Now here's something I never thought I'd type: Weapon X #14 features Mr Sinister in a pastiche of Schindler's List.

In fairness, it's not played for laughs - a prospect that would have been absolutely ghastly.  Nonetheless, there is a nasty disjunction of tone between the seriousness of the events depicted and the fact that we're dealing here with... well, with Mr Sinister.

Sinister is a problematic character.  Let's be blunt: even by the standards of supervillains, he has a stupid name and he looks ridiculous.  Chris Claremont, who created him, has claimed that the point was supposed to be that he was a child's idea of what a supervillain should be.  That makes a certain degree of sense.  Unfortunately, since Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix, that explanation has been out the window and Sinister has been given a definitive origin as a Victorian geneticist.  This is quite an interesting idea but doesn't account for the character's unutterable silliness.

Incidentally, there is a certain irony in the fact that Claremont's origin, somewhat metatextual idea for the character was kicked out of continuity by a story written by Peter Milligan.  With the usual interests of those two writers, you'd think it would be the other way round.

Anyway.  The big idea of this issue is to establish Sinister as somebody with a history of rescuing people from concentration camps and spiriting them away to his own experiments.  There's actually quite a good idea at the root of this story.  It sets out to contrast the Nazis as hate-driven villains with Sinister, who doesn't really hate anyone but takes the view that everything is justified for the greater good of scientific knowledge.  Sinister, on this view, is merely totally amoral, and arguably more disturbing as a result.

There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that idea.  The problem is that the silliness of Sinister undermines it.  You can't really sell us on the banality of evil when he's parading around like something from a medieval gay bar.

Art, by the way, comes from the guest team of John Paul Leon and Tommy Lee Edwards.  Most of it's in black and white with red highlights.  It's typically effective and subdued as far as it goes, and it does at least have the advantage of keeping Sinister in the dark as much as possible.

I can see what they're trying to do here; the problem is that Sinister is not an ideal character to be doing it with.  He's a real barrier to taking any story seriously.

Rating: B-

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