FIRST STORY: "A Sinister Heart" (40 pages)  Genesis kidnaps Faye Livingstone, Mr Sinister's lover from the 1930s, in an unsuccessful attempt to break him.  Faye dies in his arms, Sinister appears unmoved, and Genesis gives up and goes home.

What you need to know:
From this point on, the Annuals have the year in the title rather than being sequentially numbered.  (This would have been Annual #4.)

This is one of the first stories to give any details about the early life of Mr Sinister, who turns out to have been a Hollywood society figure during the 1930s.  At this point, Sinister's origin story as a Victorian scientist had not yet been established; that would happen in 1996, with the Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix miniseries.  (Co-artist John Paul Leon also worked on that book, so Marvel must have been impressed with his work here.)

1930s Sinister is no nicer than the preset day one.  His hobbies include finding nice young girls, abducting them, and doing horrible things to them in an attempt to exploit their DNA.  One such girl is Faye Livingstone, but Sinister genuinely loves her.  We know that he loves her because he doesn't do any horrid experiments to her until she blunders into his lab.  At which point he tortures her for months on end, and then kicks her out the door.  Normally he'd have chucked her in the cells straight away and killed her at the end, so you can tell that he's smitten.  It's also suggested that this is Sinister's attempt to reveal his true self to her.  His true self just happens to be thoroughly unpleasant.

Genesis and his Dark Riders turn up to advance the plot.  Genesis is Cable's adoptive son from a future timeline, and beyond that, it's really not worth worrying about.  Nominally, Genesis' motivation here is that he wants to get rid of Sinister, because Sinister was an obstacle to Apocalypse in his timeline, and Genesis wants to prove that he can do what Apocalypse couldn't.  It's all a bit weak.  (In a nice touch, Sinister regards Genesis as a bit of an irrelevance, because he's not biologically related to the rest of the Summers family.)

Comments:
During the mid-1990s it was common to find issues drawn by two or more artists with different styles, seemingly with the pages doled out at random.  This is one such issue, but it must deserve some kind of award for featuring the two most ludicrously incompatible artists imaginable.  Yes, this really is a comic pencilled by Terry Dodson and John Paul Leon.  The mind boggles.  I suspect the original plan might have been for Leon to do the flashbacks and Dodson to do the main story, which might have worked.  But that's not how the pages end up, and the result clashes horrendously.  It's a shame, because individually, the art's quite good - Leon's costume for 1930s Sinister is wonderful.

It's a very odd story.  The central idea of Sinister's relationship with Faye Livingstone is intriguing, and their weird, Stockholm Syndrome love scene is quite uncomfortable.  Sinister clearly does love her, but that doesn't stop him chucking her in a cell and torturing her.  Comics Code requirements prevent the writers being too explicit, but it's strongly implied that Sinister was raping her in an attempt to father genetically desirable offspring.  ("He used me, manipulated me, in every way possible.")  It's really quite a nasty and unsettling story.

That's the central idea - shame about the rest of the plot.  Genesis is a non-character with a lame plan to make Sinister upset, and the X-Men seem to be shoehorned into the story on the grounds that it's their annual.  There's also a saccharine "power of love" moral at the end.  A very mixed issue, but at least there's a good concept there.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Archangel (last behind the scenes in DC vs Marvel #4; next in Uncanny X-Men #325, then in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #8, then in flashback in the second story in this issue)
The Beast (last behind the scenes in DC vs Marvel #4; next in Avengers: The Crossing, then in Uncanny X-Men #325-326, then in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #8, then in Wolverine vol 2 #93, then in Exiles vs X-Men #0, then in X-Men/ClanDestine #1, then in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #9, then behind the scenes in Excalibur vol 1 #93, then in Spider-Man Team-Up #1, then in Age of Innocence, then in Uncanny X-Men #328, then in Sabretooth: In The Red Zone, then in X-Force vol 1 #51, then in X-Men vol 2 #48)
Cyclops (last behind the scenes in DC vs Marvel #4; next in Uncanny X-Men #325, then in X-Factor vol 1 #115, then in X-Men/ ClanDestine #1, then in Spider-Man Team-Up #1, then in Uncanny X-Men #328, then in Sabretooth: In The Red Zone, then in X-Men vol 2 #48)
Phoenix III (last behind the scenes in DC vs Marvel #4; next in Uncanny X-Men #325, then in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #8, then in Exiles vs X-Men #0, then in X-Men/ClanDestine #1, then in X-Men vol 2 #46)

VILLAINS
Mr Sinister (between X-Men vol 2 #39 and Uncanny X-Men #325; also in flashback following X-Men: The Hellfire Club #3 and preceding the flashback in Uncanny X-Men #241)
Genesis (last behind the scenes in Cable #23; next behind the scenes in Wolverine vol 2 #93)
The Dark Riders: Deadbolt, Gauntlet, Harddrive, Hurricane, Lifeforce and Spyne (all last in Cable #19 except Hurricane, who was last in Cable #18; all next in Wolverine vol 2 #93 except Deadbolt and Gauntlet, who appear next in Wolverine vol 2 #95)

OTHER CHARACTER
Faye Livingstone (first appearance; dies; also in flashback preceding this story)

SECOND STORY: "Words" (16 pages)  Psylocke writes to her brother Brian about her relationship with Archangel.

What you need to know:
Betsy and Warren officially become a couple, as opposed to just having an obvious mutual attraction.

Comments:
Betsy and Warren talk about their feelings.  For e-e-e-e-ver.  Well, okay, for eleven pages out of sixteen.  Basically, it boils down to them pointing out that other X-Men relationships haven't gone so well, but deciding to go for it anyway, because they're mature and have their eyes open.  It reads like writer Scott Lobdell is just getting the characters to recite some thoughts he's had about their personalities.  And they'd have been quite interesting, had they been dramatised, but instead it's a whole story of stuff like this:

"The funny thing was, reaching out to you made me feel good.  I realized helping you regain your soul was starting me down the road to reclaiming mine.  I discovered how much we had in common.  All my loneliness, my despair, the isolation that was defining me - I saw that in you, too.  And suddenly, all I wanted was to make your pain go away."

And it goes on like that.  On and on.

Continuing the theme of unusual art, this story is pencilled by the extremely obscure Ramon Bernardo (who I know almost nothing about, save that he did a handful of stories for Marvel in the mid 1990s), and inked by the legendary P Craig Russell.  It looks thoroughly average, and the mullet-fixated hairstyles have dated appallingly.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Archangel (in flashback; last in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #8; next in X-Men/ClanDestine #1, then in Uncanny X-Men #328, then in Sabretooth: In The Red Zone, then in Uncanny X-Men #329-330, then in Archangel, then in Cable #31, then in X-Men vol 2 #50)
Psylocke (in flashback; last behind the scenes in DC vs Marvel #4; next in Uncanny X-Men #325, then in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #9, then in Spider-Man Team-Up #1, then in Uncanny X-Men #328, then in issue #48)

GUEST STAR
Brian Braddock (between Excalibur vol 1 #88 and #91)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Rob McCaully (a postmaster; first and only appearance)

Written: 10 December 2004

back | next