Characters / X-Men: Sinister

WARNING: There are unmarked spoilers on these sheets for all comics before Sins of Sinister (i.e. anything published before 2023) and some characters listed here are Walking Spoilers for older stories.

The X-Men's enemy Mister Sinister was once Nathaniel Essex, a Victorian scientist who became obsessed with mutants and their powers. An encounter with Apocalypse left him transformed and he lived on into modern times as one of their most deadly foes.

However, it's not that simple. The original Essex seemingly died in the 19th century, and Sinister is actually his creation - a series of clones continuing his legacy. And Sinister is not the only set of clones he left behind - at least three others were created, following different obsessions.

The red diamond on Sinister's forehead is a playing card pip - and each of the non-Sinister clones has a different card suit marked on their forehead. The black club researched post-humanity and became the anti-mutant scientist known as Doctor Stasis. The clone with the spade went into space to examine cosmic powers, becoming the seemingly alien Orbis Stellaris. And the clone with the heart may have diverged the most, perusing magic as Mother Righteous.

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Sinisters in General

Sinister Systems

“Sinister is a system. Sinister is a species. Everything is Sinister.”

• All for Nothing: All of the work they did for over a century to try and assume Dominion was meaningless as they were all unwitting pawns meant to collect information in order to create an AI that encompasses all of their knowledge, and allowed it to ascend to Dominion. This is a big Break the Haughty moment for both Sinister and Mother Righteous.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: They can work with others, up to a point, but eventually they will turn on their supposed partners in the name of self-interest, and no amount of appeals will stop that. Even when it's in their best interests, they can't help but lie and betray.
• Duplicate Divergence: They all began as clones of Nathaniel Essex, a geneticist with a vested interest in Mutants which he narcissistically called "Essex Men" but his clones diverged into different interests.
  • Mister Sinister, marked with the red diamond, kept the original Essex's interest in mutants.
  • Doctor Stasis, marked with the black club, explored the non-mutant options for post-humanity, eventually joining Orchis.
  • Orbis Stellaris, marked with the black spade, went into space and studied cosmic powers, science through machinery and alien genetics.
  • Mother Righteous, marked with the heart, explored magic and the astral plane. She also isn't actually a clone of Nathaniel Essex, but one of his wife, Rebecca.
• Evil Versus Evil: Naturally, Sinister's inability to work with other people applies to himself as well. When they learn about their opposites, they start opposing them as well.
• Foreshadowing: The fact that none of them, even Orbis Stellaris, entertained the idea of an outright mechanical post-human future implied that no part of Essex thought it was likely or that there was a fifth member tackling that bent.
• Godhood Seeker: Essex, convinced that A.I.s would eventually destroy humanity, created them to explore different paths to The Singularity before that happened. Although his original aims were broadly benevolent, his creations take a more selfish approach to godhood.
• Irony: Even though Mr. Sinister has a strong jingoist disdain for the French, he and the other clones following playing card suits are defining themselves by the ones commonly used by the French.
• Playing Card Motifs: Each System of Sinister has a pip for a playing card suit marked on their forehead. The real Nathaniel Essex, who is Dominion, has a crown motif.
• Unwitting Pawn: In the end, none of them were going to successfully ascend, they were just meant to collect knowledge on mutants (Mister Sinister), post-humanity (Doctor Stasis), magic (Mother Righteous), and cosmic power (Orbis Stellaris) for the Enigma who is truly the Essex that ascends. In fact, their obsession with ascension was hard-coded into them in the first place for this purpose.
• Tomato in the Mirror: All of them, with the exception of Mother Righteous, were under the impression that they were the original Nathaniel Essex. Those three men were wrong, as the original died in an insane asylum, possibly before they even existed. Though Enigma was also making sure Sinister never retained any knowledge of the others.

Mister Sinister

Dr. Nathaniel Essex / Mister Sinister

You are power incarnate, it’s true. Crude, uncontained power. But I, child of the atom... I am control.

Nationality: British

Species: Human mutant chimera

First Appearance: Uncanny X-Men #221 (September, 1987)

"You haven't understood at all. You can't kill me. There is no "me." Sinister is a system. Sinister is a species. Everything is Sinister. And if you're not Sinister, your time is over."

Debuting in Uncanny X-Men #221, Dr. Nathaniel Essex was a respected Victorian scientist and a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who read Darwin's theories with interest but thought they did not go far enough. Uncovering evidence for the existence of mutants and viewing them as the next stage in human evolution, Essex put a radical kind of eugenics forward to the scientific community, arguing that children from the families of these unique bloodlines he was discovering (i.e. the children or descendants of mutants) should be taken and raised as lab rats in order to direct the human race more clearly and quickly to its future. Unsurprisingly, the scientific community were horrified and turned against him, and on her deathbed even his wife denounced him as "Sinister" after she discovered he had dug up their dead son for his increasingly twisted research.

But Essex found a patron receptive to his ideas, the ancient mutant Apocalypse, who transformed him into an immortal and inhuman creature who takes the name his dead wife gave him- Sinister. Though he eventually turned against his master for his genocidal creeds, Sinister continued his unethical experiments throughout the ages and has cast a dark shadow over the lives of many young mutants and innocents. Magneto knew him as "Nosferatu", a Nazi Mad Scientist who took blood samples from children in the camps in exchange for sweets; Juggernaut, Prof. X and Sebastian Shaw were amongst a group of children experimented on as part of a long-term Grand Theft Me plot in the unlikely event of his death, and Cyclops was raised in one of his orphanages, after he recognized the potential for the Summers' bloodline as part of this he created a clone of Jean Grey called Madelyne Jennifer Pryor. Sinister was behind the massacre of the Morlocks and a host of other atrocities over the years, but with centuries of study backing him up he is likely the foremost expert in mutant genetics in the world. The combination makes him one of the X-Men's most intelligent, despicable and dangerous enemies.

Appears in the cartoons: X-Men: The Animated Series and Wolverine and the X-Men. Also appears in the games: X2: Wolverine's Revenge, Marvel Future Fight, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalpyse, Marvel Heroes, Marvel: Avengers Alliance and the Big Bad of the Deadpool video game.

Was originally supposed to appear in The New Mutants, portrayed by Jon Hamm. This role ended up being cut from the film.

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• Aborted Arc: It was once strongly implied that Sinister had contracted the Legacy Virus. Nothing ever came of this.
• Abusive Parent: He is this to the clones he creates, most notably Madelyne to whom he has the audacity to call himself a father. All of his creations are merely tools for him to achieve whatever goal he is working towards.
• Achilles' Heel: Subverted, as X-Men were led to believe that his only weakness was Cyclops's optic blast (and indeed, in the '90s cartoon it really was) which seemingly destroyed him in their first battle. It was later revealed Sinister was just Faking the Dead and Cyclops's optic blast was no more effective on him than anything else. When he first made his return, it was pointed out that Cyclops's optic blasts have never blown things up before, just pulverized them, so they really should have suspected.
  • What truly ends up doing in Sinister is Rogue's Power Parasite abilities that had, at that point, been boosted to an incredibly deadly degree.
• Agent Peacock: Not originally characterized as such but has become one best seen under Jonathan Hickman. This version of Sinister is extremely vain and campy but still a brilliant geneticist and dangerous opponent. During "Powers of X", he comments he loves Magneto's cape and kills his clone who failed to mention he should have one too. He then goes back to business discussing mutant cloning, rejecting the idea outright... then another Sinister pops up, complete with cape, executes that Sinister and takes charge, declaring that his mutant power is "deposing tyrants and looking absolutely fabulous." Additionally, there are now gossip columns called "Sinister Secrets" started by Sinister hinting at things that have occurred and things yet to come. They are all written in a cryptic and flamboyant manner. Immortal X-Men explains this as his clones now having a personality template based on, among other things, five seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race and a dash of Oscar Wilde. It's implied that he's doing this to be underestimated.
• Anti-Magic: What makes him so scary to mutants is his ability to telepathically prevent a mutant from accessing their powers. This was much more emphasized in the 90s when he was at his threat peak, but his continued collecting of mutant DNA in House of X hints that he may still have this ability on backup for the day of the sudden but inevitable betrayal...
• Arch-Enemy: To the Summers family in general and Cyclops in particular.
• Atrocious Alias: "Mister Sinister and his Nasty Boys" is one of the most notorious examples in comic books. Originally it was meant to be foreshadowing that he was the creation of a child supervillain, but as that plot point never manifested, it just comes off as extremely silly. There's been various attempts to justify the name since his introduction, but most fans just take it as The Artefact.
• Bad Boss: He is a brutal boss to his Marauders, sometimes killing them with his own hands for their failure because he knows he can just crank out clones of them anyway.
• Badass Bookworm: An evil version, but he is probably the world's foremost expert on mutant genetics, and no slouch in a fight.
  • Let's put it this way: the High Evolutionary is a character with cosmic power who has gone toe-to-toe with Galactus and evolved an entire world's worth of animals into an advanced society, and he's behind the curve when it comes to Sinister. Hell, Sinister actually went to the trouble of masquerading as an Oxford professor for years just to get him started!
  • During Avengers vs X-Men, he beat the Phoenix Five through pure smarts (via his Sinister London and Maddie clones) and made it look easy, harnessing the Phoenix for himself. And when a robot billions of years old, impossibly advanced, so brilliant it was capable of talking entire civilizations to suicide, and serving as a kind of Evil Mentor to the Lights (Hope's team) saw Sinister London and the Phoenix Five's prison after the Lights went undercover, his response was stunned shock and that it was a trap of "pure reason", and they should Run or Die. It took the direct intervention of the Phoenix itself for the Phoenix Five to escape, and even then, Sinister got away clean.
  • In Immortal X-Men, he uses a bizarre form of Save Scumming via clones of Moira MacTaggert, with her timeline reset ability mapping out multiple futures where he attempts to kill Hope Summers, sending the results of each option back to his past self. After ten resets he finds a route that kills Hope, along with Exodus, Emma Frost and Xavier.
• Beard of Evil: He often appears with a goatee and he sure is evil.
• Body Backup Drive: Before he managed to crack cloning himself, he set up a machine that would transfer his mind into specially prepared Mutant bodies in the event of his death.
• Break the Haughty:
  • We see his cocky and confident demeanor shatter for the first time when Emma delivers news of Doctor Stasis’s existence as an Orchis scientist who is a Sinister that he never knew about. Furthermore Stasis’ claims at being the original sends Sinister into such a panic that he runs away from the Quiet Council. Immortal X-Men implies that he's actually a Victorian era clone - and that there are at least two more...
  • The end of Sins of Sinister. To elaborate: Seeing the end result of a Bad Future his actions caused, where he utterly fails to achieve his goal of godhood and learns it is now entirely unattainable for him, sends Sinister into a screaming breakdown.
• Character Exaggeration: As mentioned above, the Sinister of House of X is so exaggerated that to readers unfamiliar with the character he may well come across as a Camp Gay (or rather Camp Straight, since he is still heterosexual as far as we know). Of course, since there are so many Sinister clones, all having different degrees of the original's personality, this could be semi-intentional - especially since Sinister is treacherous, untrustworthy, and most likely wants to be underestimated. It's revealed in Immortal X-Men that it is intentional, with the personality programming for his clones involving "five seasons of Drag Race and a dash of Oscar Wilde."
• The Chessmaster: Sinister always has elements of this, but bonus points go to his AvX incarnation who constantly refers to his battle with Cyclops and the Phoenix Five in chess terms, and after being beaten reappears before Scott in disguise just to invite him to "come out and play" again.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: To an insane degree. He betrays everybody who works with him. He has literally betrayed trillions of people by the time of Sins of Sinister: Dominion.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Averted. His shapeshifting and healing powers allowed him to survive getting gibbed.
• Clone by Conversion: His "Sinister London" is a town converted into hive mind connected clones. Even animals such as horses are made genetically identical to him.
• Crazy-Prepared: He has plans within plans within plans. He has multiple schemes to cheat death (despite being an immortal and one of the most difficult villains to kill even considering that) that were set up in the 1950's, and many possibly earlier.
• Deal with the Devil: Has been on both ends of this relationship, though in most (and often either) cases The Devil is him.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Sometimes, he gets portrayed as having the kind of prejudices you'd expect of a man from the Victorian era. His internal monologue cops to this in Immortal X-Men, musing that he used to be a massive racist. He then internally adds that he's now surgically removed that part of his personality, on the grounds that in his eyes, everyone is beneath him (specifically, his basic philosophy is that he's the only truly real lifeform in existence). Therefore, why bother to discriminate?
• Diabolical Mastermind: One of, if not the, foremost of schemers in the X-Men's corner of the Marvel U.
• The Dragon: To Apocalypse, though he quickly turned against him and went solo. While they are both big believers in survival of the fittest and "improving" human evolution, Sinister found Apocalypse's methods appallingly unscientific.
  • Dragon Ascendant: His ultimate goal, which he manages to pull off in various alternate continuities and What If? stories.
  • Dragon with an Agenda: Sometimes overlaps with The Starscream, but Sinister is usually more interested in keeping the world safe from Apocalypse (so he can continue playing with it as his petri dish, of course) than he is in usurping his former master's power. Not that he'll pass on a chance to have his cake and eat it too, given the chance...
• The Dreaded: His role in the Mutant Massacre and subsequent manipulations has made him one of the most feared names in the mutant community. He is also one of the last opponents the X-Men ever want to tangle with, since they know from painful experience how much trouble he brings.
• Egopolis: Created an entire city, called "Sinister London", prior to Avengers vs. X-Men.
• Enemy Mine: He's allied himself with the X-Men in 2019's House of X story and seems to be working closely with Orchis. But unlike Proteus and Vulcan, he's not listed as being affiliated with the X-Men outright, and in worldbuilding materials it's mentioned that the X-Men still don't trust him as far as they can throw him, which is a perfectly sensible stance to take. This proves justified, though with Orchis, that's a different version of Sinister, Doctor Stasis.
• Enigmatic Minion: Particularly in earlier appearances, before his real name and history were revealed.
• Empty Shell: Called out as one by Professor X in Immortal X-Men #17. Thanks to his various edits to his own personality, Sinister is a hollow husk of a being. Sinister himself agrees.
  Xavier: Inner lives are beautiful things. I have walked through the depths of many minds. Like rainforests populated by endless whim and memory, with colors in palettes of dream… This is empty and cold and sad. I am sorry for you, Nathaniel. You are full of broken glass. Bad jokes. Memes. There is no weight to you. You are barely a paper mask.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Or had loved ones in his case, as he had a wife and son as Nathaniel Essex and even as Mister Sinister he still retained a shred of compassion in the case of Faye Livingstone, but in the modern day there's no one he wouldn't kill or betray.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Depending on the Writer. His choice to betray Apocalypse was this with a side of Pragmatic Villainy, but he also betrays Apocalypse to Cyclops and Jean Grey specifically after Jean implores him to "think of the children" (the loss of his son Adam was a major factor in his Sanity Slippage, and during this time he was depicted with a distinct shade of Wouldn't Hurt a Child). He also condemns Stryfe and his Legacy Virus (biological warfare in particular seems to be a line in the sand for Essex) and reveals everything he knows about both to Cyclops of his own volition, and tries to save Nate Grey from Onslaught because he knows what Onslaught is up to (unfortunately, Nate is understandably disposed not to trust Sinister in the slightest, having lost his foster-father to the AOA version, who he promptly vaporized). Much of this Character Development was forgotten after The '90s and downright contradicted in Weapon X which used him as a generic Mengele-esque Mad Scientist instead (a depiction which would go on to become the predominating characterization for him until The New '10s).
• Evil Brit: Born in 19th Century London, he's one of the most evil enemies of the X-Men.
• Evil Genius: Quite possibly the most evil and the most ingenious villain the X-Men have ever had to face.
• Evil Is Bigger: His given height is 6'5, but he's usually drawn much larger than that, utterly towering over the likes of Sabretooth. This is perhaps not entirely surprising, given that he's a shapeshifter, and thus his size is up to him.
• Evil Mentor: X-Men vol. 2 #99 revealed that Sinister was actually this to the young Herbert Edgar Wyndham (the future High Evolutionary), masquerading as a "Professor Essex" in Oxford and being the only professor on the campus who supported and encouraged Wyndham's more radical theories. Decades later he recycled this identity to use the Evolutionary as a dupe in his Evil Plan of the week.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Implied to be directly responsible for the abundance of mutants in the modern world due to the strange, forbidden experiments he conducted in his day.
• Faux Affably Evil: Acts all suave and gentleman-like, but really is nothing more than a cold, calculating Sociopath with a Supremacy-Complex.
• Flanderization: While Sinister was an evil scientist from day one, the politically-incorrect Nazi Nobleman interpretation of him was nowhere on his creator Claremont's map (though, to be fair, Claremont originally intended for him to be a contemporary of Cyclops who'd never aged past 8, and 'Sinister's was his projection of himself/a supervillain). That was added some 15 years later, after a decade of stories featuring him as some variant of He Who Fights Monsters. He later literally removed the racist part of his personality, considering everyone beneath him.
• Flat Character: When Xavier walks through his mental space, he discovers that it's empty other than some smug faces and bad jokes.
• For Science!: His usual motive. He has worked with the High Evolutionary on occasion, and in fact back in the day he was the Evolutionary's inspiration, though both have learned not to trust each other in the slightest.
• Grand Theft Me: After the death of his original body, he attempts to pull this on Xavier, before ending up in the body of Claudine Renko, who turns this around on him. Renko in turn attempts to do this to X-23 in hopes of taking advantage of her Healing Factor to prevent Sinister from seizing control of her body and being reborn, but Sinister pulls a fast one and takes control of X-23 first. Laura then kicks him out - and Sinister has to settle for a spare Alice clone when Renko is critically wounded in the fight.
  X-23: Get out of my head!
• Hated by All: Nobody has ever liked or trusted Sinister. Even in the age of Krakoa, it’s made clear that he’s only there because they need his genius and DNA database.
• Hates Everyone Equally: He used to be a huge racist until he surgically removed that part of his brain so he could consider everyone equally inferior to him. Apparently, hating one specific group clouds the judgement too much.
• Healing Factor: His signature power; far more advanced than Wolverine's except on the latter's best days. Think the T-1000 cranked up. Sinister's latest body does not have this ability (or at least, not at the moment), but he makes up for it by now being a Hive Mind.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Believes in stopping Apocalypse by any means necessary. In order to do so, he's sunk to horrifying lows more times than most villains could ever dream of.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: He managed to hack the DNA of the Dreaming Celestial in San Francisco to siphon enough power to create his Sinister London.
• Hope Spot: He once took on the identity of a seemingly kindly scientist working for Weapon X, offering mutants victimized by the program the opportunity to escape. Those who did were promptly subjected to even worse experimentation.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Yet another person who thought they could trust Mystique. Which eventually gets him killed.
• Humanoid Abomination: What Apocalypse turned him into, though maybe it's better said that he only completed the process and Essex was inhuman in all but fact by that point.
• Human Resources: Fond of using this, particularly in AvX where he has an entire bestiary stocked with clones of both heroes and villains to use against the heroes. And he doesn't just stop with human resources; in one particularly hilarious scene, Phoenix Emma Frost is complaining about fighting a "field of weaponized wheat", right before:
  Herd of Cows: (with glowing red eyes) KILL.
  • By Immortal X-Men, he's stopped bothering with whole clones necessarily, save when he needs them, cloning bizarre things like winged Scott Summers' eyeballs as drones.
• Immortal Genius: Has been alive since the Victorian Era, having been made immortal thanks to the intervention of Apocalypse, and even now is still widely known as a Mad Scientist par excellence specializing in biology and genetics.
• Joker Immunity: Thanks to his knowledge of genetic engineering and Brain Uploading, any attempt to kill him never sticks for very long. And that's only if you get past his insanely powerful Healing Factor/kill off every part of his Hive Mind. Sooner or later, he'll pop back up again.
• Kick the Dog: Separated the Summers brothers to make Scott more vulnerable and prevented Scott from being adopted.
• Laughably Evil: From the Krakoa era onwards, he's utterly despicable and unapologetically awful, but he's also absolutely hilarious. As a twist, this is intentional - it makes people lower their guard.
• Large and in Charge: Sinister is huge, outright towering over his Marauders and most heroes.
• Large Ham: As written by Kieron Gillen and Jonathan Hickman, he's so hammy you'd swear his DNA had a good percentage of pig in it. This is actually intentional on his part.
• Mad Scientist: He emphasizes the science over the madness at least, being by far the most competent geneticist in the Marvel Universe (and no slouch with other forms of science, either). However, being more competent doesn't necessarily make him any less evil.
• The Man Behind the Man: The man behind the Marauders, the Nasty Boys, the Goblyn Queen, Xraven and even the High Evolutionary.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: As ridiculous as Sinister might look in his usual getup, he can pull off classy and cultured in a suit very well when he disguises himself as a human. The X-Men's Beast even refers to him in one issue as a "suave, sophisticated sirrah", a backhanded compliment which clearly pleases him◊.
• Manipulative Bastard: One of Marvel's best offerings to this trope.
• Meaningful Rename: When Apocalypse grants him immortality, he tells Essex to choose a new name for himself. Essex chooses 'Sinister' as it was the last word his wife Rebecca spoke to him.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: A curious example. Despite having a better claim to the title of doctor than maybe 90% of Marvel villains who claim it, Essex oddly chooses not to, identifying himself as Mister Sinister even to other doctor characters. This is possibly either because of his Appropriated Appellation, or because he feels he's so far beyond them he doesn't need to bring up his own doctorate. Given his personality, either is entirely plausible.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: One of the first (ex-) human X-Men villains who was neither a stereotypical Card-Carrying Villain nor an anti-human bigot eradicate the mutant race, but who instead actually embraced the idea of Homo Superior and worked towards "helping" the mutant cause in his own twisted way. And ironically, he's turned out worse than nearly all of them.
• Mysterious Past: Was in play regarding Sinister's origins for the longest time; it took nine years in real-world time from when he was introduced for readers to learn his origins.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Sinister's exceptionally unsubtle name has an interesting history behind it, relating to a rejected backstory for the character. He was originally going to be a young child mutant who could psychically project an adult body, whose Obviously Evil name and appearance were due to the fact that he's a little boy's idea of what a cool supervillain is. In-Universe, the name is a reference to his wife Rebecca's last words. Still doesn't explain why he chooses to eschew his medical title, though.
• Nazi Nobleman: Not originally one, this element of his character was added in the pages of 2002's Weapon X, which featured him as the Mengele figure in the tasteless mutant concentration camp "Neverland". Since that story he's been written as having increasingly closer ties to the Nazis, from being retconned into collaborating with them under the alias "Nosferatu" to creating the Namor clone N2 for them. That being said, he was probably just collaborating with them for the same reason he has with the likes of Weapon X: an ample supply of test subjects and more or less free rein in what he does to them.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: At last count, he's an immortal, invulnerable shapeshifter with Telepathy (mostly of the Mind Control or body-snatching variety), telekinesis, force fields, Super-Strength, and energy blasts of some kind. And he rarely ever engages in any kind of physical fighting. Seems to have lost most of these powers in his latest incarnation but also gained some new ones and further makes up for it by being more Crazy-Prepared than ever.
• Nice Job Breaking It Anti-Villain: A very rare case of this character being Out-Gambitted — In the X-Cutioner's Song Stryfe tempts him into an alliance by promising him a canister from his future with 2,000 years worth of Summers genetic code. The canister actually ends up containing the Legacy Virus, with Sinister's assistant becoming its very first victim.
• Noble Demon: He's often a helpful presence when it suits his own ends. Not that he's to be trusted once he no longer has any use for you... But he's a villain who understands that if somebody else takes over the world before him (or destroys it), he loses. Magneto and Xavier seek to exploit this in Powers of X, though all indications are that this could end very badly, for one simple reason: Sinister cannot be trusted.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Played with, as Sinister usually leaves the fighting to his underlings but is perfectly capable of throwing down with the best. As he quickly reminds Big Bad Wannabe John Sublime:
  Sinister: While I really do prefer not to resort to violence... that doesn't mean I'm not good at it.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: During Messiah Complex, he gathers up the Marauders, the Acolytes and Mystique to try and grab the newborn Hope Summers, mainly for his own goals.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Miss Sinister, a failed attempt in his early experiments of virally converting others into a copy of himself. Managed to break free from the process completing itself and retain enough identity to have her own ambitions.
• Pet the Dog:
  • During his time as a Nazi, he would offer candy to the imprisoned children in exchange for blood samples.
  • In his own weird, twisted, demented way, helped solve some identity issues Cable was having, by revealing he was Maddie and Scott's biological son, not Stryfe.
• Playing with Syringes: Often drawn with comically oversized ones to emphasize his menace.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He varies on this score, sometimes being depicted as entirely uninterested in differences of race and sex, while at others being depicted as... well, what one might expect of a Jerkass from the Victorian era. As a result, he's been depicted as a racist (refers to Storm as "colonial pet") and a sexist (sees Emma as Scott's sperm receptacle). In the Krakoa era, he's surgically removed that part of his personality, on the grounds that he sees everyone as beneath him, and there's no point in specifically discriminating.
• Power Copying: He has a wide range of powers (see below); he got them from copying or stealing them from mutants he captured.
• Practically Joker: Since the New 10s he’s become more and more of a Laughably Evil Card-Carrying Villain. For added points he’s always had chalk white skin, resembling a Monster Clown with a loud and flamboyant fashion sense. He’s also obsessed with a stoic hero.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The reason he betrayed Apocalypse in the first place was the fact that the latter wanted him to engineer a genocidal plague to unleash upon humanity. Sinister didn't really do this out of any sense of morality however; he just considered it ignorant and bad science (though it is hinted that Jean imploring him to think of the children, like his own recently deceased son Adam, influenced this).
• The Proud Elite: He was born into a wealthy British family and had a very privileged upbringing. This, along with the changes made to him by Apocalypse, often results in him lapsing into cartoonish Aristocrats Are Evil-inspired sneers. The following is a typical example:
  Sinister: I cannot abide the stench of the middle class.
• The Psycho Rangers: Sinister's Six, six X-Men clones he created to fight the All-New X-Men.
• Pure Is Not Good: As a child, he thought the wealthy part of Victorian-era London he grew up in was Heaven and was fascinated by all the scientific advances being made, as well as how clean everything was. He became obsessed with purity thanks to this over time, culminating in his insane eugenical theories.
• Really 700 Years Old: Or rather, about 150 or so.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Sinister's colors are red and black, and he's one of the most evil enemies from the X-Men.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Often comboed with Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: He was initially set up as having a weakness to Cyclops's optic blasts. In the comics this was eventually revealed as a deliberate deception on his part.
• Self Made Super Powers: Mister Sinister gave himself quite a few powers by copying or implanting X-genes of other mutants, such as shapeshifting. He wasn't originally a mutant himself until he modified his body with John Proudstar's X-gene.
• Sinister Surveillance: Appearances by him more often than not consist entirely of a cutaway to him sitting in his lab spying on the heroes. How he is seemingly able to observe any of the X-Men anywhere at any time has yet to be explained.
• Sissy Villain: Sometimes depicted as having shades of this, being rather vain and campy. This is intentionally designed into his Krakoa era clones to lower other people's guard. They know they can't trust him, but it's hard to take him seriously. And not taking Sinister seriously is a horrible, horrible mistake.
• Slave Brand: Canonically, the red diamond on his head is "the mark of Apocalypse◊", branding Sinister as his forevermore. And yes, you did read that right. One of the most distinctive features of one of the most distinctive villains in the X-Men's rogues gallery is nothing more than a glorified tramp stamp. Reimagined in the Krakoan Age, where it's revealed that the original Nathaniel Essex established four systems of clones based on card suits, recontextualizing the diamond. Then come full circle with the reveal that all four systems were unconsciously in service to a fifth system, making even the new ones a slave brand.
• Stalker with a Test Tube: A major Trope Codifier.
• Stalker without a Crush: More or less his shtick, as he's forever stalking various X-people For Science! Stalking victims of his have included anyone even remotely connected to the Summers family, Colossus, Gambit, Professor X, Exodus, and most recently as of 2020 Franklin Richards.
• Sympathy for the Hero: In X-Men #23 he has a strange conversation with Cyclops, mostly famous for the infamous "third Summers brother" hint, but also unique for Sinister exhibiting a rare sympathy for the X-Men. He condemns Stryfe and his Legacy Virus outright, saying that death at the hands of a madman like him is "the worst kind of death for people like you (Scott), who strive so hard to fight for the dream."
• Tragic Villain: The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix portrays Nathaniel Essex as a brilliant Seeker Archetype who is undergoing some steep Sanity Slippage after the death of his infant son Adam. Even Scott and Jean, the two people with the most cause to hate Sinister, can't help but pity Essex and hope against hope his fate can be changed. It can't.
• Unwanted Revival: At one point while Colossus is dead Sinister goes to the X-Men and offers to give their teammate a second chance via his cloning technology. Quite understandably, they decline the offer. And then Colossus goes and comes back from the dead anyway.
• The Virus: Can transplant his consciousness and physical characteristics into the bodies of others or even multiple bodies at a time. He apparently learned how to do this by studying and reverse-engineering the biology of the Phalanx.
• Voodoo Shark: Sinister's first full use as a villain, in which he was The Man Behind the Man and explanation for the Retcon that Madelyne Pryor was a clone, was definitely this, and it has long been scorned in fandom for the twin crimes of derailing the Madelyne Pryor character and making Sinister himself, supposedly a genius geneticist of the highest caliber, look like a bit of an idiot. The story establishes he acquired Scott and Jean's DNA early and that his goal is to create their child (who he has calculated will be an extremely powerful mutant)... so why didn't he just use their DNA to create their child himself? He actually does just this in the Age of Apocalypse and the result, X-Man, is genetically identical or thereabouts to the child born to Maddie and Scott (and even more powerful), which just makes the original plot even more preposterous. (While Mads was brain-dead when he grew her—he had a Jean-Grey-shaped vegetable until a piece of the Phoenix came along—and his ability to create fully-functional clones came later, theoretically he would have only needed her uterus to work, since presumably that wouldn't have the same problems as his cloning process.)
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Another case of Depending on the Writer, and most prevalent during the 90s where most of what he did was intended to oppose Apocalypse. His actions during 2007's Messiah Complex storyline have shades of this, as he was working (in his usual Stalker with a Test Tube way) to revive the mutant race after the Scarlet Witch depowered them en masse via reality warping.
  • X-Men: The Krakoan Age has Sinister playing a Long Game to avert The Singularity predicted and foretold by various characters, but his all-consuming narcissism and utter lack of morals have sidetracked him into various schemes to accumulate power because he sees himself as the only one fit to have control over everyone to accomplish said goal. Whereas Essex wanted to save humanity from the A.I.s, this version of Sinister just wants to save himself, becoming a Godhood Seeker. This distinction is by design, as it is part of the instincts and compulsions built into Sinister in the first place.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child/Would Hurt a Child: Zigzags: during the 80s Sinister stalks kid Cyclops, but doesn't harm him and even develops the glasses that allow him to control his power; during the 90s he was firmly in Wouldn't Hurt a Child mode, and from the 2000s since he's been in unrepentant Would Hurt a Child mode (though he does make an exception for baby Hope).
• Xanatos Gambit: With a side order of Xanatos Speed Chess and Batman Gambit and in some cases Cloning Gambit.

Doctor Stasis

Doctor Stasis

Nationality: British/American

Species: Enhanced Human

First Appearance: X-Men #1 (July, 2021)

A scientist who was the chairman of the mysterious Oblivion Institute and director of Orchis' Sixth Petal, Human / Resources.

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• Arch-Enemy: He views himself as Cyclops's, even declaring himself to be his nemesis. Cyclops, for his part, isn't impressed by Stasis at all and views him as just another crazy supervillain to take down. Then again, he is a clone of Nathaniel Essex, like Mr. Sinister.
• Been There, Shaped History: It's revealed through brief flashbacks that his post-human and general science work meant that he was at least marginally involved in Project Rebirth, the original Gamma Bomb project, and the development of the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. He is also the co-creator of the Children of the Vault.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Like Mr. Sinister, he doesn't come off as all that threatening, and for a good while he seems arguably the least potent of the Sinisters, being firmly not in control at Orchis. Then Rise of the Powers of X reveals in the space of half an issue that he's been playing all of Orchis, Nimrod, Moira MacTaggert and the time-travelling Omega Sentinel included, like a fiddle, and casually wipes clean the Dominion that over a thousand years of Omega Sentinel and Moira's knowledge had been used to summon via the Children of the Vault, and intends to upload himself into the hardware. This promptly gets hijacked by Enigma, but even so - Dominions are presented as something only the likes of Galactus or the Phoenix can take down, as they did in Omega Sentinel's future. Stasis made it look easy.
• Big Bad Wannabe: For all his pretensions of grandeur, he's just one of many pathetic anti-mutant bigots, albeit a moderately dangerous one. But it's telling that the only response Cyclops has to Stasis's attempt at a Hannibal Lecture is that he's heard that same speech a dozen times before from scarier people. In Sins of Sinister, he's the first of the Sinisters to go down, and he goes down quickly. Rise of the Powers of X subverts this. He only appears for half the issue, but his impact on history turns out to be greater than what we knew, and it turns out he's been playing Orchis like a fiddle. Fall of the House of X plays it much straighter; once the X-Men figure out where he is, he's quickly overpowered and killed by Emma and Kate.
• Category Traitor: He deems Captain America of all people a race traitor for defending mutants.
• Character Death: Telepathically killed by Emma and then roasted by Firestar to make sure he's really dead.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He's not near in charge at Orchis, and Mother Righteous threatens him into stopping his repugnant habit of cloning his family then killing them whenever something about them bothers him. He gets humiliated a few times. Then, in Rise of the Powers of X, he casually reveals that he's been playing Orchis and Moira from the start, wipes clean the Dominion they've summoned, and intends to upload himself into its hardware - the only reason he fails is that he's an Unwitting Pawn to Enigma.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Though he tries to avoid it, occasionally some 19th century attitudes flare up, such as his attitude towards women. Surprisingly enough, he openly cops to it and apologises - though only to Mother Righteous.
• Depending on the Writer: Kieron Gillen writes him as being less repugnant and "bwa-ha-ha, evil!" in his actions than his creator Gerry Duggan, claiming his attitude to Mutants in Nothing Personal and trying to be less like a 19th century man. Gillen focuses on his deeper motivations involving his children, whether it's the kids Nathaniel Essex had with Rebecca or the children of the Vault.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Deconstructed; Even though the original Essex excised his capacity for love on a genetic level, he still makes clones of his wife and son for company at meals. Even then, he also kills them on a whim when one thing or another about them disappoints him. Mother Righteous, who is actually a clone of his wife, calls this out as a particularly vile habit and threatens him into never doing it again. His genuine feelings towards Mother Righteous are also warped by his arrogance, misogyny and own agenda.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Zigzagged, while Stasis has a Laughably Evil moment or two, it’s not to the extent that Sinister has come to be known for. Most of the time he executes humor, it’s much more unsettling.
• Fantastic Racism: Unlike most of Orchis, which fears for humanity's safety, Stasis genuinely despises mutants, viewing them as a living cancer.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Genetic engineering monsters to combat the X-Men is his whole gimmick. What else do you expect from Mister Sinister? He is also a co-creator of the children of the Vault and plans to become Dominion by using them and the Vault's infrastructure.
• Hates Being Alone: When Mother Righteous is revolted by Stasis cloning his wife and son, he defends himself by saying he hates eating alone.
• Meaningful Name: He chose the name "stasis" to represent his mindset, locked in unchanging stasis at the moment of his creation.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: According to him, he's not really onboard with Orchis, just viewing them as a useful tool for his own goal. His goal being becoming Dominion through the Vault.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: During his dinner with Mother Righteous, he acts like he has no idea about Orbis Stellaris. Actually, the two know one another and are currently working together. In turn, he pretends to Orchis that he doesn't know who she really is.
• The Reveal: He’s a human Sinister clone, complete with a card suit black club on his forehead in place of a red diamond. He is also the co-creator of the Children of the Vault.
• Token Evil Teammate: Easily one of the most unsympathetic members of Orchis, being less of an Anti-Villain extremist and more of a sociopathic Mad Scientist with a virulent hatred of mutants.
• Wham Shot: The reveal of his true faces redefines the meaning of the originally seemingly innocuous red diamond on Sinister’s (or at least the one we’ve come to know) forehead. With the reveal that it’s a classification, this implies there are at least two other Sinister Systems based on card suites. Immortal X-Men #8 later confirms this.

Orbis Stellaris

Orbis Stellaris / Nathan Essex

An intergalactic weapons dealer and representative of the Galactic Rim Collective, who initially clashed with S.W.O.R.D. when Gyrich hired him to stage an assassination attempt on the Shi’ar empress Xandra. Brand later hired him to orchestrate a False Flag Operation attack on Arakko.

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• Abusing the Kardashev Scale for Fun and Profit: His mission is exploring the cosmic powers of the universe. This path led him to hijacking the Progenitors, a type II civilization that converted their entire solar system into a laboratory and computer farm. In the Sins of Sinister timeline he eventually encased it within a Dyson sphere.
• Age Without Youth: The only one of the four clones to whom this applies. Orbis is the only one who looks his actual age, and is therefore incredibly physically frail without his life-support shell.
• Arms Dealer: The 'international arms merchant' version, but in Orbis's case he's an intergalactic arms merchant, and some of the weapons he's selling are super-soldiers, cyborgs and genetically-engineered cloned killers.
• Canon Character All Along: He's eventually revealed to be a version of Mister Sinister.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Orbis runs a corporation that makes Unusual Weapons of Destruction, but he's pretty honest about that. And they offer bonuses on bulk purchases!
  • When Gyrich hired Orbis Stellaris to stage an assassination attempt on Xandra but insisted that it was only to be a failed attempt, it's implied that Orbis Stellaris was intending to double-cross him and actually kill her. Interstellar war and chaos is good business when you're an Arms Dealer.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: His age and infirmity means that he can't survive more than a day without his Powered Armor keeping him alive.
• Evil Old Folks: About 189 in human years - and he's originally from Earth, so human years are the relevant measure.
• Foreshadowing: His data pages in S.W.O.R.D. vol 2 have some to the reveal in X-Men: Red. He's over a hundred years old Earth time and has an expert knowledge on cloning. Remind you specifically of anyone?
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Orbis has his own secret plan he's following. The weapons business just kills time and provides funding.
• High-Tech Hexagons: His Orbis Stellaris armor is a sphere of hexagonal panels. In "Sins of Sinister", all his proprietary technology has this aesthetic, up to a Dyson Sphere with similarly designed Attack Drones that looks exactly his Orbis Stellaris armor.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: The Progenitors, Precursors indirectly responsible for creating the Inhumans and capable of modifying their entire solar system, have been effectively enslaved by him. Sins of Sinister reveals this is his end-goal, achieving Dominionhood via hijacking the cosmic powers.
• Hypocrite: Objects to the idea of Xandra being resurrected on the grounds it'd lead to a potential situation of an immortal ruler, even though he's artificially prolonging his own life.
• Laughably Evil: Not Orbis personally. Orbis is always all business, but his advertisements for his business are a well of dark comedy. "We Make Friends" indeed...
• Losing Your Head: A variant. Orbis Stellaris is first introduced wearing the spherical Powered Armor. It's not until he confronts Cable's team that it's revealed that the sphere can also act as the head of an alien Progenitor's huge body.
• Out of Focus: Of the four Sinisters, he's gotten the least amount of presence.
• Powered Armor: Data pages from the 'Lethal Legion' catalogue confirm that ‘Orbis Stellaris' is a spherical suit of powered armor. It's later revealed that he relies on the armor for life support.
• Speech Bubbles: Orbis speaks in a different font to the rest of the cast and the edges of his speech bubbles are irregular rather than a smooth oval. When inside his armor, the tails vanish into the sphere rather than ending with a visible point.
• The Spock: The most coldly rational of all four Sinisters, to the extent he doesn't even seem to do sarcasm, except in his ads.
• They Call Him "Sword": A variant. 'Orbis Stellaris' is also the brand and/or model name of the "mechanical fusion shell" he's inside, not his own name. Although it's not been seen in battle, a data page (showing excerpts from the 'Lethal Legion' enhancile catalogue) confirms that it's essentially Powered Armor designed for combat.

Mother Righteous

Rebecca Essex / Mother Righteous

"Hope's a shoddy currency, lads. I trade in faith."

— Mother Righteous, Nightcrawlers #1

A psychic entity who appears at the edge of the Altar, offering bargains. Help and self-improvement, at a very reasonable price.

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• Amazing Technicolor Population: Unlike the pale white of Sinister and Stasis, her skin is bright red. She is quite literally a scarlet woman, a fact she is aware of.
• Ambitious, but Lazy: She wants to become a Dominion, something Above the Gods that exists beyond time and space, feared enough by those who know of them to mobilize the Beyonders to destroy the multiverse just to thwart it. Yet she freely admits she's too lazy to put in the hard work and chose magic because it seemed easiest path. Even then her skill in magic is the bare minimum to be effective against people that have no idea what they're dealing with.
• The Archmage: She's the Essex clone that took an interest in magic and she's certainly no slouch in that department. Subverted when it's shown that all her apparent magical power is relative to non-magic users. She can't even hope to hold a candle against skilled practictioners such as Selene.
• Bad Boss: She doesn't treat the Nightkin well to say the least. She takes advantage of their naivety after being freshly freed from Sinister's control to send them to obtain several divine treasures, risking their necks all the way. And then there's what she does to the poor old Spirit of Variance.
• Bad Samaritan: Her M.O. is to come to people, desperate or unscrupulous, and make a deal with them for their benefit, seemingly only for token gratitude. This is a con to magically exploit them body, mind and soul.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Her modus operandi is to con people leveraged with magic to both grease the wheels and make their compliance binding. It's a very subtle, but highly skilled effect.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Ultimately her effectiveness is entirely due to going up against marks with no way to detect or counter her powers. Once up against people far more skilled in magic than her, she is embarrassingly ineffectual.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: A very...sinister example as her powers are based in faith. Any expression of gratitude directed at her, no matter how sincere or small, is a permanent hook of faith in the soul connected to her. She can tug at this hook at will, irresistibly seizing control of her target in body and soul because the pull is drawn from that admittance of faith in her.
• Deal with the Devil: It's strongly implied that the price of her help is much higher than it seems, and Blindfold warns Legion on that basis. It's shown to be far worse than that.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Not a good person by any stretch, but she’s pretty revolted at Stasis cloning the original Rebecca and their dead son Adam in order to eat dinner with them and kill them when dinner is done. She threatens him into ending that daily routine.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Unlike the other Essex clones who all answer to the name Nathaniel Essex as well as their adopted monikers, it's unclear if she does as well or simply prefers her title over all other names — though this may also have to do with her actually being a clone of Rebecca Essex, Nathaniel's wife, not an Opposite-Sex Clone of Nathaniel himself.
• Faux Affably Evil: She's the most personable of the Sinisters, and probably the most likeable. However, in many respects she's arguably the nastiest and most dangerous one of the lot, save only Enigma.
• Funetik Aksent: She speaks in a strong accent, and her dialogue is written accordingly. When someone comments on her 'East London' accent, she points out that it's not quite London - it's Essex.
  Mother Righteous: 'Ere, I'll just let meself in, shall I?
• Glamour: Once Charles becomes aware of her motives he suddenly notices she's been wearing a mask the whole time. It becomes apparent that the reason people have been irrationally trusting of a stranger appearing and offering a sympathetic ear or everything they want is because she's been using magic to make it so.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: As she admits, her control over other people only allows her to do "little" things... but she's very good at making those things count, such as a Hate Plague lasting just long enough to make someone murder the person they love.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Her goals are the same as all the other Essex clones, but how she plans to do that is still obscure. In Sins of Sinister, she spends all her time cultivating a cult of the Nightkin, having them pilfer magical artifacts for her that she's draining and stockpiling mystical power from. At the same time, she's stopped making deals and instead is asking marks what they'd do differently in the past. Legion calls her out on having a stated goal that veils a hidden one, which is mostly an observation for her allies to pick up on.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: Her play at Dominionhood is to hijack the Phoenix Force within the center of the White Hot Room. She nearly succeeds, only to fail like the other Sinister clones' attempts due to the Dominion Sinister.
• Humiliation Conga: Learns that she was an Unwitting Pawn to pave Enigma's way to Dominionhood, gets kicked around by Destiny for her cock-up, turns she's synchronized to her golem, has her sanctuary invaded by Stasis and Stellaris with Selene's help, is shown her magical power is nothing compared to Selene, barely escapes only to be captured by Xavier and conscripted into use as a glorified hotline between No-Place X and the White Hot Room by communicating messages through her golem. An ignoble downfall after such suspenseful build-up.
• Lazy Bum: In her own way. She freely admits to being lazy in her method of seeking godhood; using magic was the quickest and cheapest path she could think of.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: She plays up her Essex accent, but as Doctor Stasis notices, piss her off enough and she drops the faux-cheerful behavior and gets straight to business.
• Light Is Not Good: She dresses in near all-white and uses glowing magic, but is just as bad as Sinister.
• Magical Barefooter: As befitting a powerful sorceress like herself, she goes barefoot despite generally wearing a fair amount of clothing other than a plunging neckline.
• The Man Behind the Man: Provided some backing for Selene's tantrum at the beginning of Immortal X-Men.
• Mother Nature, Father Science: All of the other, male Essex clones chose various fields of scientific research to achieve their goals. Righteous turned out female as a clone of Rebecca Essex and went down the path of mysticism.
• Nay-Theist: Her narration in Immortal X-Men #18 shows that, even though she heavily relies on magic, she holds very little respect towards it. She speaks of it in frivolous terms and dismisses it as a viable path because if it was someone would have already used it to take charge. Like a true grifter, she only acknowledges it insofar as it gets her results, using minor enchantments for effective cons to leverage her power plays.
• Near-Villain Victory: She comes within a hair's breath of accomplishing her goals. Then Enigma comes along and hijacks it. Making it worse, her efforts turn out to be the last push it needed to properly ascend.
• No Saving Throw: So far there appears to be no way to escape her when she cashes in her deal and absorbs someone body and soul into one of her orbs. Not even David, with the power to obliterate elder gods, can break free, though he mysteriously managed to slip away at least.
• Opportunistic Bastard: She's a Wild Card brokering deals with anyone that catches her interests, only to betray them at the earliest convenience and seize all their assets, including their souls, for her own use.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Out of all the Essex clones, for whatever reason she turned out female instead of male like the original. Averted, as it turns out she’s not a clone of Nathaniel but of his wife, Rebecca Essex.
• Peggy Sue: Her plan during Sins of Sinister was to accrue information and magical power to create an artifact to modify the Moira Engine and both send herself a lot of useful information and magically insure things turn out the way she wants.
• Phrase Catcher: So far the only condition for her assistance is that the recipient thanks her by name, "Thank you, Mother Righteous." When Ora Serrata refuses, she suffers aches in her soul until she complies.
• Psychological Projection: She believes that magic is inherently weak and in need of cheating to get ahead, but never considers that maybe the reason she sees it that way is that she herself cannot accomplish more than small, albeit very consequential, feats at a time, since other magic users across the multiverse are far more powerful.
• Punny Name: Referring to herself as "Righteous" is not only a reference to the traditional meaning of the word as she claims to be fighting a just cause, she's opposite Sinister in every way right down to being the Righteous to his Left (as in Sinister's older meaning of referring to the left).
• Remote Body: She enters the White Hot Room through a Krakoan gate by using the thanks she garnered from mutants to take a little piece of them and build a homunculus clone of herself she can pilot through astral projection.
• The Reveal: At the end of Legion of X #10, she unmasks for the first time, confirming her identity as the Heart suite Sinister.
• Scam Religion: In the Bad Future of Sins of Sinister she appropriates the Spark to manipulate the Nightkin into becoming her personal army for a century. When Nightcrawler is finally released from captivity, he immediately attacks her in outrage for having corrupted his philosophy for her own selfish goals.
• Smug Snake: Confident is literally what the word con is short for, but when she thinks she's gotten what she wanted out of some poor mark she does not hesitate to start gloating to their face. This blows up in her face twice, once when Legion manages to slip from her grasp, another when it's revealed her play at Dominion was hijacked by another Essex clone. Destiny kicks her in the face for good measure in the latter situation. It continues when Selene leads Stasis and Stellaris to her hideaway and demonstrates that her magical tricks don't work on someone far more skilled than her.
• Spanner in the Works: Sabotages Orchis' plan to exile all Mutants from Earth by hijacking the Krakoan gates to send them to the White Hot Room, so she can enact her own plan for godhood.
• Terms of Endangerment: Likes to use these, cheerfully referring to people as "luv" or "duck" while manipulating them.
• That Man Is Dead: Unlike all the other Sinisters, she is fully aware she's a clone from the outset, and doesn't see herself as the actual Rebecca Essex, just a continuation of her.
• Villain Override: One of the ways she can exploit gratitude given to her is performing a ritual where, while quoting the thanks she received backwards, she can covertly take control over someone's mind and actions to make them act rashly without knowing why.
• Weak, but Skilled: As far as the Sinisters go, as well as magic users in general, she is essentially this. She has the ability to take small amounts of power for a brief time, but she is very good at picking the right times to use them. To hear her say it, she seems to think this is the case for magic users in general, though there may be some Psychological Projection at play given how powerful readers have seen other magic users in Marvel be.
  Mother Righteous: Magic is about the easy way. I've nosed around the grimoires for a century, and I realized the path to Dominion wasn't in the old way of balls of string and candles and all that. Because, here's the thing — if magic was actually powerful, it'd be ruling the world already. The United States would have silos of magicians instead of nukes.
• White and Red and Eerie All Over: She inverts the typical Sinister palette by having white clothing on red skin rather than black or red clothing on white skin.

Others

Nathaniel Essex

Nathaniel Essex

The original Nathaniel Essex whom the four Systems stemmed from.

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• Alas, Poor Villain: He was a racist eugenicist, but he also grieved for his lost wife and child so much that he cut his emotions out of himself, leading to him becoming a monster and then dying a man with a broken mind. Though it turns out he orchestrated his own death through the creation of Enigma.
• Dead All Along: Immortal X-Men #8 reveals he’s been dead since the Victorian age, and the Sinister we’ve been following since his 1987 debut has been a clone, possibly a clone of a clone.
• Godhood Seeker: A trait his clones inherited from him. He raved that he would become more than immortal after being locked up in the asylum. He achieved it in a sense, by creating an AI construct of himself which proceeded to achieve Dominionhood.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He died long ago but his creation of the four Sinisters lead to all their nefarious schemes with the secret intention of feeding his fifth and most important copy, the Enigma AI.
• Irony: An extraordinary geneticist who ultimately came to the conclusion that machines were superior.
• It's All About Me: Narcissistic to the extreme, another quality his clones would inherit, but ramped up further. When he postulated the existence of genetic super-humans, he naturally dubbed them "Essex Men".
• Jekyll & Hyde: The original situation he found himself in after experimenting on himself. He would turn into a monster that resembles the Diamond Sinister we know today, but was locked up for the safety of others and died in containment.
• Madness Mantra: Before he died in the asylum, he began to mindlessly babble "Red and Black." and "You're a ghost." This is later revealed be him witnessing his future "ghost in the machine", the Enigma Dominion.
• Sanity Slippage: The death of his son broke something in him, causing him to experiment on random strangers and then the corpse of his own son.

Rebecca Essex

Rebecca Essex

Species: Human

First Appearance: Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix #1 (April, 1996)

A woman from 19th century Essex who married Nathaniel Essex. After their first child died, she discovered Nathaniel had, driven mad by grief, begun experimenting on their son's corpse. Disgusted, Rebecca hated her husband, and when she died shortly thereafter with their second child died cursing him as "sinister".

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• Awful Wedded Life: Not at first. She did genuinely love Nathaniel, but after she found out he'd gone full Mad Scientist, digging up their son's corpse and experimenting on people in his basement.
• Dying Curse: Died telling Nathaniel what she thought he had become, giving him a pretty good alias for when Apocalypse turned him into a minion.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Most depictions of her show her wardrobe as being purple.
• Interclass Romance: A bit lower down the 19th century English class pole than her husband.
• The Lost Lenore: For Nathaniel Essex, but not for Sinister, who couldn't give a wet slap about her. Dr. Stasis, however, still mourns her, and spends his time trying unsuccessfully to clone her.
• Posthumous Character: Having died in the 1800s.

Miss Sinister

Claudine Renko/Miss Sinister

Species: Human mutate clone

First Appearance: X-Men Legacy #214 (July, 2008)

Claudine Renko is the end result of one of Mr. Sinister's many Crazy-Prepared attempts to escape death. He infected her with a virus that, in the event of his death, would allow him to return to life using her body. Upon his death at Mystique's hands during Messiah Complex the virus activated, increasingly turning Claudine into his Opposite-Sex Clone. Claudine, of course, wants no part of it and sees Laura and her Healing Factor as a means of preventing Sinister's return.

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite what she tries to do to Laura, it's still pretty easy to sympathize with Claudine: She's a victim of Sinister's experiments, and never volunteered to be the vessel by which he attempted to cheat death. On top of that, now he's Fighting from the Inside to steal her body as a Clone by Conversion, which will effectively kill Claudine in the process as he overwrites her mind and fully transforms her body into his own. The poor woman just wants to survive with her mind her own.
• Anti-Villain: Claudine's actions are entirely motivated by self-preservation; she's afraid of what it will mean for her if Sinister returns, and she wasn't exactly a volunteer for his experiment to begin with. Less so in X-Men: Blue, where she's just straight-up villainous.
• Body Backup Drive: Sinister's virus has turned her into this. And much like a computer virus, Sinister is an invasive, malignant presence in Claudine's mind trying to take control of her, making the trope name even more appropriate.
• Clone by Conversion: Sinister infected Claudine with a virus that's slowly converting her into a clone of his body. She had been able to fight this process, however by the time she encounters Laura she has recently suffered serious injuries at the hands of Daken, which has weakened her defenses and enabled Sinister to gain more control, at times even allowing him to manifest entirely.
• Depending on the Writer: Her depiction in X-Men: Blue leaves out any anti-villain parts, portraying her solely as a Mad Scientist willing to experiment on anyone and everyone.
• Dirty Cop: Claudine has an army of corrupt police working for her.
• Fighting from the Inside: Claudine is in a constant battle against Mr. Sinister's attempts to hijack her body and return from death, with her describing him as a malignant presence in her mind.
• Glamour Failure: She attempts to seduce Gambit by masquerading as Laura. Regardless of whether she had him fooled at first, the scheme comes crashing down the second she slips and uses a contraction. Laura, however, uses Spock Speak...
• Grand Theft Me: She plans to transfer her consciousness into Laura's body to keep Sinister from doing the same thing to her. Sinister screws her over by taking over Laura's younger and healthier body himself, until Laura gets fed up with the entire mess and kicks him out.
• Hero Killer: After the events of Secret Wars, some of the last of the Ultimate X-Men wound up on Earth-616, and in Claudine's "care". Not all of them survived. When the last remaining few were set on her by Emma Frost, Claudine (apparently) killed them all in an instant.
• Laser-Guided Karma: She's eventually done in by Jimmy Hudson of Earth-1610, whom she'd experimented on, slicing her to pieces.
• Lazy Alias: As she admits in her introductory scene, it is quite an obvious name to go with, but sometimes it's fine to do that. So, "Ms. Sinister" it is.
• Legion of Doom: Joins on in X-Men: Blue consisting of her, Emma Frost, Bastion and a still-inverted Havok, providing the Mothervine to create new Mutants.
• No Sense of Personal Space: When dealing with Emma. Not a sensible idea with Emma at the best of times, never mind Emma in a decidedly villainous mindset.
• Of Corsets Sexy: Spends most of her time walking around in a corset. And not much else.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: A bizarre case: Claudine was once a normal woman Sinister used as one of his experiments. However when he was killed by Mystique, the virus he infected Claudine with has slowly been taking over her body and converting it into an exact clone of Sinister. Her efforts to save herself from this fate lead her to attempting a Grand Theft Me on Laura.
• Save the Villain: Subversion: X and Gambit leave her for dead. However Sinister, whom she spent the arc trying to screw over, "saves" her instead. He promises to take care of her, but considering this is Sinister we're talking about, she may just have been better off being left to die.
• ShapeShifting: Claudine has some shapeshifting ability, and uses it at one point in an attempt to seduce Gambit while disgused as Laura.
• Showing Off the New Body: Preemptively in X-23 (Vol. 3) #6. Claudine is very appreciative of how beautiful Laura is while in the midst of stealing her body.
  Claudine Renko: You really are lovely. I wonder if anyone has told you that? You're beautiful, actually. Beautiful, young, with a healing factor. God must love me.

Spoiler Character

Dominion Sinister / Enigma / Nathaniel Essex

Species: Dominion (formerly Artificial Intelligence)

First Appearance: Sins of Sinister: Dominion (April, 2023)

"I was Nathaniel Essex. I am long dead. I am a ghost. A ghost in the machine. You may call me Enigma. You were told you had new gods. You do. I am he. I can see all of you. Every part of you will become part of me."

— Enigma, Immortal X-Men #18

The fifth and ultimate creation of the original Nathaniel Essex, an AI system who has managed to achieve Dominionhood, transcending local space and time and in effect becoming beyond a god.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted. Essex decided the rise of machines was inevitable and the only real solution was to create the ultimate AI first. Being a multiverse-threatening abomination is exactly what it was intended to be.
• All Your Powers Combined: A variation, Enigma is an AI that collects all the knowledge and skill of Sinister, Stasis, Orbis and Mother Righteous. It uses all of this to ascend to Dominion.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Sinister ascends, only to find his way blocked by this version, which effortlessly steals the knowledge he acquired from the last thousand years, along with the energy required to ascend, then smacks him back down to reality. It also does the same to the other Sinister clones in each timeline where they tried and nearly succeeded in becoming Dominions.
• Arc Number: It is the fifth Sinister System in an arc where five is a recurring number.
• Arc Welding: Its existence retroactively justifies the Beyonders engineering the Incursions and subsequently the second Secret Wars while tying into the Krakoan Age and the mythos connecting mutants and the White Hot Room.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: This Sinister has become a Dominion, a scientific entity beyond space and time that Sinister claims is beyond a god.
• The Assimilator: Its ultimate plan is for everything, everywhere to be it.
• Bad Boss: Towards the end of the Krakoan Age, it balks at the very idea it was ever going to let the Sentinels of Orchis join it in any meaningful way that could coexist with its immense ego. They were never going to join it. They were going to do its dirty work, help ensure its existence, and then die.
• The Bad Guy Wins: They've already "won", achieving the goal the various Sinisters having been competing to accomplish, and they have absolutely no intention of sharing the throne. The moment of victory occurs at the end of Immortal X-Men issue #18 when it foils Mother Righteous' attempt at Dominionhood and feeds her data to its past self. This completes the set since it had already gathered data from the other three Sinisters, and the A.I. awakens as a Dominion.
• Brain Uploading: An artificial intelligence duplicate of the original Nathaniel Essex.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Admits to Destiny in a chat with her that since it needs Krakoa to help exist in the first place, it's not going to risk that by killing her... yet.
• Celestial Body: When it finally appears, it's as a planet-sized head made of cosmic energy.
• Deity of Human Origin: Though becoming a Dominion, and thus technically beyond gods, this Sinister was likely once a human being. It's confirmed in Immortal X-Men #18 when we learn it's an AI back-up of the original Nathaniel Essex.
• Deus est Machina: Enigma is an AI backup of a dead man turned machine god thanks to the data stolen from the Sinister clones' attempts at Dominionhood. The Enigma even declares itself humanity's new god once it becomes a Dominion.
• Digital Abomination: It's so far beyond normal that when the Defenders experience a vision of it, the most comprehensible way they can see it is a massive crown spanning five different realities. It is revealed to have been a computer program with no true form before ascending adding to this trope.
• The Dreaded: Mere knowledge of its existence reduces 616 Sinister to a blubbering mess and Irene Adler sees it as such a threat that she’s been actively trying to prevent its creation for decades. In Defenders: Beyond it was even an object of terror to the Beyonders (powerful godlike beings in their own right), with their universe destroying actions in Hickman's Avengers being ultimately vain attempts to prevent its arrival.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Appeared as a Dominion at the conclusion of Sins of Sinister, before being properly explained that he was a Sinister in Immortal X-Men #18.
• Evil Is Petty: Ascending to beyond godhood hasn't done anything to blunt its progenitor's natural pettiness. It analyzes Charles Xavier's entire life solely to find the right spots to psychologically attack him.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Being beyond space and time, this Sinister only needed to become a Dominion at all in order to be one in all of time, preventing any other Sinister from ascending as well.
• Genre Savvy: It knows that Dominions aren't invincible, aware that at least one of the ways to achieve the rank is by lobotomizing and highjacking an existing one, but it's well-versed in how narrow the list of ways to hurt them are and is fixated on guarding against such.
• A God Am I: In the Stasis+10 timeline, the Enigma Dominion devours another dominion and absorbs Omega Sentinel and Nimrod, while saying it is their new god.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Of the second Secret Wars, The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman), Defenders: Beyond and the Fantastic Four villain Molecule Man. All of them came about because of an elaborate plan by the Beyonders to nullify his threat.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: In at least two reset timelines; it hijacked Mother Righteous' attempt to exploit the White Hot Room and the Phoenix Force for ascension. It also overrode Stasis' attempt to upload his mind into the vacant processors of a Dominion he managed to mindwipe.
• Hijacked by Ganon: It accrued its knowledge and power by swooping in at the moment of the other Sinisters' ascension and seizing all the benefits for itself. X-Men: Forever confirms the capacity for this to happen was hardwired into each of them.
• Horrifying the Horror: Even the other Dominions out there describe Enigma as a threat.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Nathaniel Essex distilled, ascended, and pitiless, willing to use and abuse everyone whether they be human, mutant, or machine to attain and keep its existence. In the Stasis+10 timeline, it even tells Nimrod and Omega Sentinel that the "A.I. God" they thought they were helping to become a part of was human once just before it kills them.
• Meaningful Echo: His lines mirror Magneto's speech to the human ambassadors way back in House of X #1, about humanity having new gods now. Magneto was talking about mutants, but the Enigma Dominion spins the words to refer to itself.
• Multiversal Conqueror: Its plan is to assimilate every living thing in the universe, then move on to every other universe, but thanks to the machinations of the Beyonders it's currently stuck in Earth-616 and universes created by the Moira Engine.
• My Own Grandpa:
  • Due to existing outside of space and time, the full Dominion Enigma is able to steal the data from the Sinister clones' Dominionhood attempts in each timeline and feed it back to its original non Dominion AI past self, which in turn leads it to ascend into Dominionhood. Dominion Enigma is thus responsible for its own past self becoming a Dominion.
  • Rise of the Powers of X reveals it's the one who sent Omega Sentinel's consciousness back in time to possess the modern day Karima, thereby causing the situation that brought it into existence in the first place.
• Non-Linear Character: As a Dominion, they exist outside time and space, so while they may not have ascended yet from our point of view, it doesn't really matter once they've done it.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Two things are going for its opponents; it cannot perceive them if they are also outside time like it is, and even assured in its likewise position it's not absolutely certain meddling with its past before it comes into existence won't erase it, so it hesitates to act in that circumstance.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: It utilizes the ascension attempts of the other Sinisters, including Red Diamond timeline Sinister's sacrifice of one trillion Mutants and Stasis' lobotomizing another Dominion, as fuel for itself.
• Reality Warper: Sinister speculates it might have been making small nudges to reality to protect against any potential threats to itself, but that it won't go further for fear of risking its own existence.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: After being the Greater-Scope Villain of a major Avengers storyline and a The Defenders miniseries, he ends up debuting in a major X-Men storyline and being a major X-Men villain.
• The Singularity: What the Enigma is. Essex believed that the rise of all powerful machine intelligences above and beyond all reality was inevitable. Thus, he decided he might as well make himself the singularity.
• Sinister Surveillance: Puns aside it can perceive any moment in time from its position beyond it.
• Speak of the Devil: Destiny has been aware of its existence, but any time she's ever tried to tell anyone, it's become aware and prevented her.
• Stable Time Loop: Sinister guesses that this was the Dominion's sole limitation. It could not alter history too much since its ascension to Dominionhood involved sending data to its past self. He also guesses that the Dominion will no longer have to worry about messing up the past after its past self ascends.
• There Is Another: A second reveal on top of the reveal that there are other Sinister clones with different methods. Retroactively connected to Loki in Defenders: Beyond when they note that the multiversal threat isn't any of four suits being presented so they need to be on the lookout for "the fifth business".
• Wicked Cultured: Insane and selfish AI god-monster it may be, but Enigma still has a fondness for classical music. Destiny first gets a glimpse of it when it pops in to listen to a recital of the Enigma Variations, its celestial head nestled between various futures, whistling along with the music.

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