Back to the Future—The Rise and Fall of BISHOP

Back to the Future—The Rise and Fall of BISHOP: "

If '90s comics gave us anything besides shiny covers draped in holograms and foil embossing, it was characters with ridiculously huge guns and a tinge of psychosis.







A lot of the characters introduced during the era have since gone by the wayside, but the few that endured did so by their ability to rise above the one-note stereotypes they were introduced as and by getting their hands dirty in some of the more important storylines in their respective universes.







Not long after Cable made his adult debut in New Mutants #87 (that’s adult as in age, not adult as in the star of some weird cyborg fetish porn) another time traveling badass blasted his way into the X-Men’s world—the man known only as Bishop.

One of his less used mutant powers was juggling pink energy balls...

Debuting in Uncanny X-Men #282, Bishop (later revealed as Lucas Bishop) arrived in our present, chasing down criminals that had escaped from the future, including one Trevor Fitzroy, the man with poor fashion sense that was responsible for the deaths of the Hellions and the White Queen in the previous issue.

Accompanied by Malcolm and Randall, Bishop took a shoot first, second, and third, then ask questions fourth approach that had the X-Men wondering which side he was on.







Stuck in our timeline, and his comrades killed in action, Bishop joined the X-Men, explaining that he was a member of Xavier’s Security Enforcers, a unit he joined after growing up in the ghettos of a Sentinel controlled future, in which mutants were forced into camps due to a massive race war.

'You're under arrest for two counts of crimes against fashion and being a horrible Prince impersonator.'

Bishop’s arrival helped fuel years of mystery, particularly as he revealed that a lost transmission he uncovered showed a battered Jean Grey calling for help after the X-Men were betrayed by one of their own.







The mystery of the traitor was unknown, but similarities between Gambit and the alleged sole survivor of the betrayal called The Witness led to a feud between Bishop and everyone’s favorite mystery Cajun. Granted, he was our only mystery Cajun, but, still, you get the point.







Uncovering the traitor to the X-Men and stopping the nightmare future he came from drove Bishop as a member of the team, his more violent manner of doing things often coming at odds with the more pacifist approach of his teammates.







When Legion played around with the past and jacked things up so badly that the Age of Apocalypse came about, Bishop got caught up in the new reality and was key in helping them set things right and correct the timeline.

Pretty sure Legion's lost last words before the timeline shifted were something along the lines of, 'Oh crap, that can't be good...'

Not long after, Bishop came to the shocking realization that the traitor to Xavier’s dream was Xavier himself as his mentor became Onslaught and nearly killed the entire team.







If not for Bishop, he would have, so after fixing the Age of Apocalypse AND saving all of the X-Men, Bishop’s badass points just kept accumulating.







Eventually, Bishop was lost in the timestream following a battle in Shi’ar space and returned in time for Maximum Security after which he joined Storm’s X-Treme X-Men team before becoming a cop in the Mutant Town section of NYC in the short-lived District X series.

Now THIS is the Law & Order spinoff they SHOULD have done...

As the Civil War tore apart the hero community, Bishop took the side of Iron Man’s forces, his belief in registering superpowered beings fueled by his future having been formed largely by the actions of a rogue mutant that led to the harsh reprisals of the human Sentinel programs.







Naturally, this put him at odds with the X-Men, who saw the Superhuman Registration Act as a prelude to putting them all in the very camps Bishop strove to avoid and their relationship with one another cooled considerably.







Of course, that relationship downright shattered when Bishop sought to assassinate Hope, the first child born post M-Day, believing her to be the mutant that triggered his future in the first place.

For some strange reason, baby killing always seems to put a damper on friendships.

Never mind for a second that his timeline should have changed already because of stopping Onslaught and that changing the past to save the future just plain never seems to work; it just gave Bishop something new to go crazy about.







After Cyclops charged Cable with keeping Hope safe, Bishop followed him into the future and became the Coyote to his Road Runner, setting trap after trap to snare him, but failing before being stranded in the future.







When Bishop returns (I mean, c’mon, you know he is coming back eventually), will it be as friend or foe, and, with the extent of Hope’s powers still unknown, will he be eating crow, or serving it up to a team torn asunder?

Meep meep this, mother $%&*%#!!!