Immortal X-Men scribe Kieron Gillen reflected in a recent interview on evolving Mister Sinister from a relatively underdeveloped villain into a campy egomaniac throughout his various X-Men runs.
"When I’m doing big reworks on a character, I’m normally writing with a back door so other writers can rewind the clock rather than write what I did," Gillen told AIPT. "With Sinister, you even see him tweak his personality at the start of my run. One of my things was stressing that he’s a living petri dish, and that always gives a chance to change the recipe. If someone wanted to dial him back to what he was before, they could. In fact, they did -- the first appearance of Sinister post-me was Business As Usual."
Despite leaving it open for other writers to revert Sinister to the less over-the-top vibe he had exuded in the past, Gillen said he had been especially pleased when writer Jon Hickman used his "high-camp multi-body glory" in the 2015 event Secret Wars.
"The short of it is that Sinister was always campy, and I just turned up the dial and made him more self-aware of it," Gillen said. "There’s a line I think of a lot -- just because I’m funny, don’t assume I’m joking. That was what I wanted to bring forward in the mix. It’s all a game to Sinister because he’s a moral abyss with no bottom floor... Just because he’s making jokes, never assume that he wouldn’t tear your neurons out one by one."
Mister Sinister, created by Chris Claremont in the 1980s as a new archvillain for the X-Men, first appeared in all of his blue, white and red glory in 1987's The Uncanny X-Men #221. A deadly manipulator who possessed a vast army of clones and was prone to dramatic speeches, Mister Sinister's motives for mutantkind remained murky until Gillen's run on Uncanny X-Men in 2012.
The first three issues of the series revealed that Sinister had created a mass hive mind with all of his clones, taken control of a Celestial and had grand designs to replace everyone on Earth with versions of himself. Gillen's Sinister was also unapologetically foppish and treated his plans like a grand performance, to the point of yelling out "Everything is sinister!" in the final pages of Uncanny X-Men #1.
Gillen's return to mutant comics with Immortal X-Men #1 continues this characterization with an unreliable narration courtesy of Mister Sinister himself and is now available on comic book store shelves. The issue is illustrated by Lucas Werneck, colored by David Curiel, lettered by Clayton Cowles and designed by Cowles and Tom Muller.
Source: AIPT
