7 Most Evil Things Mister Sinister Ever Did in Comics

The X-Men have several major villains, but few have done the evil things that Mister Sinister has, many of which ruined several of their lives. Nathaniel Essex was a Victorian-era scientist who predicted the emergence of mutants and ended up genetically mutated by Apocalypse. However, Essex created three clones of himself in 1895, as well as a clone of his late wife, and it is those clones that became the Mister Sinister that the X-Men know so well. However, the most interesting thing about the clones is that none of them knew they were clones, and they all believed they were the original Nathaniel Essex.

Since that time, Mister Sinister has been determined to control his own destiny, and he has manipulated the lives of countless mutants to achieve his goals, with many of his actions very dark and demented.

7) Destroyed Cyclops’ Childhood

Mister Sinister had an unhealthy obsession with Scott Summers, and this all started when he ran an orphanage called the State Home for Foundlings in Nebraska. After Scott’s parents died in a plane crash, while Scott and his brother Alex survived, Sinister brought in Scott, who was in a coma, and experimented on him at the time. Sinister than placed Scott in his orphanage and sent Alex away. Mister Sinister manipulated every single aspect of Scott’s childhood during this time.

Scott finally ran away, and Professor X found him and took him in, rescuing him from Sinister’s control and making him one of the original X-Men. Mister Sinister learned that there was something about the Summers and Grey family lines that would lead to the creation of a mutant that could help him finally achieve his dreams. As a result, he ruined almost every aspect of Scott’s life, and it didn’t stop after Scott ran away.

6) Created Madelyne Pryor To Force Cable’s Birth

Mister Sinister kept a close eye on Cyclops and his family, and he even moved to Alaska to become neighbors with Scott’s grandparents. He then collected as much DNA and data as he could about the other X-Men, but realized that he couldn’t get access to Jean Grey. Sinister used his cloning expertise to create a clone of Kean, but the clone ended up coming out with no powers. Before Sinister destroyed it, Jean Grey died in the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Seeing a way to get to Scott again, he had the clone, now named Madelyne Pryor, randomly meet Scott, and the two fell in love and married. It was precisely what Mister Sinister had hoped would happen as the two ended up getting pregnant, and their son, Nate, was born. Mister Sinister was right, and Nate became a powerful mutant named Cable, but this didn’t help him, and Cable actually became another obstacle in Sinister’s way.

7) Caused Inferno

However, Mister Sinister’s planning for Madelyne Pryor had an unintended consequence, and it almost destroyed the world. After Jean Grey returned from the dead, Scott went to find her, and Madelyne was left alone in Alaska with their baby. Mister Sinister sent his Marauders to kidnap the baby and kill Madelyne. They got Nate, but Madelyne survived and ended up hospitalized.

This then unlocked Madelyne’s dormant powers, which were similar to those of Jean Grey, and Madelyne angrily became the Goblin Queen. Feeling that Scott betrayed their marriage to return to Jean, and thinking her child was dead, Madelyne decided to destroy the world. Even when Madelyne learned Nate was still alive, she decided (and luckily failed) to sacrifice him to the demon N’astirh in one of the X-Men’s darkest storylines.

4) Helped Bring Down Krakoa

Krakoa finally gave the mutants a safe haven and a home where they could live without persecution and away from the hatred and bigotry of humans. However, it all came to an end, the mutants were persecuted and hunted down again, and a lot of the blame goes on Mister Sinister. While the Quiet Council worked to ensure the survival of Krakoa, Sinister had a seat at the table and worked behind the scenes to ruin things.

This played out first in Sins of Sinister and then finished up in Fall of X, where Mister Sinister proved that he was one mutant who didn’t want anyone to have a happily ever after ending. Mister Sinister’s actions created several different timelines and alternate Earths, often with horrific results.

3) Unleashed the Legacy Virus

The Legacy Virus is one of the deadliest things to ever happen to mutants. Mister Sinister had Cyclops and Jean Grey kidnapped by Apocalypse’s Horsemen, and then he traded them to Stryfe and the Mutant Liberation Front in exchange for a genetic matrix with the Summers’ future bloodline. He then betrayed Stryfe by revealing his identity to the X-Men. However, when Sinister opened the vial, nothing seemed to be in it.

However, there was something in it, and the Legacy Virus was released into the air. Stryfe had planned this, and it ended up killing countless mutants. It wasn’t until Colossus sacrificed himself to use a cure Beast came up with that the virus was ended, but Mister Sinister was responsible, although it was Stryfe who tricked him into the action.

2) Worked Alongside Nazis in World War II

There are few people as terrible in world history as the Nazis, and Mister Sinister proved to be the ultimate evil when he worked with the Nazis during World War II. As a Nazi scientist, he worked with geneticist Josef Mengele, the man who helped Adolf Hitler explore the occult, and he began to experiment on children at Auschwitz. It was at this time that Max Eisenhardt witnessed his experiments firsthand, fueling Magneto’s hatred for Sinister from early in life.

This is also when Mister Sinister became interested in Namor, who fought alongside the Invaers in World War II and who was a mutant himself. He also met John Greycrow during this time, which led to more experiments years later when he made his way into the Vietnam War.

1) Ordered the Mutant Massacre

The worst thing that Mister Sinister ever did was to order a genocide. The Morlocks were mutants who lived underground in New York City. These mutants were unable to live in public because their mutations couldn’t be hidden, and this means they were always in danger. However, in The Mutant Massacre storyline, a mutant team known as the Maurauders invaded the tunnels and slaughtered almost all of them, except for the few that X-Men, X-Factor, and Thor could save.

The reason for this was because an alternate version of the Beast had experimented on the Morlocks, and this Beast was once a student of Earth’s Mister Sinister. Since this was a perversion of this world’s Mister Sinister’s work, he wanted all the Morlocks dead to prevent it from happening on Earth-616. Mister Sinister even tried to kill the rest by having Malice possess an X-Men member, but this failed, and Malice became forever trapped in Polaris’s body. Killing so many innocent mutants is easily the worst thing Mister Sinister has ever done in Marvel Comics.

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