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How sinfully original of you, Mr. B.C.

Carey is very good at strong character interactions and doing satisfying things with characters' voices.

Way is very good at shoehorning stereotypical chracters into his plodding, contrived stories.

I'm going to just call all the good stuff Carey's and all the bad stuff Way's.

To be fair, regarding Miss Sinister, all X-villians are lame.

wow, that is really bad. i'm pretty sure we're going to find out eventually that it was wolverine that told charles xavier to originally start his dream and recruit 5 mutants into a team called the x-men, with the promise that he'd join the team himself years down the line.

We’re equals now - okay, I’ll still treat you like my dad, but I’ll SAY that we’re equals a lot - and soon I might convince myself that it’s true!

AKA "The Marv Wolfman Nightwing Maturation Process"

"Slightly not recommended" has to be one of the best closing lines to a review I've ever read. I wish I'd thought of that.

You said it best with that (sigh) after "newly revealed secret". We've had far to many of these stories written in between the lines, and they just don't deliver the goods. From a story-telling perspective, they're too constrained by the original and thus devoid of drama because it's all revelation without danger - we know who survives. If continuity's your thing, there's the danger of a retcon spoiling things.

Miss Sinister... *shudders*

Is this the first we've seen/heard of Miss Sinisiter? Is there an explanation given as to why Sinister is a she now instead of a he?

Sure, but in order to make any sense of it, I suggest reading the Nicieza Gambit series from the late 90s/early 00s first. Even though it's never been collected and probably never will be.

... what? At least it's a pretty good book... for a Gambit book.

It is. Good art. Fun supporting cast and...

Oh nevermind.

Is this the first we’ve seen/heard of Miss Sinisiter? Is there an explanation given as to why Sinister is a she now instead of a he?

She first popped up in a recent issue of X-Men: Legacy.

Sinister had fail-safes put into place in case he died, but Sebastian Shaw also had some fail-safes involving clones, so he had a female clone of Sinister up and raring to go when Sinister died awhile back.

Brian,

I thought that it was that his power actually ended up in Black Womb's body there due to Xavier beating back the possession of his body and it wasn't actually Essex but her in the driver's seat instead. Sort of a half victory for Xavier+Gambit?

Or did I totally misread that? Because I'm not reading it again anytime soon.

Yeah, it's a separate personality.

I would love to see the return of a little concept called " coincidence " to superhero universes. I liked it better when Xavier was looking for new recruits to rescue the original X-Men from Krakoa and Wolverine happened to be among them, as opposed to it being due to yet another dark secret from the X-Men's past.

That's the problem with the whole M-Day fiasco. Depowering just about all of the mutants takes the core focus of the entire line away, and know the only way you can tell a "compelling" story with them is by dredging up "Secret Files" from the past. The current stories just feel like they are wheel spinning until a future editor comes along and decides to bring the mutant community back. Because really, that's what the best X-Men stories were about, the mutant COMMUNITY and there place in the world. Now there's no community to examine.

I liked it better when Xavier was looking for new recruits to rescue the original X-Men from Krakoa and Wolverine happened to be among them, as opposed to it being due to yet another dark secret from the X-Men’s past.

Yeah, wasn't awkward enough when Claremont and Byrne retconned Wolverine's way of joining the X-men - the Canadian military seemed happy enough with him just leaving in Giant Size #1, and yet Alpha Flight come to fght to get him back later on - now we have to go back and totally change it...

Instead of trying to re-write already great stories, why not go and write new great stories?

Also, how can something that sounds like such a wank just from the premise, be only 'slightly not recommended'?
The review seems to be pointing out how utterly shit this was from the get go, cliche ridden throughout, then right at the end it's only 'slightly' not recommended, as opposed to the 'run away!' the rest of the review seemed to be saying.

Wolverine and Xavier's interactions make up a large chunk of the issue, and they're well-written.

And the art is pretty good.

So it's not an awful comic book.

Slightly not recommened is pretty scathing for Brian.

Well, and what Brian actually said there, I guess.

Doesn't anyone else just ignore this sort of thing because it can all just be really easily retconned anyway? Like, even if they stay with it for ahwile, I am sure that someday some one will just wall off this little back alley with a really offhanded explanation/ignoring (ignoral?).

Like, even if they stay with it for ahwile, I am sure that someday some one will just wall off this little back alley with a really offhanded explanation/ignoring (ignoral?).

You mean once they realise Draken isn't going to be the character find of the decade that they want him to be?
They'll just kill him off and never mention all this stuff that was going to change the way we saw everything, ever again.
Like with Adam-X.

"Instead of trying to re-write already great stories, why not go and write new great stories?"

I am in total agreement with this statement. I'll even add that i wish creators would tell stories that move forward as oposed to shoehorning stories into the past. (using an example from the X-Men, when Magneto was the teacher to the New Mutants and we later found out that was because Moira McTaggert played god with Magneto's psyche. That was a retcon that made something that didn't make since (the X-Men's greatest enemy becomes their headmaster.) and made it make a little more since.

But this and Deadly Genesis are examples of bad retcons.

"Like with Adam-X."

You and I read a lot of the same bad X-comics as kids, I seem to remember. Remember when we were supposed to think that he was the Third Summers Brother?

You and I read a lot of the same bad X-comics as kids, I seem to remember. Remember when we were supposed to think that he was the Third Summers Brother?

That was just before my time - Nicieza was the only one bringing him up every now and again by the time I was in, and it was sad and confusing... Letters at the time had me convinced it was Gambit, because at that point they were building a friendship between he and Cyclops, which also disappeared.
The closest I got at the time to seeing Adam-X be close to a summers brother was a (two-part?) story about Adam and cyclops' grandfather, which I only learnt years later was meant to be hinting towards that - at the time it just confused the shit out of me - I was new to comics, and hadn't quite realised that all those sub-plots were getting made up without tight plans for it all to work together.

You'd think that after the original Daken story, they'd roll over, look at the character in hangover-style horror, and never, ever, ever mention him again.

Who the hell has a hard-on for this character? Giving Wolverine kids is fine; he probably has a few. But 1) we already have him more or less raising his young clone right now, and 2) Daken is a 1990s Dark Horse refugee.

There are a bunch of X-Men comics coming out right now that appeal solely to diehard fans who were reading the X-books during their commercial peak of the 80s-90s. The rest of us can safely ignore these books because they won't make any sense and they're retreads anyway. Who even knew Wolverine HAD a son?! Only the people who were already buying these books.

Comixkid2099 said: "I am in total agreement with this statement. I’ll even add that i wish creators would tell stories that move forward as oposed to shoehorning stories into the past. (using an example from the X-Men, when Magneto was the teacher to the New Mutants and we later found out that was because Moira McTaggert played god with Magneto’s psyche. That was a retcon that made something that didn’t make since (the X-Men’s greatest enemy becomes their headmaster.) and made it make a little more since."

It's interesting how different people take different stories. For me, the Moira-made-Magneto-good-for-a-while retcon was awful. Reading it, I felt completely let down, because Magneto coming over to try the X-Men's way of doing things had been a natural development over a long time, from around Uncanny X-Men #150, when he almost killed Kitty Pryde, and then was horrified by what he'd become, through the first Secret War, where he didn't join the villains, and later even helped the heroes, to Uncanny X-Men #200, where he really reformed. Over the course of New Mutants #30-50, he was shown really trying to reach out to the kids and help them, and there was some real character development going on. I felt that the retcon just threw all of that development away; I understood that there was a feeling that Magneto was needed as the big X-Men villain again, but I thought there were better ways to achieve it.

Everyone's different, of course, and so what I remember being a huge let-down, others remember as a classic, a moment when everything got back on track.

I think you're being overly hard on Mr. Sinister. The name is a bit crap, but this is comic book land and the JLA's been a fighting a guy named Desparo since the sixties. And is "Crazy scientist who wants to advance the mutant line through genetics" really a worse high concept than "Crazy would-be dictator who wants to be superhardcore so everyone is forced to evolve?" Hell, at least he's not bent on revenge or seeking super ultimate power.

Oh, but Miss Sinister is derivative crap.