I wasn’t regularly reading Marvel’s line of X-books in the
late eighties. I did purchase secondhand issues, so I was vaguely aware of the
debut of two major X-villains, “Apocalypse” in Louise Simonson’s X-FACTOR and
“Mister Sinister” in Chris Claremont’s X-MEN. But few such developments had any
personal resonance for me once I was no longer reading with a sense of total
involvement. I even scoffed at the latter villain, since his design seemed
derivative of the X-Man Colossus. Eventually I came to understand that Sinister was some
sort of clone-maker, which became significant in the long and winding
“Madeleine Pryor saga," and that Apocalypse was an immortal badass dedicated to
“the survival of the fittest.” Most of the stories collected in the TPB “X-MEN:
THE RISE OF APOCALYPSE” didn’t make me any more invested in the two villains.
The one exception, though, was the mini-series THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS
AND PHOENIX, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by John Paul Leon and
Klaus Janson. The four issues possess no over-arcing story-title, so I’ve
chosen one of the intertitles to designate the whole narrative: issue #2’s “The
Origin of a Species.” The cover-copy promises the reader a more specific
origin—that of Mister Sinister—while the cover itself shows the figure of
Apocalypse, Sinister’s sometime partner-in-evil, looming in the background.
Origin-tales require their authors to turn back time’s
winged arrow figuratively, but in “Species” the time-shift is literal. With the
help of your basic “time lord intervention,” X-heroes Cyclops and Phoenix are
charged with journeying back to 19th-century England to prevent the
immortal Apocalypse from wreaking havoc in that timeframe. The heroes are
dropped Terminator-style (i.e., buck naked) into 1859 London—which date
Milligan clearly chose because it was the year in which Charles Darwin
published ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. It’s also a time-period when Marvel-Earth
harbored no mutants except Apocalypse, who was spawned in ancient Egypt. In
effect Cyclops and Phoenix have entered a “terra incognita” for their kind, a
singular era in which the scientific idea of mutation was first codified—as
well as one in which the conflicts between humanity and inhumanity took on new
dimensions.
Coincident with the arrival of the heroes, Apocalypse awakens
from hibernating in a time-capsule beneath the sewers of London, without much
detail about when and why he chose that site for his big sleep. Upon awakening,
the villain doesn’t seem to have any particular big scheme in mind, though as
always, he’s raring to unleash the dogs of war upon humanity as part of his
personal eugenics program. But by dumb luck he happens to learn the name of a
scientist named Essex—and thereby hangs the story of the first collaboration of
Apocalypse and Sinister.
The reader meets Nathaniel Essex and his wife Rebecca before
either Apocalypse or the heroes. Following a two-page teaser which takes place
in “real time,” Milligan and Leon send us back one extra month, to show us the
background of the Man Who Will Be Sinister. Essex, a prominent English
biologist, is seen at his estate reading the recently published Darwinian
magnum opus. He complains to Rebecca—who is pregnant with the couple’s second
child—that Darwin is “still shackled by too many moral constraints.” Rebecca, a
mother-to-be who’s already lost their previous child to illness, defends the
need for morals to structure society. But Essex, despite never having seen a
super-powered mutant in his life, intuits that “some humans might, in time,
evolve into gods,” and so he has no use for anything reminiscent of a Christian
god and his restrictions.
Later, Essex unveils his radical theories to a conference of
the British Royal Society, which the celebrated Darwin himself also attends.
The obsessed scientist confirms the influence of “incremental changes” upon the
flow of life, but also argues for the position we now call “saltation theory,” which
allows for sudden, rapid transformations as well. To illustrate his almost
religious conviction, Essex imitates one aspect of the Frankenstein
mythos—constructing a hybrid organism out of corpses, apparently “mutated” by
the addition of angel-like wings—though he stops short of the Full Victor,
since the corpse-construct is no more alive than any other medical cadaver. The
gathered scientists are revolted by this mix-and-match approach to biology, and
Darwin opines that Essex has been addled by the loss of his son, broadly
implying that the new theory is compensation for that loss.
Essex’s reaction to this rejection is precisely that of
Frankenstein: he buries himself in experimentation on unfortunate “freaks”
taken prisoner by a local band of cutpurses, “the Marauders” (figurative
ancestors of a similar group of henchmen Sinister will use in the 20th
century). Rebecca sees her husband more and more consumed by his inhuman
crusade, and by the end of this jaunt into “one month ago,” she intuits that he
may even have defiled the grave of their first son for his experiments. This is
the resolution of the two-page teaser I mentioned earlier, wherein pregnant
Rebecca is seen feverishly digging up her first child’s grave—and finding an
empty coffin. A reader might reasonably expect that Essex exhumed the corpse to
revive it, but Essex doesn’t do resurrections, and Milligan doesn’t ever say
what the scientist did with the boy’s remains—though the fact that the kid was
named “Adam” brings in yet more Shelleyan overtones.
Around this same time, Apocalypse wales up and just happens
to question one of Essex’s Marauder-henchmen, which makes the villain eager to
talk with the scientist. Cyclops and Phoenix not only arrive naked, they also
get separated into very different venues. Cyclops manifests in the depths of
the sewers from which the Marauders cull their deformed quarry, and, despite an
early contretemps, he ends up making allies of London’s quasi-Morlocks. Phoenix
gets to make a more celestial descent, crashing through the roof of Westminster
Abbey during services. Leon and Janson (whose inks here are some of his best
work ever) get quite a bit of visual mileage out of the contrast between the
“upper” and “lower” worlds, which contrast is of course something Milligan
exploits throughout the SPECIES script.
Milligan explicitly refers to the relationship between Essex
and Apocalypse as a “Faustian bargain,” but like Faust, Essex hasn’t completely
given himself over to evil. Essex does put Apocalypse (deftly wearing a human
disguise) in contact with a society of corrupt aristocrats whom the mutant can
manipulate, and these sordid rich guys are also an X-reference, for they make
up the 19th century Hellfire Club—albeit long before it was taken
over by the full-time villainous club-members who make life difficult for the
X-heroes in the 20th century.
When Cyclops and Phoenix finally encounter Essex, they
recognize him as the man who caused them endless suffering with his cloning
science, and Cyclops is mightily tempted to play “kill baby Hitler,” even
though Essex has not yet become Mister Sinister. Apocalypse fights with the duo
and spirits away Cyclops, after which he binds the hero and makes him listen to
screeds like, “You cannot combat strength with goodness and loyalty, only with
greater strength.” Meanwhile, Essex regains a little of his humanity by
succoring Phoenix when she’s injured. However, it’s too late for the Man of
Science. Rebecca dies in childbirth, taking her second child with her, and
leaves her husband with his new identity, that of being entirely “sinister.”
Apocalypse continues his plot to make Earth into a “modern
Golgotha” (by which one assumes he means a “hill of skulls,” not the site of a
transcendent savior). Phoenix tries to rescue Cyclops, but the villain subdues
both crusaders. Apocalypse then confers super-villain status upon Essex, so
that he becomes “forever branded” as Mister Sinister. However, the machinations
of the high and mighty are laid low when some of Cyclops’ lowlife-allies venture
into Apocalypse’s lair and free the X-heroes. By that time Apocalypse is off to
foster the, uh, apocalypse. Phoenix manages to restrain Cyclops from killing
the nascent super-villain Sinister, and to some extent Sinister responds by
telling the heroes where they can find Apocalypse. The two of them prevent
Apocalypse from one of his dastardly deeds, but the time-spell starts wearing
off, drawing them back to their own era. Apocalypse, his plans foiled by both
Sinister and the X-Men, returns to his hibernation chamber, the better to set
up continuity with whatever Marvel writers had him do next.
In my review of GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, I noted that only
rarely had X-writers managed to use the implicit themes of the X-concept to
best effect. “Origin of a Species” can take its place as one of the few times
an author managed to use those themes to meditate on the divided nature of
humanity. There are no super-powered mutants, but our myths of exaltation and
damnation are as real as the proverbial Berkleyan stone. “Species” concludes in
1882, as the mutated Essex attends the funeral of his former colleague Charles
Darwin. The story ends with the villain reaffirming his commitment to inhuman
experimentation—and yet, the last image is that of a music box that once
belonged to Essex’s wife. Sinister discards the trinket, trying to put the past
behind him. But the “camera’s” focus on the box, uttering its bell-like sounds,
may be sounding the toll for the eventual overturning of his evil devotions—to
the extent, that is, that any comic-book super-fiend’s destiny can ever come to
an end.
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