Guide to Mister Sinister (Early Access for ALL PATRONS) (Patreon)

I'm so happy to be sharing a new comic guide with you all, especially because I've been working on it for a long while and it is very definitive!

Mister Sinister - The Definitive Guide 

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Mister Sinister is a curious Claremontian creation. He's absolutely critical to the history of the X-Men via his fascination with Scott Summers from the Claremont era, yet in the modern day he's actually more defined by stories that came after Claremont.

That's hard to wrap your mind around, because those Sinister stories are very spread out. Sure, his definitive origin appears in The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, but he's been tinkered with by everyone from from Fabian Nicieza to Jonathan Hickman, with his major developments scattered throughout 30 years of single issues and random flashbacks.

Well, if you've ever wanted the whole Sinister story, I've gathered it all in one place for you with this guide. It not only lays out every Sinister experience, but it explains and contexualizes each one of them - helping you to know if they're worth diving into to learn more about this signature X-Men villain.

While Sinister doesn't have the same consistency to his development as Magneto, working on this guide revealed to me that he does have a few distinct post-Claremont eras of development.

First, in the 90s, he was depicted as a sort of "Junior League Apocalypse." He was behind the Legacy Virus but also striving to contain it, he was obsessed with Scott Summers but also pulled the strings behind Gambit, and he was a noted cloned hoarder. Almost every appearance in this period suggests some new element of Sinister's history - they almost all include flashbacks or hints of his past actions.

Then, in the 00s, he was used much more broadly. Both Excalibur and Weapon X connected him with Nazi eugenics, although there are suggestions that he had no interest in the Nazi cause and simply saw them as an opportune places to conduct his work. He also is case as an occasional tinkerer in Spider-Man's work via the X-Men and Spider-Man mini-series.

Mike Carey brought him back into the main X-Men fold in 2008 by having him be the force behind a reassembled Marauders and a main player in Messiah Complex. Afterwards he regenerated him into a female version - Miss Sinister.

The biggest impact on Sinister's continuity and character came in 2011, when Kieron Gillen used Sinister as the smarmy narrator of the end of the first volume of Uncanny X-Men, and the introductory villain of the second volume. Gillen's Sinister is different than all past Sinisters. He's a Victorian Dandy, as obsessed the the foofery of his costumes as with curating an unending army of clones and manipulating the fates of the mutant race.

This new comedic conception of Sinister immediately became the version of Sinister, as writers took a liking to having a silly but deadly and totally undefeatable villain to flummox the X-Men.

One of those writers was Jonathan Hickman, who couldn't resist briefly casting Sinister as a foil to his God-King Doom in 2015's Secret Wars. And, Hickman would return again to silly Sinister when he arrived in the X-Office, revising Sinister to have always been a mutant in Powers of X and making him one of the key Quiet Council members deciding the ongoing fate of the mutant race.

Even if Sinister is now a silly character, he's never been more important to the X-Men - both in the present day, and because his history of genetic hoarding begat the new eternal life of mutants.

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What's up next for comic guides?

This month is a chance for me to be mega-focused on comic guides, so you might see a flurry of updates in the coming weeks.

That could include some new guides as well as the long-awaited revisions to my older guides. Many of the major Marvel character guides haven't been updated since 2018-19, and I'm eager to put my new solicits database to good use in updating them. 

Plus, Google is increasingly rewarding fast-loading pages, so I have a lot of revisions to do to images throughout CK!

While my YouTube presence represents a lot of my online visibility these days, make no mistake - my internet presence is primarily about comic guides, and they're not going anywhere. In fact, they should be more visible in my YouTube presence in the near future. You continue to be the reason CK can even exist - YouTube brings in about 1% of the funds that fuel CK every month, compared to Patreon and affiliate earnings representing the other 99%.

I'd love to get to the place where every week there is at least one video/podcast episode and at least one significant guide update. We'll see if I can at least hit that goal all this month.

I'm very interested in what you would like to see THE MOST right now as a Patron of CK. I know Superman is a popular request, and I'm diligently working to figure out how to do that, but if you have other suggestions I'm always happy to hear them.

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