The New Testament Of Irene Adler

“All Mankind’s Woes”
“The New Testament of Irene Adler” 
Immortal X-Men #2-3
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Lucas Werneck 
Color art by Dijjo Lima (R.I.P.)

“All Mankind’s Woes” mainly serves to establish Hope Summers’ role in this story as she becomes the newest member of The Quiet Council thanks largely to the machinations of Exodus, who considers her to be a messiah. For the uninitiated, Hope was introduced in a 2007 crossover story called Messiah Complex in which she was the first mutant child born following the Scarlet Witch’s “no more mutants” hex in House of M. As a result many factions of mutants and anti-mutant forces took an interest in her, and Exodus was among those who believed her to be a messiah. She was brought to the future and raised as Cable’s adopted daughter – hence the Summers surname – and she looks like a young Jean Grey because for a long time she was heavily hinted to be a reincarnated Jean. She eventually made good on her messiah status by using the Phoenix to bring back mutants at the end of Avengers Vs. X-Men, but that now seems like a lesser work compared to Jonathan Hickman making her the leader of The Five, the group who have collectively made mutants effectively immortal and have resurrected thousands of mutants in a short span of time. 

As you can see, Hope is a character with a lot of baggage. She’s also a character who Kieron Gillen has used extensively before, and he’s by far the writer who has done the most to make her a distinct person rather than a plot device. She was the star of his short-lived series Generation Hope, and was a regular cast member in his original Uncanny X-Men run. Gillen’s Hope is very much the pragmatic hard-ass Cable raised her to be, but she’s also a genuinely good and humble person who chafes at the adulation of people like Exodus. The second issue reestablishes all this in her actions – her power makes her thrive on teamwork,  she’s decisive and ruthless in her plan to stop Selene, and she inadvertently repays her debt to Exodus by informing him that the extent of his power is determined by how much others believe in him. It seems like it probably won’t be a good thing that Exodus, a zealot with cult leader tendencies and omega level powers, learns this about himself. But I like the dynamic Gillen is setting up here – a political alliance, a budding friendship, two mutants who requires other people to make them powerful. It’s an intriguing way to explore the “cult of personality.” 

“The New Testament of Irene Adler” is Gillen’s deliberate echo of Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz’s now classic “The Uncanny Life of Moira X” in House of X #2. That story set up Moira and Destiny as parallel figures, and so this time we get a look into Destiny’s life. Gillen is largely connecting the dots on what other writers have put down over the years – most especially the work of Destiny’s co-creator Chris Claremont – but he does some interesting work in fleshing out the character’s romantic relationship with Mystique, which was largely left to subtext and cryptic Comics Code work-arounds for the majority of her publication history. The most crucial bit of continuity surgery performed in this issue is explaining Destiny’s murder by Legion during Claremont’s original Uncanny X-Men run and how that connects to Hickman’s reinvention of both her and Moira. It all fits together perfectly though I suppose it was already implied by Hickman – Destiny was aware through her visions of the future that she had to die for the Krakoa project to happen, and in retrospect she understands that the reason was Moira’s intense fear of her. 

Whereas the Moira story showed us paths Moira had already taken, this Destiny issue naturally gives us a glimpse of what may come down the line. Hickman and Gillen are both very sharp and deliberate writers, but the difference between them is best illustrated by the depiction of these things in text – Hickman gives us an elaborate timeline filled out with historical events, while Gillen gives us an abstract double page spread with events presented as evocative titles, like track names from an album or a catalog of Marvel trade paperbacks that have yet to be published. Hickman is concrete and meticulous like the scientist Moira, Gillen is artsy and lyrical and well-suited to the prophet Destiny. 

There are three very important things established by Destiny’s flood of new visions of probable timelines. The first is her vision of Gillen’s forthcoming event AXE Judgment Day, and Destiny imploring the other council members to trust her visions in order to protect themselves from a coming Eternals attack. The second is that she becomes aware of Sinister’s use of cloned Moiras, which she deduces is the reason every timeline she sees cuts off abruptly, and this all emphasizes how high the stakes of this story are now that as she puts it, “the universe is a snow globe tossed between the hands of a gin-addled child.”  The third is that every vision of the future Destiny has does not include Mystique, which is a nice reversal of Hickman’s “The Oracle.” Mystique only wanted to bring Destiny back, Destiny only wants to keep Mystique around. Both writers present these women as cold, calculating, ruthless self-described terrorists, but they really know how to make you root for their love. 

• Speaking of Mystique bringing Destiny back, the third issue addresses Mystique’s conspiracy in Inferno in a Quiet Council meeting, which gives Xavier the opportunity to whine about the others nitpicking the decisions he, Magneto, and Moira had to make in order to create the nation of Krakoa. I empathize with him, but the self-pity and passive-aggression is very unappealing and exactly why so many of the other characters have come to loathe him. It’s a good character beat, and also gives us an interesting moment in which the always judgmental Kate Pryde admonishes him for being cruel to Mystique. The traditional X-Men members in the cast – Kate, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler – have largely taken a backseat in Gillen’s story thus far, and it’s just nice to see one of them voice an opinion that is not fully on the same page as Xavier. 

• Lucas Werneck continues to impress, rising to the challenge of large scale action and montages of future events, while excelling at character expressions and body language in council debates. I’m fond of Werneck’s wide variety of line weights on any given page, ranging from the ultra-fine to thick chunky outlines to emphasize extreme depth of field, a bold figure placement, or a somewhat surreal effect. His page design also tends to feel loose and spacious, which helps to alleviate the density of Gillen’s text. It all comes out balanced rather nicely – issues that feel more generous with plot and detail than most other Marvel series, but with a visual style that makes it feel breezy rather than heavy. 

• Oh right, there’s a vision of what Exodus can become once trillions of people feed him with their belief. Even with him going after and destroying an evil Sinister…seems bad! I’m very much looking forward to seeing more on this topic. 

The Left Hand

“The Left Hand” 
Immortal X-Men #1
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Lucas Werneck
Color art by David Curiel

Immortal X-Men #1 flows so gracefully from where Jonathan Hickman left off in Inferno while firmly introducing a new era for the franchise more generally that it’s now even more baffling that Marvel insisted on lodging X Lives/X Deaths of Wolverine between the two stories. In every way that the latter story fumbles through plot points and inadequately “yes, ands…” Hickman’s story, Immortal X-Men artfully builds on what came before while reestablishing Kieron Gillen as an X-Men writer. 

But this is no surprise, as a major strength of Gillen’s work-for-hire writing is a skill for respecting what other writers have laid down while adding new ideas and value to the ongoing story. The best example of this is what Gillen did for Mister Sinister in his first X-Men run – he effectively fully reinvented the character while using what had come before, and the Sinister we’ve known through the Hickman era is very much the flamboyant Victorian eugenicist creep that Gillen gave us. Gillen picks up the Sinister baton once more, but in a totally new context provided by Hickman – he’s a major political figure in the mutant nation, he’s been instrumental in making mutants effectively immortal, and he’s cooking up ideas for chimera gene mash-ups. 

Gillen quickly reminds us of some elements of his Sinister that have been largely glossed over more recently, such as the fact that he electively became a mutant through extensive cloning of his own body and that he has no care for mutants beyond being genetic fodder for his experiments. By the end of this issue we see that Sinister has been using mindless clones of Moira McTaggert in a scheme to send information from his future selves back to the present so he can have advanced knowledge of events. He’s essentially approximating the precognitive powers of his rival Destiny, but with a difference – while she sees branching timelines ahead of her, he’s working on more empirical evidence of things that have actually happened to him, albeit in varying versions of his lived experience. It’s already shown to be a faulty system in a council vote scene, but a very intriguing development for the character and a clever spin on the utility of Moira’s powers. 

But why would Sinister see Destiny as a rival? This is unclear as of yet, though the opening pages of this issue establish that the two knew one another in England in the wake of World War I, and that she told him a secret that unexpectedly killed his clone body. The scene is a deliberate echo of the Xavier/Moira park bench scene from Powers of X – the setting, the casual conversation, the woman with great knowledge passing it on the arrogant man in a way that shatters his worldview. 

Destiny refuses to share the secret with Mystique, presumably to protect her from words so destructive they could leave Sinister dead and gasping “you’re a ghost, you’re a ghost” as he passed. But what does that mean? I don’t have a good guess at the moment, but I’m intrigued by the seemingly mystical effect of her words. The title of the issue – “The Left Hand” – would suggest that what we’re seeing with Destiny and Sinister here is a conflict between two opposing systems of magic. That, along with the sequence in which Selene reminds us of how “mutant magic” works, makes me think that “magic” could be somewhat literal here. 

Destiny’s prophecies and Sinister’s messages sent back to himself through the Moira clones also make me think of the evocative recurring phrase from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men: “Are these words from the future?” 

Aside from Sinister’s machinations the main plot point of this issue is Magneto stepping down from the Quiet Council in order to do whatever it is he’ll be doing on Arakko in Al Ewing’s X-Men Red, and his seat on the council being taken by Hope Summers largely due to the political maneuverings of Exodus. Hope makes sense in this book for three reasons – it makes sense for The Five to have a representative especially given their previous conflicts with the council in X-Force, Hope’s direct role in making mutants effectively immortal clicks into the title of the series, and this is a character who was central to Gillen’s previous work in this sandbox on Generation Hope and Uncanny X-Men. 

As with Sinister, Hope was not created by Gillen but was largely defined by him, and so it makes sense he’d want to write her again given her “messiah” role is less a matter of narrative contrivance threading together three major X-Men crossovers and more her day-to-day job in mutant society. It should be interesting to see how she fits into this, and the suggestion that her role will directly lead to catastrophe is very intriguing. Her presence certainly does point in the direction of the Phoenix Force becoming a factor in the story, particularly as the front cover teases this with a Phoenix emblem on the empty chair at the center of Mark Brooks’ homage to The Last Supper. 

One of the most promising elements of Gillen’s new run is the writer’s interest in developing Exodus, a character with a bizarre backstory dating back to the Crusades and a crucial role in the Quiet Council who often seemed like a low key insidious presence in Hickman’s X-Men. Exodus is a zealot – “a man with an unyielding code” as Xavier says in Powers of X – and a man of faith who apparently observes a sort of mutant-centric Catholicism based on his knowledge that Jesus Christ was “The Nazarene Mutant.” Exodus sees Hope as the messiah, which is at least part of why he went out of his way to bring her into the running for Magneto’s seat without consulting the rest of the council. As with most of Exodus’ actions since the beginning of the Quiet Council his behavior is noble but there’s a lingering ominousness about him. He always seems to be quietly working a long game, which makes a lot of sense for a guy who’s lived as long as he has. The scale of his life gives him a patience that the younger mutants on the council simply do not possess, and since the impact of very long lives is clearly a major topic of this run I expect that to come into greater focus in regards to him as we move along.

Miscellaneous notes: 

• Lucas Werneck has stepped up his art game quite a bit for this issue, though I think the reality may be that he was simply given some time and encouragement to execute these pages on the level of the work he displays on his Instagram. Werneck’s style here strikes me as a pleasing blend of R.B. Silva and Adam Hughes, and his skill for drawing facial expressions and body language are well suited to a series in which a lot of the scenes will be people having conversations around tables. He’s also good at allowing a bit of implied space and breathing room to pages that may otherwise feel overly dense. 

• Gorgon makes a brief cameo in this issue that suggests the character has settled into something more closely resembling the Gorgon we knew before his death in Otherworld, which is a major relief since the last time the character appeared he was a yelping lunatic slicing up an ice cream stand in Simon Spurrier’s abysmal Way of X. 

• The one place this issue really left me wanting was Colossus basically being around to say “yes” and “no” in a few votes. It’s obvious there will be more room to explore his new role in all this in subsequent issues, but I’m just very eager to get his point of view on all this. Does he feel bewildered by this? How engaged is he? Does he actually understand that he’s a pawn for Xavier here and compromised by his brother Mikhail in X-Force? Colossus is another character Gillen has written quite a bit, so I’m curious to see his take on where he’s at today. 

• The text pages in this issue really do a lot to emphasize this as a jumping-on point for new readers as well as the starting point for a new phase of the story across the line. One page early on spells out the major secrets that are moving story along – the threat of humans at large learning of mutant immortality, a recap of Inferno including the revelation that while Orchis was created by Omega Sentinel she and Nimrod do not care at all about the fate of humans, and that Abigail Brand is collaborating with Orchis. The pages at the end updating the map of Krakoa from HOX/POX is also quite helpful, as is the updated org chart for Orchis. Seriously, after the extent to which X Lives/X Deaths was hostile to new readers, this all comes as a major relief. 

Everything Is Sinister

“Everything Is Sinister”
Uncanny X-Men Vol 2 #1-3 (2012)
Written by Kieron Gillen
Pencils by Carlos Pacheco with Jorge Molina, Rodney Buchemi, and Paco Diaz

By the time Kieron Gillen got the opportunity to write Mister Sinister, the character was firmly established as one of the most prominent X-Men antagonists, but also one of the most confusing. Sinister, who was originally introduced by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri as the mysterious new archvillain of the X-Men following the rehabilitation of Magneto, was never given a concrete backstory during Claremont’s original tenure on the series. He’s responsible for sending his Marauders to murder the Morlocks in the “Mutant Massacre,” but we never find out why until a retcon a decade after that story was published. In “Inferno” he’s revealed to be the mastermind behind the creation of the Jean Grey clone Madelyne Pryor in an elaborate scheme to mate Jean’s genetic potential with that of Cyclops’ despite Jean’s seeming death at the time he set the plan in motion. Claremont’s Sinister isn’t a character so much as a plot driver, and given his assumption that he would be writing X-Men indefinitely, there’s a sense that he was going to get around to the origin and motivations of Sinister at some point in the ‘90s. 

Claremont set the basic template for Mister Sinister – master manipulator, mad scientist, obsessed with cloning, and knowingly camp in his villainy. Silvestri’s brilliant original design for the character looked like Colossus as a goth glam rocker. Later writers built on this with retcons, most notably that he was not actually a mutant but a Victorian scientist named Nathaniel Essex who was genetically enhanced by Apocalypse. Fabian Nicieza deepened Sinister’s obsession with Cyclops’ family line, but also cemented the trope that Sinister is always plotting something but mostly just taunts the X-Men rather than do anything actually scary. Writers just kept giving Sinister more powers too, to the point where it just seemed like he was borderline omnipotent. (But yet, always so easily defeated?)

Kieron Gillen took it upon himself to take everything previous writers had done with Sinister and not just make sense of it all but position him as a thematically logical archnemesis for the X-Men. He doesn’t contradict anything important about the character – he’s an amoral Victorian dandy mad scientist obsessed with mutants – but he revealed what he’s been working towards all this time. Basically, he’s been tinkering with mutant genes and cloning all this time to turn himself into a hive mind species. It’s the ultimate expression of egomania – he wants to replace both humans and mutants on earth with endless iterations of himself in a distinctly British version of a fascist utopia. It’s “God made us in His image” taken very literally by someone with the means to be like “Oh, I can do that too.” 

Gillen had finally made sense of Sinister’s motivation, but the real fun is in how he wrote his dialogue. The character had always been written as a pompous megalomaniac prone to monologues and melodramatic gestures, but Gillen really leaned into it and emphasized that when it comes down to it, he’s just a messy bitch who lives for drama. It’s all a big game to him, and he loves playing the villain. He chose the name Mister Sinister!  Gillen writes Sinister as a demented sort of artist, and playing the part of over-the-top scenery-chewing supervillain is a deliberate part of his persona. He’s not about dogma or nobility like Apocalypse or Magneto – for him it’s just ego, a barely-concealed erotic obsession with Cyclops and Jean Grey, and a perverse sense of fun.

A large portion of “Everything Is Sinister” is basically Mister Sinister doing a classic “villain explains his evil plot to the heroes” monologue, and he’s loving every moment of it. He actually mentions on panel that he’s been dying to tell the X-Men – and specifically Cyclops – all about it for a very long time. It’s a performance, and he knows that this particular story is just a dress rehearsal for a bigger arc later on in Gillen’s run. When Sinister taunts Cyclops at the end of this arc – “Next time we talk, you’ll be more hated than I’ve ever been” – he’s absolutely correct, which would imply that Sinister is a something of a metatextual character. He knows what Gillen knows about editorial plans, but the other characters are on the same page as the reader. 

Gillen’s version of Mister Sinister has become the dominant iteration of the character since this story was published, but some writers have done better with this than others. Jonathan Hickman used a version of Sinister in Secret Wars to great effect, pushing him even further into bitchy camp. (Hickman loves writing a petty elitist, so of course he’d gravitate to the Gillen Sinister.)

But still, this hasn’t stopped writers like Jeff Lemire, Cullen Bunn, and Matthew Rosenberg from writing Mister Sinister more recently as a gloating chump, and essentially as a “mini-boss” in their larger narratives. Of course, part of the beauty of Gillen’s conception of the character is that it makes sense of the existence of off-model Sinisters showing up in lesser comics. He’s basically given the Mister Sinister the canonical equivalent of Doctor Doom’s Doombot doubles. (“Oh, that wasn’t the true Doom, that was just a Doombot” has been a way for writers to retcon previous stories they dislike since John Byrne wrote Fantastic Four in the ‘80s.) 

Of course, given that Hickman is now in charge of the X-Men mythos going forward and is an avowed fan of Gillen’s concept for Mister Sinister, it can be taken as a given that there won’t be any dull or wasted uses of the character for at least a few years to come. The future, as the character is wont to say, is distinctly Sinister.