WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Powers of X #1, by Jonathan Hickman, R.B. Silva, Adriano di Benedetto, Marte Gracia, VC's Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller, on sale now.
Mister Sinister has long been one of Marvel's most notorious villains, mostly linked with wars on the X-Men, upon whom he's repeatedly attempted to genetically experiment. In the past, Sinister has deployed armies such as the Marauders and the Nasty Boys to help him, but as Powers of X #1 shows, while those squads were relatively easy to defeat, his new legion is one of the deadliest ever created and changes the future of the world for the worse.
When the setting jumps forward 100 years into the future from the founding of the mutant haven of Krakoa, it's nothing short of post-apocalyptic. There's a Man-Machine Supremacy War, with Nimrod the Lesser and his army trying to eliminate a mutant population that's dwindled to a few thousand. We see resistance fighters -- Rasputin, Cylobel and Cardinal -- trying to gather data for Krakoa, and it's at that point writer Jonathan Hickman reveals what Sinister was up to.
He initially led the mutant breeding program in the pits of Mars, creating soldiers called the Chimera to send to the frontlines for Krakoa against Nimrod's robots. He spliced and diced, making three generations as he tried to perfect the formula for mutants like Rasputin, who possesses the genes of Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Unus and Quintin Quiree, and can wield Magik's Soulsword. These are Super-Mutants, similar to the Super-Skrull, although the fourth generation possessed a defect that would cause them to turn and kill even more of mutantkind.
They'd then kill themselves, which paved the way for Krakoa and the Cardinals (mutants who weren't as aggressive) to fall as well. Even Sinister's pits were destroyed, which allowed Nimrod to become the Greater, and for his Supremacy to become the Ascendancy. But to complete the victory, the remaining rebels had to be killed off. However, with mutants like Rasputin around, Nimrod had a challenge ahead.
Sinister's Chimera, or the survivors, are lethal warriors, after all, more than teams like the New Mutants or X-Force. They were bred for war and conditioned to destroy empires, which is why when they turned on their own kind, there was no stopping them. These mutants had too many powers mashed up, so after taking out their own, and once they committed suicide, it paved the way for Nimrod to rule the world with his Sentinels.
Sadly, it's revealed Sinister engineered the failure in the program himself as he wanted to bring mutants down. The reason's not revealed but it could be he didn't want to work under Xavier and Co. anymore, but for him to turn his most dangerous warriors -- beings he created in the lab called Hounds, aka the elite Chimera -- against their species and themselves, one has to wonder what his endgame really was.
They swept through their people like a virus, doing Nimrod's dirty work, and then when Sinister defected, he was murdered in turn because the machines just couldn't trust someone so disloyal. So whatever fallout he had with Nimrod died in that debacle, leaving fans confused as to why he'd betray his own kind and have his trump card of an army also eliminate themselves from the equation.
Only time will tell, because as it stands, there's a lot of mystery surrounding Sinister's production line. Hopefully some flashbacks will deliver answers straight from the horse's mouth as we attempt to figure out why he turned into this traitor.
House of X #2 goes on sale Aug. 7.