X-Force: “Vendetta”
And so we reach the final storyline for both Uncanny X-Force and Cable & X-Force, before the titles face their latest relaunch.
The decision to launch two entirely unrelated X-Force titles in the last wave of Marvel Now is no less baffling now than it was a year ago, particularly since one of those teams never actually called itself “X-Force” in the course of the series. The ludicrous overuse of the “Avengers” and “X-Men” brand names at least makes some sort of short-term, blinkered sense – those are top franchises, at least. But “X-Force”?
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this crossover was commissioned simply on the logic that the two titles had better do something or other to interact before they were taken out and shot, in order to justify the name. Fortunately for writers Dennis Hopeless and Sam Humphries, there is in fact a natural crossover story with these two books, thanks to Bishop’s inclusion in the cast of Uncanny X-Force. The entire Duane Swierczynski run on Cable was based on Bishop chasing Cable and Hope through time in an attempt to kill her and thereby save history from something or other. So there’s an unresolved tension there.
Problem is… it’s that story, which never worked to begin with. In fact, while fans can be all too easy to claim that something has permanently wrecked a character, and most stories, no matter how misconceived, can readily be reversed or simply ignored, Swierczynski’s take on Bishop really does present major problems for anyone trying to use him in future. Once you’ve become a genocidal lunatic, it’s kind of hard to go back. And the window of opportunity for blaming it on mental illness or outside manipulation seems to have passed.
Still, Hopeless and Humphries give it their best shot here. Stryfe is hauled back to serve as the villain, since at least he’s Cable’s arch-enemy. And his central motivation – bitterness over what he sees as Cable usurping his life – can be leveraged into a malicious desire to screw with Cable and Hope’s father/daughter relationship. So the story comes down to Stryfe trying to encourage Hope to kill Bishop, for no particular reason beyond the fact that it would prove to Cable that he had failed as a father. This provides at least some opportunity for Bishop, Cable and Hope to achieve some sort of understanding and defeat a baddie into the process.
It all makes some sense; you can see what it’s aiming for. But really, by revisiting this territory at all, you only lampshade the difficulty of redeeming Bishop at this stage. Even if Cable doesn’t want to kill him, he could legitimately ask why the hell the X-Men are allowing him to wander around. He’s a mass murderer, after all.
But then there are two ways you can redeem a character. One is to do it within the logic of the story, and actually redeem him. If that’s past praying for, there’s always option two, which is to provide some sort of notional closure and then politely agree with the audience that We Shall Never Speak Of This Again. You can get away with that if the readers were already looking for an excuse to pretend it never happened, and with Bishop, many people might well be thinking that way.
It’s far from a classic. Stryfe’s agenda is heavy-handed; the art is pretty average, with a plethora of inkers suggesting some last-minute assignments; and the other members of the two teams are left with not much to do (though there is a cute gag about Boom-Boom and Puck having so little to contribute that they kill time by making childish bets with each other). Nor does it really serve as a finale for either X-Force title.
But “Vendetta” is at least seriously trying to wrench its unpromising source material into a real story about Cable and Hope, it’s decently constructed, it’s focussed, and it does have some interesting ideas about Cable and Bishop’s role as influences on Hope’s life. It works heroically to try and rehabilitate Bishop as a character. And it winds up being a readable few issues – more than you would have expected for a tacked-on crossover at the tail end of two dead books.
But if you’re willing to let Beast’s genocidal tendencies slide because people didn’t like the storyline, I don’t see why the same can’t be done for Bishop (because no one genuinely liked the storyline either!). Just ignore it until new terrible stories cycle through so people forget the Hope/Cable/Bishop storyline.
Much like, “Dead-beat dad” Cyclops or “Wife-beater” Spider-man. Just address it with a throw away line and move on.
As for Jean, in “Here Comes Tomorrow” she wipes out the “bee people.” Also, the doppleganger retcon has been retconned and Jean was ALWAYS the Phoenix. Although Marvel just bounces between the two retcons when it’s convenient.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a Bishop fan that I’m willing to let it slide. Why waste any more time fixing a broken storyline?
Remember when editorial forced Marrow on the team? Scott Lobdell objected on the grounds that she was a stone-cold murderer, and it was something that was never truly dealt with so much as swept under the carpet. That never sat well with me, and I was unable to accept the character as anything other than a flat-out villain who never should have been allowed on the team to begin with.
It’s just occurred to me that we readers are truly a hypocritical bunch. We’ll get bent out of shape when continuity or characterization is ignored, or when a story written today contradicts some bit written back in 1986, but when it comes to something we WANT to see downplayed, marginalized, if not disregarded outright, then it’s a different story.
Beast has also been busy killing alternate Earths with the Illuminati in the current New Avengers title.
There seems to be a real move to make the Silver Age team leader and/or scientist types into horrible, horrible people in general, which would work if Marvel were planning to replace them with something else. But since Iron Man and the X-Men aren’t really going anywhere
I’m getting a bit tired of the “protagonists who do whatever it takes” bit, which seems not only strangely consequence-free for the characters in the longer term but also increasingly dated now that popular opinion is turning against drones and limitless surveillance and so forth in reality. It’s starting to feel like 2003 never ended for most of the key Marvel writers.
“If Hope was killed, the phoenix force wouldn’t have come to Earth and wouldn’t have destroyed those planets in its path.”
That’s not right, is it? It was coming back either way, possibly with added anger if its ‘creation’ wasn’t here for it.
Even if Bishop isn’t appropriate to every story, he fills an interesting enough niche that it’s better having him available than making him unsalvageably toxic. As Dimitri notes, he’s the pro-establishment X-Man. He sometimes dismisses the present X-Men as whining about minutia, because he remembers the hell he grew up in. (I really liked him in the X-Men Civil War mini for this reason.) He polices his people because his experiences tell him its far better than the alternative. He’s the cranky old man complaining how tough things were when he was growing up, even if he hasn’t even been born yet. All these things could certainly lead him to make bad choices, but it seems to me that the setup was better to build his heel-turn out of his willingness to compromise (or collaborate!) with oppression, rather than his zealotry.
I like to think of Bishop stalking his grandparents, interfering in their love-lives like some psychotic nappyless (or diaperless, I guess) Cupid. Distrating, kidnapping or otherwise eliminating the various obstacles between them and True Love. Like, instead of How I Met Your Mother, it’s How I Made You Meet, Mother.
“Kids, in the Spring of 2014, I had just returned from a dystopian future – no, not that one, the one where I was bald and had a robot hand – and I get this call from Gambit, who’s down at Josie’s Bar. “Suit up, mon ami,” he said. “There’s a passel of SHIELD agentettes down here, an’ the homeliest three are all vous.”
“Needless to say, the next three weeks are a blur, but from what I recall, that was how I got banned from Madripoor, inadvertently invented the Oculus Rift, married and divorced three of Multiple Man’s dupes and got just a little bit closer to working out who my Grandmother With The Yellow Coat might have been.”
Something like that.
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