Immortal X-Men Using The Past To Divine The Future (XSpoilers)

Today’s Immortal X-Men #8 takes a break from looking into the future of the X-Men after Judgment Day and the upcoming Sins Of Sinister stories set ten, one hundred and one thousand years from now (many details revealed this weekend at Thought Bubble’s X-Men panel and more to come). Instead, it’s a jump to Mystique and Destiny, Raven Darkholme and Irene Adler’s past. We get to see a World War II period that is somehow a cross between Robert Oppenheimer‘s Manhattan Project of the USA that created the atomic bomb, and Josef Mengele‘s human experiments of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

With Destiny, as is her role, playing the long game. There’s a reason she was always the supervillain. What really divides her from Sinister? More of a sense of altruism, but at the expense of petty lives in the modern day, aside from her own and Raven’s? Is she Marvel’s Ozymandias, and is her empire equally destined to fail?

But we also see them in the century before that, living as the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories. Of course, it’s easy to make “deductions” when you can see everyone’s past, present and futures all coming at one. The heroin probably helps too…

With Nathaniel Essex, Mister Sinister playing out the part of other Victorian genre tropes, including both Bram Stoker‘s Dracula…

…. but also a favourite of Robert Louis Stevenson from the same period, given both his paleness…

And his speed. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Man, these Victorian pulp writers, they really didn’t have an original idea in their head, did they? To a man, it seems they were all copying from Kieron Gillen and Michele Bandini.

….as well as a League Of Extraordinary Charleses.

Obviously, Professor X joins the crew. And these days, everyone knows that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, even if the Differential Engine that Charles Babbage designed for her programmes to run on was never built. However, this does show Sinister in his earliest form, as a futurist of the highest magnitude, even beyond Destiny’s mutant power, defining the Powers Of X timelines in which the Earth is attacked by machine alien races, and the battle is not just between human and mutant but with machines, sending their own agents through time to try and cut Krakoa off at birth… in a reverse Days Of Future Past.

Will the upcoming Sins Of Sinister seek to reverse that as well? Will his many Moiras be put to good use?

IMMORTAL X-MEN #8
MARVEL COMICS
SEP221011
(W) Kieron Gillen (A) Michele Bandini (CA) Mark Brooks
A STUDY IN CERULEAN! Lawks! What’s going on in foggy old London town in the year of our lord 1895? Well, it’s only Sherlock Holmes, Mystique and Destiny on the tracks of a murderer and uncovering a truth that’s significantly more sinister… RATED T+In Shops: Nov 16, 2022 SRP: $3.99