Marvel gives X-Men’s Sinister an epic new crossover at NYCC

The X-Men’s future is about to get way darker, a whole lot weirder, and absolutely fabulous.

The big news out of Marvel Comics’ Next Big Thing panel at New York Comic Con 2022 is the X-Men crossover event Sinister Sins. Launching January 1, with a Sins of Sinister One-shot helmed by writer Kieron Gillen, the story will find the whole X-Men line subbed out for a twisted alternate universe, where the future of mutants has been rewritten in the image of Krakoa’s most scheming and least trustworthy evil geneticist, Mister Sinister.

Gillen has been building up Sinister’s plans in his flagship The Immortal X Men title, and in the new crossover the X-Men line’s ongoing books will be swapped for mirror image Sinister equivalents. X-Men Red It will be Storm & the Brotherhood of MutantsThe Nightcrawler-led Legion of XWill become NightcrawlersThis article is about a Nightcrawler-dominated team. Immortal-X-MenThen it becomes Immoral X-Men, a pun so good there is a non-zero chance it’s the reason Gillen and company came up with this idea in the first place.

It’s a venerable X-Men event model that started with the 1994 Age of ApocalypseThe crossover used time-travel shenanigans and the Marvel Universe to be replaced by one controlled by the dictatorship of Apocalypse. Strange alternate timelines are now a common feature in the X-Men comics. Age of Apocalypse was followed by 2011’s Age of XIt imagined a future in which mutant persecution would reign supreme. The wild and the bizarre have been popularized even more recently. Age of X-ManImagine a world without sex, ruled by mutantkind thanks to Nate Summers, a weirdo mutant.

Sinister’s great passion has always been genetic tinkering, so it wouldn’t be a leap to presume that the reality we get will be the result of some villainous genetic modification. Does it seem like a coincidence? It is immoralIt is only Immortal “minus a T” — which happens to be one of the four letters in the human DNA code?

Sinister has been the diamond-headed Checkhov’s gun since the start of the Krakoa era: Way back in Powers of XIn this future, Sinister would be the one responsible for the demise of mutantkind. And at the start of Gillen’s Immortal series, we learned that he’s been secretly experimenting with clones of Moira MacTaggart. Sinister has an easy way to create the world of his degenerate dreams because Moira used to be able to reformat reality every time she died.

Of course, Marvel also promises that the event will prove Sinister might be his “own worst enemy.” And since it was Gillen who first introduced the idea that Sinister isn’t an individual but a system of fully autonomous and often competitive clones, that’s one promise that might be very literal indeed.