On the Origin of a Supervillain: the Neo-Victorian Reinvention of Mister Sinister
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chapter 8 On the Origin of a Supervillain: The Neo-Victorian Reinvention of Mister Sinister David Bullen Abstract First introduced in Uncanny X-Men #221 (1987), Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri’s supervillain Mister Sinister quickly became a prominent foe in the comic-book series. It was not until 1996, however, that his origins were first ‘revealed’: Mister Sinister was in fact Nathaniel Essex, a Victorian scientist obsessed with Darwinian evolutionary theory, transformed by an ancient Egyptian power into an immortal. Sinister’s brand of amoral villainy has always espoused a certain element of social Darwinism, but in recreating him as a neo-Victorian, this ideology was explicitly linked back to the his- torical Darwin. In this chapter I aim to trace the development of Sinister from the 1980s to the present day, charting his transition from generic megalomaniac to postmodern- ist device for the X-men comics to meta-fictionally reflect back on their own real and imagined origins. Keywords Apocalypse – comic-books – empire – globalisation – Mister Sinister – postcolonialism – retcon – revisionism – social Darwinism – X-men ... In the on-going proliferation of fiction set in the nineteenth century, there has been no shortage of contributions to the genre from the comic-book industry.1 Although recently emerging academic scrutiny on the subject has, in terms of comic-books, generally only extended as far as Alan Moore’s continued engagement with the nineteenth century in V for Vendetta (1982–85), From Hell (1989–96), Lost Girls (1991–92, 2006), and The League of Extraordinary 1 I would like to thank James Walker-Black for acting as a sounding board for my argument, as well as Nick Lowe for allowing me access to his Marvel treasure trove. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/97890043���57_0�0 On the Origin of a Supervillain 181 Gentlemen (1999–), the more mainstream titles of the largest comic-book pub- lishers, dc and Marvel, have not been strangers to revisiting and revising his- tory.2 Bryan Augustyn and Mike Mignola reimagined dc’s foremost anti-hero Batman in the single issue Gotham By Gaslight (1989) as a costumed Victorian detective, tutored by Sigmund Freud and on the hunt for Jack the Ripper.3 Mar- vel have reimagined a number of their superheroes by situating them in his- torical periods for one-off or limited series publications – these include Marvel 1602 (2003) and the Marvel Noir titles (2009–10). While these Marvel titles do not focus on the nineteenth century, the way they engage with history is essen- tially the same. Moore’s work has perhaps received most academic scrutiny because it fulfils what Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn note as a prerequisite for specifically neo-Victorian fiction: not merely a narrative set in the nineteenth century but texts about the “metahistorical and metacultural ramifications of such his- torical engagement” (2010: 6). Neo-Victorian scholarship has maintained an interest in Moore because his works utilise the nineteenth century in order to reflect on the twentieth and twenty-first. The likes of Gotham By Gaslight are limited in their capacity to do this because they are limited in their ability to speak back to the present – they feature alternative versions of characters tak- ing part in narratives that have no impact on their counterparts in canonical or ‘classic’ continuity.4 By becoming sealed off from the comic-book ‘present’, therefore, this kind of historical fiction is deprived of that crucial self-reflective quality discussed by Heilmann and Llewellyn.5 2 For critiques of Moore’s work from the perspective of scholarship on neo-Victorianism, see: Crowell (2008/2009) for V for Vendetta; Ho (2012: 27–54) and Pietrzak-Franger (2009/2010) for From Hell; Jones (2010) on Lost Girls; and Jones (2010) and Rutherford (2012) for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. 3 The issue spawned not only a sequel, Master of the Future (1991), but the entire Elseworlds series of single issue ‘alternative versions’ of dc’s prominent superheroes, indicating an interest in a revisionist mode that became increasingly popular in fiction generally in the 1990s. 4 Continuity is a difficult term to define in relation to comic-books: generally, it refers to the events a character has ‘officially’ experienced – their canonical history. It can then further refer to the collective events of a fictional universe in which many characters co-exist. This is made more complex when large publishers such as dc and Marvel establish multiple fic- tional universes and thus multiple different senses of continuity, which are largely exclusive but not beyond interaction. In the case of Marvel, their ‘mainstream’ or ‘classic’ continuity, which contains many decades’ worth of material, is considered separate from various alter- native continuities that offer different histories of the same characters. 5 This said, James Fleming (2008) has made the case for Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602, which reimagines the Marvel universe in the early modern period, as a postmodern response to a Western world disoriented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks..