X-Men Questions — Part 1: Is Bishop Good?
I’m a die-hard X-Men fan. Specifically, X-Men comic books. I haven’t read them all, and I don’t think I ever will, but I have read almost every X-Men comic from 2004 and onward. Nonetheless, among my group of friends, I am known as the X-Men person who can answer almost anything when it comes to the uncanny bunch of mutants we all know.
That being said, a long time friend of mine made a comment out of the blue on Twitter about X-Men.
So I responded.
Then he responded.
I figured he would send me a message or a text so we could hash it out. Or, more likely, play around the idea of doing a minisode or two on the podcast I host, I Read Comic Books. But then he posted the list (and now we can finally get to the meat of this post):
You should definitely check out some of the ridiculous responses to that tweet. But for now, I want to actually go through the list Rene sent and answer some of this stuff.
And because this list is huge, I want to answer these questions over time and, you know, give myself some time to think. So, this is the beginning of a series of (probably) short articles.
Let’s start with Rene’s first question:
Is Bishop back? Is Bishop good again?
Note: I’m going to answer these questions to the best of my ability and opinion with the help of Google, UncannyXMen.net, Wikipedia, and a few other sites.
Before we start, I want to warn you: There will be full spoilers for all X-Men titles as of August 6, 2017.
Let’s do this.
About Bishop
As of Astonishing X-Men #1 (2017) (by Charles Soule and Jim Cheung), Bishop is back. He’s a “good guy” in the same sense that he was a “good guy” during Chris Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men. He’s always been a hard-boiled character, and in Soule’s story he seems to be that same Bishop.
I think what Rene was getting at is Bishop’s “crazy” streak during the fallout of Messiah CompleX where he was hellbent on killing a newborn mutant — later to be known as Hope Summers. Why? Well… that’s a long story. But the short version is this:
In Bishop’s future (yeah, he’s from the future), Hope is the reason mutants are enslaved and put into camps (and marked with that iconic M on their faces). In order to prevent that future from becoming a possibility, he decides that he needs to kill Hope. However, another time-travelling mutant, Cable, decides that he isn’t going to let that happen because Hope is the first mutant born since M-Day and she’s important.
In the end, Bishop goes killer-crazy, but Cable and Hope end up out-bad-assing him. Leaving him to rot in the future.
However, during Sam Humpries’ Uncanny X-Force (2013–2014), Bishop reappears. There’s some business with a demon and mind control and the far-far-far future being scary, but in the end, Bishop gets back to his old self. After this series, we don’t really see much of him (unless there’s some tie-in I didn’t read) until Astonishing X-Men (2017).
So, Good? Sure. I think he’s a good guy again. We’ll see how the story plays out in Astonishing X-Men.
For more of my thoughts on the X-Men and comic books in general, make sure to checkout the I Read Comic Books podcast where almost every week I find a way to bring up the X-Men on the show.
