Friday Reads: Original Sins

HEY KIDS! COMICS!

X-Men: Sins of Sinister

For anyone who’s not a comics fan, you can probably move on this week. The nerdery is going to get a little deep.1 I will include footnotes that explain terms for the civilians out there who want to follow along.2

I’ve been a little obsessed lately with Marvel Comics’ crossover event3 Sins of Sinister, written mainly by Kieron Gillen and Al Ewing, and drawn by an all-star lineup of artists, including Leinl Francis Yu, Lucas Werneck, Paco Medina, Andrea Di Vito, and Alessandro Vitti.

Sins of Sinister is about the X-Men4, Marvel’s team of mutant superheroes who protect a world that hates and fears them. A couple years ago, almost all of Marvel’s mutants decided to stop being their world’s oppressed minority5 and create their own nation, Krakoa.6 All the enemies put aside their difference and set up their own laws, their own economy, and their own government. This meant a general amnesty for some mutants formerly known as super-villains, including one in particular: Mr. Sinister.

Sinister is a rogue geneticist who’s been around for more than a century, meddling in the affairs and the DNA of the X-Men, working an extremely long game.7

And in the name of togetherness and realpolitik, the mutants let him onto their ruling council and used his vast database of mutant genetic sequences to craft biotechnology for their new nation.

If that seems like a scorpion-and-the-frog situation waiting to happen, well, Sins of Sinister is where it all hits the fan.

Sinister — it’s right in his name, for God’s sake — has been trying to insert his own DNA into the ruling council of Krakoa in an attempt to make them more ruthless and more willing to use their gifts to control the world. Or, to put it more simply, evil.

He finally succeeds, using the DNA of a mutant who can reset time, replaying the same events over and over like he’s working on a level in a video game.

At first, it’s great. (For him. For everyone else, not so much.) Sinister’s council and his clones take over the world, subverting everyone they need and killing those they don’t. The island paradise of Krakoa becomes the hellish capital of a dystopian Earth that is mainly an engine for producing mutated biotech horrors.

And then Sinister discovers the downside to having a bunch of people around who are just as ruthless and evil and driven as he is.

They decide to conquer the whole galaxy, using mutant clones as disposable living weapons. And then they decide Sinister himself is expendable.

All of this would be pretty standard for a Marvel event. The universe is threatened every six months. But what’s fun for me is the sheer scale. Sinister and his clones get away with their schemes for a thousand years before anything close to a reckoning happens. It’s a given that the timeline will be reset and things will go back to normal — or as normal as it gets in the Marvel Universe, anyway — but the question is always how. And for things to go so badly wrong for so long presents entirely new wrinkles and plots for characters who have done everything already.

The current arc of the X-Men leans hard into the team’s whole convoluted and complex history. It’s fascinating to see the creators take on the idea of a superhuman utopia with consequences — however short-lived — in what passes for the real world in the stories. There has always been the question in Marvel Comics of why the world never gets better in any real way. Why are the cops still carrying guns when Iron Man could outfit them with non-lethal repulsor rays? Why do people drive gas-burning cars when Mr. Fantastic has invented safe, flying vehicles that run on inexhaustible zero-point energy?

The Age of Krakoa has, at least, answered a few of those questions. The mutants have stopped limiting themselves. They’ve given humanity incredible new technologies and medicines. They’ve terraformed Mars and claimed it for themselves. They’ve changed the shape of the world. And in Sins of Sinister, the serpent in their garden bites them, with centuries of misery as a result.

It’s a cautionary tale about utopias and hubris, told by characters who shoot lasers from their eyes.

FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS DEPT.

Tales of Syzpense #1. Speaking of comics, I always try to pick up whatever Chris Ryall is working on. Chris was the Chief Creative Officer at IDW Publishing, where he helped launch Joe Hill’s brilliant and disturbing Locke & Key, revived the much-missed and beloved ROM, and gave me a shot at writing a comic book. He’s since moved on to found his own imprint, Syzygy, at Image Comics with Ashley Wood and Gregory Prout. Whatever Chris is doing, I know it’s going to be interesting.

Tales of Syzpense is a throwback to the days when Marvel was limited in the number of titles it was allowed to have on the newsstands, so the publisher would put two of its characters in one book split into two stories. For instance, Tales of Suspense featured both Captain America and Iron Man.

Tales of Syzspense #1 is shared by Les Mort 13, a surreal mystery from T.P. Louise and Ashley Wood and Dreamweaver by Ryall and Nelson Daniel. I was immediately intrigued by both. Les Mort 13 is haunting and evocative, beginning at a robot grave and delving into stranger images and fragments of narrative from there. No idea what happened, but I want to find out. Dreamweaver is about an aging mystic adventurer whose magic isn’t enough to change the fact that he’s ready for retirement. It’s a solid first chapter of an adventure story, effortlessly establishing the main character and his world. Looking forward to issue #2.

Middle-aged adventure. My pal Boyd Morrison and his sister Beth’s new book The Last True Templar isn’t out yet, but if you’re a member of NetGalley, you can request an advance copy for a review. This is the second book in their bestselling, highly praised series about medieval knight Gerard Fox. If you haven’t already picked up the first, Tales of the Lawless Land, well, here’s your chance.