X-Men Just Killed Thanos in the Most Creative Way Possible

Thanos has been a thorn in the side of the Marvel Universe for decades, most famously finding his way to the big screen in Josh Brolin’s live-action portrayal. In the comics, Thanos has fought Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, snapped away life in the cosmos, and more, but he meets an untimely – yet hilarious – end in Sins of Sinister #1. The event takes over the X-Men’s regular publishing plans as Mister Sinister’s grand schemes finally come to fruition. Sins of Sinister takes readers 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years into a future controlled by the X-Men villain, and its debut issue reveals Sinister’s master plan to deal with the Mad Titan.

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Sins of Sinister #1. Continue reading at your own risk.

Sins of Sinister #1 comes from the creative team of Kieron Gillen, Lucas Werneck, Geoffrey Shaw, Marco Checchetto, Juan José Ryp, David Baldeón, Travel Foreman, Carlos Gómez, Federico Vicentini, David Lopez, Joshua Cassara, Stefano Caselli, Bryan Valenza, VC’s Clayton Cowles, and Jay Bowen. Along with seeing how Mister Sinister has implanted his DNA in the resurrected bodies of Charles Xavier, Emma Frost, Hope Summers, and Exodus, we jump a few years into the future to see how the Marvel Universe is changing.

Mister Sinister starts pulling strings to frame the X-Men as Earth’s greatest heroes, taking out the anti-mutant organization Orchis, framing the Avengers, and more. One threat Mister Sinister anticipates as a problem is Thanos. Luckily, he has a “psychically manipulated Juggernaut” as his secret weapon. The page illustrated by Geoff Darow of “Thanos Rises” fame shows the small Juggernaut being shot through Thanos’ forehead via a Forge-crafted temporal canon, leaving his brain matter scattered through two billion years of history. 

Kieron Gillen Talks Sins of Sinister

ComicBook.com spoke to Kieron Gillen ahead of Sins of Sinister to learn more about the event. “The short of Sins of Sinister is it’s a very different take on an X-Men classic, the alternate timeline, except this is not an alternate timeline,” Gillen said. “Due to the nature of the Moira engine, it’s the future of the Marvel universe. It’s just the future that may get blown up because that’s what the Moira engine does. And it’s also my gleeful homage to — not mine, actually, it’s me and Al [Ewing] and Si [Spurrier]. I actually forget which of us had the idea to basically riff on Powers of X. It’s told across a thousand years of history in three time zones: 10, 100, and 1,000 years in the future.”

He continued, “The core idea, which I think Jon said to Jordan [White], was let’s just do one of those timelines. Instead of doing a short time reset, let’s go for a long one. Let’s follow what happens at the end of Immortal 10 into a hell dimension. I joke that it makes Age of Apocalypse look like the Swimsuit Special and I’m not saying in terms of quality or anything. What I’m actually saying is, by the end of the thousand-year bit, it’s so apocalyptically grim that it’s gone straight into apocalyptically-grimly comic. It’s really horrific, some of the worst stuff that three pretty horrible people can imagine, but it’s got this enormous operatic grandeur to it. It’s a lot. The idea came from ‘let’s do a timeline’ and we did.”

Let us know your thoughts on Thanos’ death and Sins of Sinister #1 in the comments.