MR. SINISTER

In London in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a grieving biologist named Nathaniel Essex stood before the Royal Society and out-Darwined Darwin. In The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix #1 (1996), Essex argues that hidden “Essex Factors” in human heredity will produce dramatic mutations within a few generations — a Victorian prediction of mutantkind delivered a century before the X-Men.

Essex did not arrive with charts alone. He presented the Society with a hulking specimen stitched together from human and animal parts, offered as a preview of what directed mutation could build. The assembled scientists recoiled, Darwin himself warned that grief for Essex's dead four-year-old son Adam was warping the work, and the Society cast the lecturer out as a monster in the making.

The humiliation mattered because of who was listening in the shadows. The ancient mutant Apocalypse had woken in that same London, and a researcher willing to call morality a pollutant on progress was exactly the servant he wanted. Essex's expulsion from respectable science is the hinge of the whole saga: rejected for predicting mutants, he was recruited by the first one and remade into Mister Sinister.