The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix

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The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix is a four issue miniseries published by Marvel Comics in 1996. Written by Peter Milligan with art by John Paul Leon, it tells the origin story of the X-Men villain, Mister Sinister. It is also the sequel to the 1994 miniseries The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix.

[edit] Plot

As in The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, the series begins with Cyclops and Jean Grey being shunted through time. This time, however, they are brought back to England in the year 1859. Most of the series focuses on the man who would become the villain Mister Sinister, Nathaniel Essex.

Nathaniel Essex was a 19th-century scientist in Victorian England obsessed with Darwin's theory of evolution, though he felt Darwin and his contemporaries were shackled by too many moral constraints.

While pursuing his own research in 1859, he discovered that humanity was undergoing increasing mutation, due to what he called "Essex Factors" in the human genome. His theories were mocked, making him bitter; his son's death (at the age of four from numerous birth defects, including crooked bones & hemophilia) drove him deeper into his work. He approached many groups in search of funding, including the Hellfire Club, though all turned him down. He hired a group of thugs, which he named Marauders, to kidnap people off the streets of London so he could perform experiments on them (it should be noted that Sinister would later assemble a group of supervillains over a hundred years later to do his dirty work that he also named the Marauders). He even went so far as to dig up his dead son and experimented on him.

During this time, Essex came into contact with Apocalypse (whom the Marauders had stumbled upon & awoke), accidentally educating the ancient mutant about the facts surrounding his nature. The two subsequently formed an alliance, during which Apocalypse used his advanced technology to activate dormant mutant traits within Nathaniel. With his new abilities and dispassionate outlook, Essex took a new name - Sinister, the last word his wife spoke to him as she died, after discovering the horrors he’d been engaged in (the stress also caused her to miscarry their unnamed child).

During his "uplifting," a time-traveling Cyclops & Jean Grey interrupted the procedure -- Cyclops’ optic blast struck Essex soon after he emerged from the machines, damaging his "newborn" form. Cyclops & Jean also freed many of Sinister’s captives, two of which (a man named Oscar Stamp and an apparently mute boy named Daniel) traveled to America and took the name Summers.

Apocalypse's first command was to create a plague to destroy the weak of the world, but Sinister would not do it - he had clarity of purpose, and cruelty for its own sake was not part of it. The plague Sinister created attacked only Apocalypse, driving him into hibernation.

[edit] Collected editions

A trade paperback was produced some time after the miniseries finished publication collecting it into one volume (ISBN 0-7851-0556-5). However, it was produced during a period of economic decline for Marvel, and before trades had reached the popularity they would a few years later, and has thus been left out of print.