Bishop runs from a past that may not be his own!
Originally Published January 1996
As the title suggests, we begin with a little poker action.
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| This ain't Texas, ain't no hold 'em |
The X-Men -- and Ben Grimm, for some reason -- are having card night at one of Warren's spare apartments. When The Thing has to leave to go to Space or Whatever, that yokel from the sticks Cannonball sits in, despite the fact that he's a greenhorn who has been sitting over Beast's shoulder ruining his game all night.
Elsewhere, in a story that promises to be somewhat more engaging, Bishop is out to dinner with Scott and Jean, who can commiserate with him over their shared experience of having to cram a decade-plus worth of post-Apocalyptic memories into their modern day bodies. For a half a second it seems like they're about to invite him into a throuple.
But before we can get into polycular science, the party is told their table is ready, by Pam, the unforgettable waitress who smiled at Bishop one time two years ago whose return you've no doubt been awaiting.
Which is the point at which I realize that, much like Bishop, I too am working to cram several decades of existence into a very small period of time.
By and by, we see that Bishop is being watched: Dark Beast, one of the many refugees from the Age of Apocalypse to have plunked down into our world, has more cameras on him than the Truman Show.
Beast got plunked down on our world twenty years ago and has spent the entire time waiting for this reality's version of Bishop to appear, because he might be the only one with knowledge and memory of the Age of Apocalypse. He and his reluctant associate/gross little guy Sugar Man need to know what, if anything, Bishop knows about them.
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| And really, like all things, it mostly comes back to Sinister. |
Meanwhile, Charles vents to a mostly unconscious Psylocke -- who has not yet been revived by the magic of the Crimson Dawn -- about how flicking hard everything is lately, and how having principles sucks and might not be worth it, and maybe it's time to get wild, I dunno.
Back at the poker game, it turns out Cannonball is a total hustler.
It comes down to Sam and Gambit, of course, but all of this talk of bluffing and strategy gives Beast an epiphany about his approach to cracking the Legacy Virus, including possibly getting played by Sinister and his misdirection.
Dark Beast and Sugar Man resolve to kill Bishop, in a scheme that also involves this weird mutant brain guy in a capacity that is not clear to me.
Point being, they want to kill Bishop before he lets Sinister know -- intentionally or not -- about their existence, being that they are, apparently, the answers to the mysteries that have been plaguing Sinister for years.
Back at the game, the Sam-Remy showdown reaches its apex with Sam revealing a full house. Gambit is gradually turns over his cards -- 10 of Diamonds, and then the Jack, Queen and King, but before he can reveal the final card...
He turns the whole thing over like Monopoly on Family Game Night.
As everyone picks up the pieces, Storm notices something peculiar... Gambit actually had a winning hand!
Why did he throw the game? Did it have something to do with his Deep Dark Secret? Or was it just a random event to fill out pages?
Later that night, Bishop is losing his shit. Seems he's become convinced that Pam is actually a spy, possibly an agent of the dread high lord Apocalypse.
Cyclops and Jean are nowhere to be found, but Beast does happen by and try to subdue his wayward comrade.
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| I said he tries |
Bishop collapses, and Pam does what any sensible woman would do in her situation, carry her attacker back to her apartment to convalesce.
In the meantime, those Generation X kids are being sucked into the vortex that is the upcoming Onslaught storyline.
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| I mean, they have their own book where this could be happening, but we're trying to drive sales here |
Holding Pam at gunpoint, Bishop confesses he's feeling a little wacky lately, with all this reality-hopping stuff causing him to doubt his (usually absolutely sterling, I'm sure) law enforcement instincts, so yeah, he's a little jumpy.
But -- twist! Pam really is an agent out to get Bishop on behalf of Dark Beast. They communicate telepathically, no doubt through the use of BrainThing up there.
So Dark Beast grew Pam in a lab, genetically engineered to be Bishop's ideal woman, then got her hired at a diner where he might happen to run into her once every few months, a plan elegant in its simplicity. At least he let her get a cat for company.
Also at some point Dark Beast kidnapped Havok, because, um, why not, right?
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| Kidnapping or brainwashing Havok is on pretty much every villain's Bingo card |
At D.B.'s command, Pam shifts into evil Henchwoman mode and throws Bishop out the window (right into Good Beast's waiting arms.)
They have a tussle, but it's cut short when they rupture a gas main and the whole thing blows up, presumably killing the antagonist but leaving our heroes unscathed.
Dark Beast, watching from afar from one of his many cameras, gets a little distracted by what he sees:
Apparently it had not occurred to him that there is indeed a Hank McCoy in this world, but he knows now, and thinks it's time to pivot his plan.
Sifting through the smoldering rubble, Bishop and Light Beast have more questions than answers about who Killer Pam was working for.
But at least the cat is safe.
Further Thoughts:
Here's where the X-Men comics are more than the sum of their parts, because to describe it, this seems like a pretty flimsy pair of outings, but it all works to explore the ongoing story of the universe, with a bit of action and a bit of humour thrown in, including a runner about Beast wishing he were Mr. Teri Hatcher.
So the comics themselves are generally enjoyable to read, and if you're in, you're in. If you're not, then you are free to point out that it takes years to get anything done to pay off these gargantuan storylines which seem to be increasingly concerned with villains clashing with other villains with their inscrutable and complicated machinations, with the X-Men helplessly caught in the middle. Yes, that is a valid take. but when you've got the hot hand and what you're doing seems to be working, critiques like that hold less water.
Let's consider the structure of the X-Men franchise at this point then. We have two core X-titles coming out every month. Theoretically they are discrete units: The Crimson Dawn story was a two-parter in Uncanny and this was a two-parter in X-Men. But the Bishop story kind of wends its way through both titles depending on the month, as does the Betsy story, the Gambit story, the Iceman story, et cetera and so forth. And right now, they're both now being written by Scott Lobdell (with an occasional hand from Jeph Loeb or Mark Waid) which means there's more mixing and mingling even now than there was when you had a Lobdell book and a Nicieza book (which was not no mixing.)
So the narrative is integrated, and we end up with two lines and no waiting, because we don't need to cut back and forth between this and what's going on in Uncanny in a single issue. In practice, you don't notice what's missing from an individual issue because you're having so much fun as the story skates along. On balance, it's actually a pretty good way to do comics, if the point is to keep selling individual issues to X-crazy fans week after week, month after month, rather than the more modern notion of simply telling one clear-cut story that can be packaged and sold. It doesn't make for the most watertight of narratives and reading experiences, but from a sales perspective it clearly has its advantages. And that's before you start leveraging the occasional page here and there in X-Men to promote a tie-in story in Generation X or what's going on in X-Factor. It allows the soap opera of the X-Men to balloon to wild, grandiose and, some would say, dubiously manageable proportions, but I admire it. It doesn't mean that I love every single issue of it, but structurally I like it for this project even though some issues end up as duds. They continue to compel me to read.
In summation and final verdict: X-Men comics of the 90s are complicated, but fun.
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