocalypse storyline. On another occasion he merged with the Dreaming Celestial and transformed the entire population of San Francisco into clones of himself. At another time, Sinister, then part of the Weapon X project, promised to free the project's prisoners from the facility they were held in, only to betray their trust and use them as part of his own experiments. Concerned only with his mad genetic theories, Sinister has worked with everyone from Josef Mengele to Apocalypse in the interest of furthering his own research, and making himself the perfect lifeform and the ruler of an artificial race of perfect mutants.

Freudian Excuse
None. I don't think there are sympathetic motives for his obsession with genetic perfection and cruel experiments on humans and mutants, including children.

Heinous standards
Sinister rivals with Apocalypse, Shadow King and William Stryker as the most evil and awful villains in the X-Men series.

Final verdict
I think he definetely qualifies.