UNCANNY X-MEN #288: Time and Place

Bishop learns his history

Yes, it took four people to write this issue! Surely a mark of quality

Originally Published May 1992

We begin with the men of the X-Men's Gold team -- Colossus, Archangel and Iceman -- preparing for a secret mission.

That mission? Ambush their counterparts on the Blue team and give them, um, I dunno, noogies or something.

Yes, it's quite heartening to see the X-Men horsing around, being playful and acting like human beings with lives, even if this particular prank -- if it can be called that -- barely rises to the level of junior high hazing. When you're pining for the days of Iceman freezing the toilet seat, you know you're in a dire situation.

The gag is that the Gold Boys want to tweak Cyclops for always saying they have to be ready for anything. Cyke, for his part, doesn't think this harmless fun is so fun. What if Beast had used his animal strength on Colossus in his human form? What if he had let loose with one of his uncontrollable optic blasts? What if Psylocke was there and literally murdered everyone? Would that be fun? 

Nevertheless, Warren and Bobby are in full-on bro mode, badgering Cyclops to dish about whether Psylocke has had a chance to use her freakishly long ninja legs on him in the Danger Room. About that, Scott has no comment and excuses himself, allegedly getting a summons from the Professor. 

Jean, eavesdropping from the nearby stairwell, takes note of Scott's bashfulness when Betsy is mentioned.

In the Danger Room, Bishop is working out is frustrations. Seems he's gripped by some kind of reverse-futureshock at being stranded in the past, in the days of landlines and VHS. 

I would feel this way too if I were sent back to the era of dial-up

Bishop is, however, in awe of the living legends he finds himself surrounded by: Cyclops, Storm, Jubilee... mythical figures all. The Professor grants Bishop a place on the Gold team under Storm. He thanks them by informing them that sometime in the very near future they will be betrayed and murdered by one of their own, but it is unknown who.

Jkjk, that doesn't come up. Instead, Bishop wants to hit the town -- he's spent his life in combat training, but what he needs is to learn what New York is like in the 1990s.

"I've seen the historical records... take me to Central Perk"

Elsewhere, Bobby reconnects with Opal Tanaka, his normie girlfriend from late in the X-Factor days, and Warren screens a call from his old flame Charlotte Jones, but struggles with his identity, since, being blue and a former mind-warped Horseman of Apocalypse, the now-Archangel isn't totally convinced he is Warren Worthington anymore.

Out on the town, Bishop walked by the Waldorf Hotel and is awed by the fact that it actually has some dignity here in the past: in his time, everyone is destitute, and crime has over taken the city, the once-grand hotel is now basically a homeless shelter and as such the affluent all live and remain on upper floors and are never seen at street level. You know how people often describe a humble place by saying "It's not the Waldorf..." well, in Bishop's time, that's a compliment.

As described, it sounds a lot like the "Biff's Pleasure Paradise" alternate timeline from Back to the Future Part II, a combination of a conservative nightmare about rampant criminality but also excessive capitalism widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. From what we've seen of Bishop's time, it's also all murder all the time.

Jubilee, thinking: "Is this guy, like, total mondo future-melvin or what? Gag me etc."

Just then Bishop runs into an old friend. In fact, it's the one who got away... specifically, Styglut, the future-psycho responsible for the deaths of Malcolm and Randall, the last-remaining outlaw to have come through Fitzroy's portals (except for Fitzroy himself of course... and hopefully Bantam.) Styglut seems to be out on the town chasing honeys, but when he sees Bishop, he murders his escort to absorb their life energy and power up (why do all future-mutant abilities seem to involve killing someone to power up?)

Bishop asks his new teammates to stand back, since Styglut falls under his jurisdiction as an XSE officer. 

They have an explosive battle. Bishop is benevolent enough to note that while Styglut -- who has murdered 300 people, allegedly -- was in his cell there was a "chance" for rehabilitation, but that chance is gone now. It's kind of an interesting token nod to the idea of restorative justice: this comic doesn't really believe Styglut can be rehabilitated but it wants us to believe all options have been explored before Bishop murders him.

And look, whatever. The comic has invented a scenario where killing 300 innocent people is not so much the exception but the rule, thus necessitating the rise of a brutal kind of justice. There were 92 criminals that came back from the future by Bishop's reckoning, and if all of them committed half as many murders as Styglut then they'd collectively be responsible for the death of an entire small town. whether Styglut can or should be rehabilitated is a purely philosophical point. Practically speaking, he did an impossible shit-ton of murder.

Bishop kills Styglut for his crimes, and Storm is like "All right, but that's the last one, okay?"

Never wholesale slaughter, no

Storm has Bishop take a look around at the innocent people he's put in harm's way with his antics, and how that flies in the face of everything the X-Men are and do. Bishop reflects on how it's different in his time: if the X.S.E. showed up, anyone who was innocent would know to duck and cover because shit was about to to go down (which seems terribly irresponsible but whatever.) But now in the relatively peaceful past, he has to, you know, show accountability for his actions, a totally new concept to him.

With that, Bishop has a good long think about where he is going. Later that night, he comes to Storm and admits he has much to learn, turning in his badge of command and agreeing to follow her and do things the X-Men's way.

Further Thoughts:

I wouldn't say this was a "good" issue, but it gave me a lot to think about.

A lot of dialogue in X-Men studies is devoted to the efficacy and meaning of the mutant metaphor. It's very of-the-times in 1992 to be concerned with criminal justice, as comics responded to rising hysteria about criminal activity with violent heroes that the books posited were justified mostly uncomplicatedly in their actions. Even those that were complex and used as examinations of the nature of violence were usually simplified as time went by as audiences and creators alike decreased the nuance. Comics are not always the best place to have this debate and yet because of their nature they are a place where the debate will always come up.

Does it, in the end, matter what a real life cop should do if faced with a dangerous criminal like Styglut? He killed 300 people, more than almost any real life single person in history outside of, like, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Yeah, fair to say he deserves whatever he gets. The real problem is in actual cops treating lesser offenders like Stygluts -- or worse, in giving a pass to killers who bring assault weapons to otherwise peaceful protests with the intent to open fire, just because his skin happens to be right right color and his cause happens to be the one they like. The "problem" with the metaphor here is partly that it's purely hypothetical and partly that this is a comic book not meant to teach us anything more complex than "thou shalt not kill." Because it is an action-adventure fantasy about time travelers with blasty fists, we do well to remember that its first order of business is to provide action, then interior melodrama and character conflict that arises out of that, and if, at a distance, it can say something, anything about the real world, that's merely a bonus.

I love X-Men comics. I love that they raise questions even in their most degraded forms. But they are entertainment, not parables, and the answers are not found within these 22 pages. I've personally made peace with that. I love all of that and it remains a huge part of what draws me to these comics and without it I don't know that they are so beloved to me and many others. But the reason these issues get brought up is to fuel these characters -- their lives and motivations -- in a fictional context first and foremost, so the metaphor gets extremely wonky when translated to real life. In this case, it's about creating a compelling internal struggle for Bishop as he joins this team from an outsider context with different morality than the X-Men are used to -- not really all that different than when the All New, All Different X-Men were drawn together from exotic and diverse places like Africa, the USSR, and Canada.

Sidenote: Kubert inked by Sienkiewicz is a wild aesthetic.

Storm comes down on the side that the X-Men "do not kill." Of course they have killed and will kill again. I have often proposed that the main reason heroes don't kill, or have rules against killing, is more because the comics code made them take a hardline black-and-white stance, which is then reverse-engineered as ethics, than the creators wanting to interrogate the idea of justice, but that doesn't mean I don't buy into it. Superheroes are a combination of soldiers, police officers, peacekeepers and rescue workers. Soldiers often have to kill. Police officers shouldn't kill. In the real world both often kill more than they should. Superheroes are fictional and have mostly been endowed with abilities and resources that should make killing largely unnecessary. It becomes thorny because it has little to do with real-world justice and crimefighting, but it is aspirational, which is what I like about the superheroes.

Bishop is a maniac with a huge gun (and blasty-fist powers) but his arc is that he's learning not to be that. Which is a fun way for the comic to have its cake and eat it too, because while he's around he can be a badass man of action shooting it out across the page to the excitement of readers while Storm admonishes him. He might get unlimited chances to do better, until inevitably they start running into foes against whom Bishop's predilection for ultraviolent means are acceptable -- like, is anyone going to be furrowing their brows if Bishop opens fire against Apocalypse or Sinister?

My first order to you, then, is to never barge in here while I'm half naked