Spider-Man has plenty of time fighting against enemies who utilize cloning — with the web-swinging hero facing off against plenty of dark copies of himself over the years. But there was a batch of clones that formed their own Sinister Six — at the command of a major villain not normally associated with Spider-Man.
Spider-Man’s tenure with the X-Men’s school pitted him against Mister Sinister — and in the process faced off with a bizarre cloned mutant incarnation of the Sinister Six.
Spider-Man & the X-Men by Elliot Kalan, Marco Failla, and Diogo Saito focuses on Spider-Man’s attempts to briefly serve as a substitute teacher at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning in the aftermath of Wolverine’s apparent death. In the process though, Spider-Man found himself targeted by Mister Sinister, who was in the process of collecting more mutant DNA when Spider-Man arrived at the school. In an attempt to give her best friend (the brain in a jar known as Martha Johnson) a new body, Ernest traded a captive Spider-Man to Sinister — who sought to learn from Spider-Man’s unique genetic code.
But instead of giving her a body of her own, Martha woke up in a Frankenstein-like cloned body of Storm that Sinister retained control over. As revealed by the villain when other students arrive to save Spider-Man, Sinister had grown tired of cloning villains like the Marauders who kept failing to defeat the X-Men — so instead, he created his own cloned version of the X-Men. Consisting of clones of Wolverine, Beast, Firestar, Nightcrawler, and Iceman along with Storm, the newly dubbed Sinister’s Six quickly prove lethal — doing their best to kill Spider-Man and the assembled students, Luckily, the clones lack the experience and expertise that the X-Men have developed after years of active work as heroes in the field, allowing them to overcome and defeat the clones.
But Sinister’s Six remains a fun footnote in the history of the Spider-Man supervillain group, making it one of the only versions of the iconic villain team to not have an appearance in the recent “Sinister War” storyline. Spider-Man has fought plenty of iterations of the team, and he’s also dealt with villains who utilize clones to create chaos (most notably the Jackal, whose machinations set the Clone Saga in motion). Mister Sinister getting his own cloned version of a Sinister Six is an inherently interesting concept, especially when one remembers Spider-Man has come up against Sinister’s machinations in the past (such as the dangerous Xraven, the clone of the original five X-Men and Kraven the Hunter).
Spider-Man’s unique power-set and genetic code have made him the envy of evil scientists in the past, so it should not be surprising that Mister Sinister had a similar response — seeing potential in the wall-crawler that he’d want to mine for great effect. Sinister would make for an ideal threat to someone like Spider-Man, given his absurd limits and commitment to mad science matching the more manic plans of Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus.
Sinister briefly having his own version of the Sinister Six is a solid idea, as the naming alone lends itself well to a team of evil clones of Spider-Man foes. There could even be plenty of fun in seeing Mister Sinister go to war with not just Spider-Man but the Spider-Man villains who would be offended at his intervention in their long-running battle with the Wall-Crawler, which could easily be the set-up for a bombastic Spider-Man/X-Men storyline.
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