X-FACTOR #39: Ashes to Ashes

Cyclops confronts his lifelong arch-enemy Sinister!

Originally Published April 1989

Sinister has triumphed over the X-Men and X-Factor. After leading them back to their former home, the X-Mansion in Westchester, NY, he ambushed them with an explosion that blew the house to smithereens and left the whole lot of them toppled like bowling pins. His prize: Jean Grey, whom he intends to empty out like so much stale coffee from yesterday's carafe and refill with his own blend of medium-grind dark roast evil.

Standing in his path to victory is the last X-Man standing: Longshot, everyone's favourite towheaded alien boy-man stunt star. You know, the guy who throws knives at things.

Sinister is, not wrongly, unimpressed. As we all know, as does Sinister, Longshot's powers of luck derive from his uncorrupted goodie-good pure intentions, which have been compromised since his time in Inferno, which saw him acting selfishly, lustily, and might I say, quite brusque. 

Sinister zaps him down forthwith.

But Longshot manages to provide a distraction so that the other last X-Person standing, Beast, can fly in and give Sinister a punishing curb stomp.

This is still little more than a nuisance to Sinister, who is like, totally strong and powerful with psychic powers and pewpew blasts, but when Malice moves in for the kill on Cyclops, he revives and takes her out. Facing down his previously-unknown mortal enemy, Cyclops steadies himself and prepares to fire a devastating optic blast -- only to find that he can't get it done!

Happens to lots of guys

Instead, Cyke charges in for fisticuffs and he and Sinister exchange schoolyard taunts that are just a smidge out of character for the erudite and aloof Sinister and the straitlaced Scott Summers. Almost as if they're harkening back to some kind of shared childhood...

It's called revertigo

Rogue and Psylocke come-to next, with Psylocke providing her usual psychic whammy to buy Rogue some time to go for the gusto, flying in to absorb his powers an' mem'ries.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case with these boss-level big bads, Rogue can't quite handle the load and Sinister ends up riding around in her body.

As Sinister stands triumphant over Scott, the X-Factor Leader starts to remember flashes of this mysterious alabaster-skinned vampire guy appearing to him during his childhood at the orphanage. Sinister gloats that he had manipulated Scott for years, and talks about how he had created Madelyne and arranged for their coupling and was getting ready to snatch the baby when Jean returned and scuttled those plans.

Havok tries to interject by way of frying Sinister with his deadly plasma blasts, but Sin shrugs him off and has Polaris wrap him in some metal debris -- he's got a monologue to get through and won't have Havok interrupting. The heroes continue to prove ineffectual as Polaris toys with them -- to the extent of using Colossus as a big metal puppet -- while Sinister repeatedly commands her to kill them, but she keeps procrastinating while he turns his attention to more exposition, like telling the story of how he invented Scott's rad ruby quartz specs that hold back his optic blasts.

Yessiree, they sure did have  some good times back then, when Sinister was secretly grooming Scott for a place in his burgeoning evil empire and masterplan while mentally erasing all knowledge of his existence from the youngster, but things didn't last and Sinister lost Scott to Professor Xavier. Bummer.

And on, and on, and on he goes, like a veritable Ted Mosby 2030, giving the X-Men time to mount a big psychic Zoom call wherein they coordinate a plan of attack.

It begins with Archangel unloading his paralyzing blades not at Sinister, but at Malice to take her out of the fight...

Which provides an opening for the X-Men to dogpile on Sinister...

During which Storm has a chance to sweep Jean away on a wind.

Wolverine begins to disentangle Havok, but is attacked by Sabretooth. Unfortunately, since this is not Sabretooth's first appearance against the X-Men, he has been downgraded to less than useless, and is completely dismantled by Wolverine between panels.

With Havok freed, he turns his attention to his brother. After all, since Havok was Madelyne's self-appointed protector as the Goblin Prince, he's still carrying that torch and his here to call Cyclops out for his overall behavior these past however-many years.

Of course as we all know, while Havok's plasma blasts are usually instant death, because of his and Scott's shared DNA, the effect of their energy-based powers are not destructive or injurious at all to each other. They barely even tickle. In fact they have a rejuvenating, empowering effect. Havok might as well be blasting his brother with a hot tub water jet.

The rest of the heroes focus their energies on Sinister, but hanging on the sideline of the battle is Longshot -- you know, the guy who was poised to look like a big hero when this all started. At Dazzler's urging, he gets in the game, figuring he couldn't actually hurt their plight by tossing a few knives at the bad guy. It's Longshot's time to shine!

Except somehow it leads to an unforced error and Jean winds up back in Sinister's arms.

Shit, that was the opposite of what we wanted!

Also, gross

Or was it? Havok continues to goad Cyclops until at long last he can stands it no more...

That's right, the rage-fueled blast that Cyclops had tried to aim at Havok -- overclocked by Alex's powers -- found its way to Sinister instead, a sly workaround for the "You can't use your powers on me" conditioning Sinister had worked into Scott's psyche. So say goodbye to Sinister, that is it for that guy. He is as dead as it gets. Homeboy is bones.

With Malice having disappeared from the fight scene, the heroes are left in the afterglow of the battle to say a tense but farewell, acknowledging that they have different parts to play in realizing Xavier's dream. 

With those parting words, the X-Men head back through they Gateway Hole to Australia, while the X-Factories are left to clean up the rubble that once was their school and ponder what's next.

Anyone for Brunch?

Further Thoughts:

Inferno is an epic, grandiose event that seems to be the culmination of nearly a decade worth of stories, dating back to Jean's initial transformation into Phoenix and her death on the moon, Scott's marrying of Madelyne Pryor, the formation of X-Factor and Jean's return there, the Mutant Massacre, and even some of the Limbo stuff that is mostly going on in New Mutants. Since these events center on the mutant A-Couple of Scott and Jean, who are on X-Factor, our X-Men have more of a supporting role, largely antagonizing the O5 throughout the story, and then finally teaming up to help take down the Scott-and-Jean-centric villain Sinister. 

The biggest key role filled by an X-Man here is Havok, who uses his unique position as Scott's brother to unlock the destructive power within him and seal Sinister's fate once and for all. I actually quite like that -- very few superheroes have siblings, and specifically siblings who are also superheroes, so stories that rely on this dynamic, including the unique aspect of Havok being more attached to Scott's dear departed ex Madelyne, are quite cool to me. As a younger brother myself, I definitely get the urge to unload my deadly plasma blasts on my older siblings from time to time (knowing that, because we share genetic material, it can't actually hurt them.)

Other than that, the story does find room for the X-Men. Previous issues explored Wolverine's love for Jean, and the longstanding dislike between him and now-Archangel. Longshot has a mini-arc here about overcoming his self-doubt. The X-Men are in the story, it's just not really about them.

A lot of the commentary I've received from you, dear readers, about Inferno is that it's a bit chaotic and messy. This is absolutely true but I actually enjoy the car crash nature of it, piling the seemingly disparate threats of Sinister and the Marauders, and the Limbo Horde, all on top of one another. These X-People live very busy lives and there's no reason these two calamities wouldn't come to a head simultaneously, and in fact as we saw in the initial issues they were very specifically enacted both at once, as Madelyne was only able to seek out Sinister due to the empowerment she received from N'astirh. And once that ball was rolling there was no reason to put off the confrontation with Sinister. Very few stories in comics history have played out this way, and it's down to the specific nature of Chris Claremont's "gardening" style of writing. Over his 14 years at the helm of this property, he's planted the seeds for a dozen potential storylines, why not harvest half of them all at once?

It's refreshing -- these days comic characters mostly exist on a cycle of big events with very specifically delineated beginnings and ends. But as written by Claremont in the 80s, the X-Men seemed to be living a simulacrum of organic lives in real time, where things were constantly happening.

So let's turn our attention to Sinister himself, the final big boss guy of Inferno. Considering how little we've seen of him prior to this, it's hard to get a handle on him. He carries himself with all the trappings of your traditional Super Secret Mega Villain, some of which seem to be cranked to the Nth degree, with his bizarre appearance, undefined powers and cultured mannerisms. We know that the keys to his plan are Scott and Jean, specifically their genetics, which he wants to smoosh together. Out of that, he got little baby Nathan, but exactly what we wanted the kid for, it's never made clear. We now know that he's been manipulating Scott forever, and that he has a particular aversion to Scott's deadly optic blasts.

He's depicted as someone who plays the long game, which in comics is usually a cover for "we came up with this whole backstory and we need a reason why he never appeared before now." That said, his supposed schemes do fit nicely with what we do know about Madelyne and Scott.

So he's great and powerful and a brainiac and a schemer. Whenever a character like this is drawn into a fistfight at the end of a big comic it feels a little obligatory, but you can't blame Sinister for engaging since he thinks he holds the trump cards, in his rewiring of Scott's powers and his own super-nuh-uh abilities. He also falls prey to some of those classic supervillain blunders, and it's more than a little comical how many times he orders Malice to murder the X-Men, and she just doesn't, while he monologues on and on about his secret plan to Scott and the reader. It's not great to see, but this is a comic after all, and the final resolution, using Alex to browbeat Scott into overcoming this, was pretty good and a strong character payoff for Cyke who has been one of the key focal points of Inferno, being that it's largely about is past and his lovelife.

There's a bit in this issue where Cyclops and Sinister exchange schoolyard taunts which, if you have no context for it, pings as extraordinarily weird. The original nature of Sinister -- which is later explored in Classic X-Men backup stories at the end of 1989 -- is that he was another child at Scott's orphanage, who had the psychic ability to project the image of Sinister you see here. Therefore, the Sinister we see here is all an act, which he momentarily drops when confronted by Cyclops. The real Sinister -- Nathaniel -- may even be in a sort of arrested development, unable to move on past his orphanage days. This is a little weird to reconcile with some of the things we see in this story, like Sinister supposedly running the orphanage and doing his experiments there, but that's a classic comics rabbit-hole. After Claremont's tenure ends and the character is brought back, this aspect is never revisited and a different backstory is conceived for Sinister, leaving these two panels as just a really weird blip.