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.
If they ever want to use Bishop as a legitimate protagonist again, just use time travel and bring his fairly-recent-before-he-went-nuts past self to the present. Problem solved.
Hell, even reboot him completely and have him arrive in the present rather than X-Men circa 1991.
What they did was more or less the only thing they could do, short of mental possession (which they could have done do much more easily), and that’s just hand-wave away the genocide because it’s an alternate future, so, you know, might never happen!
But I also thought they were going in the direction of the same trick they used on Tony Stark after CIVIL WAR – erase his memory so that he has no recollection of what he did, ergo making him less culpable (or something). The editing on this story was a little bit shaky because it seemed as if they were initially headed in that direction – re-read the conversation between Bishop, Storm, and Psylocke in UNCANNY #18 – but that soon turned out to be not the case.
Why salvage him at all? What is it about Bishop that was ever worth salvaging? I honestly never understood the appeal of this character. He has no personality. He comes from a boring dystopian future where mullets are back in fashion (which makes it hard not to root for the Sentinels), and he probably wouldn’t be in this situation if he hadn’t been regarded as disposable in the first place. If he were a real life celebrity, he’d be a has-been on Dancing with the Stars. Send him back to 1991 and leave him there, please.
Or just turn Bishop permanently into a villain. Why does he have to stay a hero, short of inertia?
I really don’t remember how Stryfe was put in play again… According to wikipedia he appeared in an X-Man story I’ve completely forgotten. I didn’t read the shitty version of X-Force or Cable that took part in Messiah War, so I apparently missed something there, but nonetheless would have appreciated at least a recap page explaining Why Stryfe.
Anyway, the art on Cable & X-Force was pretty decent I thought, and I did enjoy the Boom Boom / Puck interactions. Uncanny’s art, however, not quite. Something off about the facial expressions and proporitions of the bodies, not in a stylized Alfona kind of way.
I did enjoy reading “Stab your eyes!” Totally forgot about that curse.
it seemed to me that Bishop pointed out that Cable killed people at the start of Cable and X-Force so Hope is being a hypocrite. So Hope doesn’t kill him because that proves Cable is better than Bishop but she might kill him another time. The Stryfe well he just got away. I really had a hard time bringing my self to read these.
Both of these relaunches probably saved me from buying the new x-force.
I have to agree, what is the point of salvaging Bishop? His story is long since over. And Cable seems to be a better fit for ‘mutant/Terminator inspired man of action/time traveler from dystopian future’ for the Marvel Universe. With stronger ties to the more popular X-men characters.
Well, they didn’t try very hard to salvage bishop and he’s now likely going into limbo so apparently marvel mostly agrees with you. As to why they should even try, a) he’s going to be in the next movie (probably won’t do much,but will still be there) and b) from a ‘meta’ point of view, it’s a tad ackward to have a book built on a sci-fi metaphor for racism and prejudice and then have their most prominent black male character turned into a baby killing genocidal loon. That might be considered ‘bad optics’ 😉
Bishop is the X-Men as vocation. Once the future that the X-Men are fighting to alternately protect, defray or dress in a spiked latex onesie gets here, somebody’s got to keep law and order. Utopias are all well and good, but ya gotta eat, right?
So what Bishop is – and I hate the name “Lucas” (clearly he’s a “Martin,” as any Robert Redford fan knows) – what Bishop is is an internalisation of the X-Men mission.
But he’s also damning testament to their utter utter failure. More so than Cabes, more so than Rachel Grey, Bishop is the fish out of water – that’s it. He’s Bruce Wills. Bishop is the mid-period post-Bruno Bruce Willis of the X-Men. He’s the Die Hard.
In a way, he’s also Reverse Captain America, in that he’s a man out of time, but backwards. Also, he’s a community hero, rather than a national one.
And he should be the one that goes out into the world and takes The Mission with him. Not only because to him, even somewhere like Detroit or Trumpington is a paradise of teddy bears and milkshakes, so giving him a really pressing reason to keep it tidy, but because unlike Scott “Scott” Summers, unlike Kitty “I kissed a smoker and now I’m qualified to teach children,” unlike pretty much any of them, he’s the guy who is most like us. Okay, he grew up in a harsher environment than anyone in the first world would recognise, but he still puts his giant red ascot on one knot at a time.
This current time travel thing, wherever they’re going with it, would have been a great excuse to wipe all the post-Ostrander Bishops from the timestream. I mean, what’s one more boggin idea after timeloopslapheadMadMaxkillchase?
…I like Bishop. 🙁
//\OO/\\
(actually, thinking about it, given his hairstyle, he’s probably the Timecop.)
//\Oo/\\
Um, I’m not following you on that bit with Kitty. What does kissing a smoker have to do with teaching children? You’re not seriously suggesting that because Kitty once dated a smoker, that this somehow makes her unfit to teach?
No, unless I’m mistaken, the idea is that chronologically Kitty is still only in her early 20s, and yet because she’s had some compressed quote-unquote “life-experience” she’s suddenly completely qualified to be a teacher.
I don’t see any problem with that. Age and wisdom don’t always go together hand in hand and Kitty’s cumulative experiences more than qualify her to teach, as far as I’m concerned.
As far as Bishop goes, I’m not the sort of reader who can never be persuaded to change their mind about a character. For example, I formerly couldn’t stand Monet St. Croix until Peter David clarified her for me with a single line of dialogue: “Supergirl meets Veronica Lodge.” at which point I finally “got” her.
But Bishop? Sorry, I just can’t buy into the Bruce Willis analogy and that’s because Bruce Willis characters (notably John McLaine) actually have personality, whereas Bishop doesn’t seem to have one. His range, from what I’ve seen so far, and putting the craziness aside, has extended from “very serious” to “deadly serious” and a character needs a hell of a lot more texture to them than that in order for me to overlook a messy backstory. Ultimately, I just think Bishop was a decent enough idea for a story, but that story’s long since been told. Some characters just don’t have “ongoing appeal” built into them. They’re meant to be wheeled onstage to make a point or to serve a story, and once that’s done with, they’ve outlived their usefulness. Bishop was a demonstration of what the X-Men could become. Point made. I feel similarly about Rachel too, by the way, but at least she behaves like a real person.
And to be honest, my least favorite aspect of the X-Men universe us it’s obsession with having these alternate reality/future/past characters lurking about, cluttering the landscape, and generally making the X-Men universe more convoluted than it needs to be.
While I’m on this, I’ll also remind everyone that Cable was already a popular character well before anything about his barely comprehensible backstory was even established. He didn’t need to be the time-displaced son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey. He was a gun-toting, take-no-prisoners old soldier style of character which granted, isn’t novel, but it was certainly novel to the X-Men universe at the time, and I could at least see the appeal in that. Everything established about him from that point onward only served to wreck the character, IMO. If I could change things up, I’d go back and do away with all of that, and have him turn out to be an ex-marine with low-level telekinesis whom Elaine Grey had a brief affair with resulting in Jean’s conception.
I always thought keeping Bishop as a permanent villain was the way to go. To me, Bishop coming unhinged made perfect sense, since he’s constantly being thrown around time and reality.
I mean, in Marvel Universe time, he’s been in the present for about 5 years. During that period, he travelled from his future to the present day, travelled from the present day to 20 years ago, where he witnessed Professor X getting killed by Legion and reality warp into the Age of Apocalypse, where he wandered around for 20 years before aiding in fixing reality. When reality was fixed, he retained all of the memories of AOA, anyway. He then stopped Onslaught from killing the X-Men, (which should have made him disappear from existence maybe?) but remained in the present day until he got lost in space with Deathbird. He returned to earth briefly, then woke up unexplainedly in a completely different future. He was briefly transported to the present day during “The Twelve” storyline, then went back to the “Bishop: The Last X-Man” timeline. He returned to the present once again, did nothing worthwhile for a few years before “House of M,” then eventually went nuts in “Messiah Complex.” I imagine that would drive anyone mad. How can he believe where he is is even real anymore?
I also always preferred the original reveal that Stryfe was actually Nathan, corrupted by Apocalypse in the future, and Cable was the clone.
I was only kidding about Kitty, kind of. I’ve known people like Kitty, who have had just *so many more adventuresome life experiences than anyone else* and I’ve hated every single one of them – out of nothing more complicated than sheer silky jealousy. 🙂
“Some characters just don’t have “ongoing appeal” built into them. They’re meant to be wheeled onstage to make a point or to serve a story, and once that’s done with, they’ve outlived their usefulness.”
Totally agree. The law of diminishing returns, and all that. Bane, Venom, Carnage, etc., etc., etc..
//\Oo/\\
The one time Bishop seemed to fit was during the District X series. Given that Marvel seems to be tentatively overturning Decimation, that might be a good status quo for him. Not necessarily in a new series, mind you, but just have his character move there and trot him out for the occasional guest story.
“I always thought keeping Bishop as a permanent villain was the way to go. To me, Bishop coming unhinged made perfect sense, since he’s constantly being thrown around time and reality.”
You know, when I read that issue that introduced the Witness and the X-Traitor plot, I honestly thought that’s what they were going for. I thought the plan was to have Bishop turn out to be the X-Traitor.
With hindsight, I think that would have been a better story than what they eventually delivered.
@wwk5d – I agree. Despite not liking Bishop terribly much, I actually gave District X a shot. You’re right, it was a better fit for him, even if the series could have been considerably better and if Mutant Town hadn’t been nullified by M-Day. I’m still pissed about that. Mutant Town was a neat idea.
District X wasn’t that bad of a series, it just was unfortunate to debut during the “everything must be written for the trade, and every trade must be 6 issues long” era. A lot of the storyarcs would have been much better had they trimmed off an issue or 2 from each arc. The series had a good premise and an interesting cast. It’s a shame it was hampered by the writing-for-trade edict.
Is there any kind of attempt at an explanation of what was possibly going to be so terrible about Hope?
Stryfe’s returns haven’t made any sense since he died redeeming himself in Gambit & Bishop (and possibly before then). As far as I can tell, it’s always just ‘He’s a time-traveller, so he can appear again whenever’.
You know this was a really tightly edited crossover, because Cable has an eyepatch in the C&XF issues and doesn’t in the Uncanny issues.
@wwk5d – True, the decompressed approach didn’t do it any favors.
You know ever since Morrison used them, I thought Bishop and Sage made a good pair. I could totally see them in a police-procedural series set in a mutant community.
Although, they’d need a supporting player to lighten the tone and to occasionally point out how neither of the two leads seem to have a personality.
Perhaps Bishop, Sage and…Pete Wisdom? Not sure about the premise, but he’d be the good character to take the piss out of them, and be fun to see Sage outsmart him every once in a while.
No smokers.
//\:)/\\
Bishop, Sage and Gambit? – Thief turned cop would be interesting
Bishop, Sage and Quicksilver? – Sarcasm and superspeed. He’s practically an entire police force on his own.
Bishop, Sage and Legion? – With Legion deputising his own sub-personalities to go fight crimes.
Bishop Sage and Deadpool? – Deadpool doesn’t have enough books at the moment.
“Bishop, Sage and Gambit? – Thief turned cop would be interesting”
You might be onto something there. But why assume Gambit would also be a cop?
I was thinking more along the lines of Joe Peschi’s Leo character from the Lethal Weapon films.
Gotcha. I’m thinking more along the lines of Quark from DS9 or any of Mulder’s informants in The X-Files. Sure he’ll cooperate with law enforcement if it’s in his best interests, but there’s no reason Gambit wouldn’t be sleazy if it suited him. Simply giving him a nice apartment in Mutant Town would give him enough excuses to cross paths with Bishop and Sage (or they’d seek him out on occasion), but he’d have enough time and space to run all sorts of side projects of varying degrees of legality.
Hey, anyone remember Shard?
Me neither.
Shard would fit into the modern MU a lot better than she did way back when. She’d have to be an living person, somehow, rather than a holo-ghost (without irises, ew, the ’90s).
And hey: maybe she’d be the thing to bring Bishop (wait, is her name Shard Bishop? Oh, man, tell me her full name is Chardonnay. *checks* No. Rats.) back to his senses. She was always meant to be the superstar out of the two Bishop siblings wasn’t she?
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Anya, that is a bloody good point concerning the ‘meta’ point of view of Bishop’s treatment.
Still, the character has always come across as redundant to me. I don’t know if that’s an inherent fault of the character, if he’s only got a short shelf life or the writers don’t know what to do with him.
The greatest sin of Bishop is even in stories he headlines, like ‘Bishop: The Last X-Man’ which I enjoyed, he could be replaced with another established or new character and it would have been better.
Like Matthew, I also have a soft spot for Bishop – or at least, for early Bishop, for the concept of Bishop, which was a pretty neat concept, I always thought, but was clearly lost in the shuffle during the heavy creative turnover of the period in which he was introduced. The idea that Bishop is both the most devoted X-Man, the ultimate exemplar of Xavier’s dream, and evidence of that dream’s failure, is pretty compelling. And in fact, I like (or liked) Bishop as a character as well as a high-concept: rather than being personality-free, as a number of folks here have asserted, I always found him to be refreshingly distinct – stuffy and uptight to a fault, yes, but also interestingly naive, crammed full of illusions about an idealized past and larger-than-life iconic figures he now has to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
(And also, like Halapeno, I also thought for a good while that Bishop was probably the X-Traitor – or at least, that it would be awesome if that turned out to be the case, especially if he actually had a logical and compelling reason to turn on the team. That’s youthful naivete for you – that I would assume there was any coherent plan at all to resolve that storyline.)
Of course, post-Onslaught, no one had any idea what to do with the character (not that they had been using him that well beforehand), and so at best Bishop became “the one who’s a cop.” This was a take on the character that was a tad reductive at best, to say the least, and lead to a lot of stories in which Bishop was genuinely bland and personality-free – because the context in which his interesting, distinct weirdness defined itself had been stripped away.
The current version of the character is genuinely wrecked, I think – you can’t simply say that murdering billions of people is fine because it happened “in the future” or whatever; if that were the case, I guess Apocalypse could hang out with the team, right? – and it would take serious retconning or time-travel shenanigans to make him usable again. What boggles the mind is that it seemed like that was exactly what they were going for with that Uncanny plotline, but nope.
On this actual storyline: this was clearly a sloppy rush job of a project. Just looking at the art, and the spectacular nosedive it takes throughout – you have multiple pencilers and inkers, cramming dull-looking panels with shrunken figures onto the pages. It’s the kind of thing that’s become SOP for DC, but still doesn’t get called out as much at Marvel, which still enjoys a reputation for prioritizing art a bit more. Plotwise, there’s nothing done to resolve any plots taking place in either book, or to set up a future book – I almost wonder if this started out as just a crossover between the two X-Force titles before belatedly it turned into their cancellation party.
IIRC, nobody was using him for awhile before he showed up to kill Hope. Hell, even if they were, he’s a timetraveler. For all we know, decades passed in his life between the issue before he went off the deep end and the issue when he did. Maybe he jumped to 2014, giving a writer time to actually do some character work with him, making his shift from “I’m a Hero!” to “I Nuke Planets” just a titch more organic?
Problems with Bishop:
1. Time travel was overplayed, even by then (he never mixed with Rachel, for example). The denouement of his story was Onslaught, which is a shame. Far better twist for the traitor to actually be Gambit, or Bishop himself, or hell, almost anyone. The initial plot had a lot of mileage as somany x-characters were acting oddly or under suspicion (Gambit, Psylocke, Cable, to name a few). Shame itran out of stem.
2. Boring power. Really boring. Give me shooting lasers out my eyes any day, or manipulating the weather. Converting energy…? Er… at least Gambit’s power, which is equally dull, has a great visual with the kinetic playing cards.
3. No personality. As ive said before, at least all characters under Claremont had verbal tics and patterns of speech to be recognisable (I’d say Emma and Deadpool are the only later characters to have these). How does Bishop speak?? I should note it is not just him who suffers this…
4. No real agenda. He wants to kill Hope… why?? It was never ever clear!!
In his favour, i would say the character could be reused. Keep him a villian, lord knows the x-men ran out of baddies as they all went good. (On that note, keep Illyana evil and have Colossus join her! Way more interesting and natural progression for all characters…). Or, pair him with Sage for some dysfunctional chemistry. Bishop can be used well (I liked peter david’s use of Bishop and Fitzroy in the future in X-Factor..). Otherwise, he has sadly run his course.
P.s was it ever explained why Spiral cared about Ginny, or what Ginny could actually do??
I just realised this thread existed. I like Bishop too. He’s an Aborigine, sort of. National pride.
Anyway, to redeem Bishop is easy. You know all those people he killed? that never happened. They’re all still alive. At least one’s in the Avengers right now. Some aren’t even born. The only places most of his crimes actually exist are in the heads of himself, Cable, and Hope. Spider-Man’s raison de thingy is that he thinks he killed his uncle. One moment of clarity, of remorse, and Bishop suddenly has the most powerful reason to atone and be a hero of any character. And team mates are unlikely to care so much that he killed a bunch of people who don’t exist.
And of course he has a personality. He’s dour, driven, idealistic to a kind of dark but noble cause, remorseless but noble(ish) and he’s the one X-Man who never, ever, EVER quits.
“You know all those people he killed? that never happened. They’re all still alive. At least one’s in the Avengers right now. Some aren’t even born.”
Except that this isn’t how time travel works in Marvel comics. Bishop didn’t kill billions of people in some dream sequence – he killed them in real life, just a real life that happened to exist in the future. Bishop and Cable are themselves from the future – that doesn’t make them any less real than, say, Storm, who has spent her life in the “present.”
Like it or not, the crimes Bishop committed are very real – and those crimes are as monstrous as anything most X-Men villains have committed (even Apocalypse, who is typically held up as the ne plus ultra of evil in the X-universe, hasn’t killed as many people as Bishop did in that storyline). So without a massive retcon, the character is toxic right now.
Heh. Maybe Bishop should hunt himself through the timeline. An infinitely recursive Wile E. Coyote, with causality as his backfiring boulder trick.
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Lol, reminds me of what Jon Stewart said to Arnold Schwarzenegger while interviewing him shortly after Arnold’s infidelity/love child mess came to light.
Stewart – “Why don’t you just go back in time and kill that Arnold?”
Yeah, Bishop killed billions of people, but in a way that only affected him and two others (both still alive. It’s a crime that wouldn’t stand in any court. I’m not saying they should pretend it didn’t happen, on the contrary it should be central to the character. I’m saying that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he’s just a guy. He can still operate. He only needs to seek his own forgiveness – and that might never come.
@Si – Unless they Parallax him, he’s effectively ruined. He’s damaged in the eyes of readers by the fact that he committed genocide the first place. Taking the consequences of those actions away doesn’t change that and it really doesn’t matter how the MU regards him. It matters how readers regard him. Okay, granted I never liked Bishop to begin with, but swap him out with a character I do (or did) like and that’s how I’d feel about it.
Though personally, I don’t think the genocidal stuff is that bad. I think what’s even worse is the fact that he took up baby-hunting and sucked at it. “Oh no! Bishop is chasing us! Quick, hop into that stroller!”
@Si – That would work for almost any character, but not Bishop. The man is from the future. Bishop, Cable and Rachel can’t hand-wave actions that have happened in the future because by the same token, it would mean that anybody who killed them now had not committed a crime. After all, they haven’t been born yet. How can you kill someone when they haven’t even been conceived yet?
Besides, even leaving aside the billions he has killed in the past (of his own personal timeline), there is the minor fact that he tried to murder a baby.
@Niall – Just a correction: Cable has already been born.
All right, I’m going to go ahead and say it: I liked Chris Claremont’s “I’m a cop, I’m a cop” Bishop.
Obviously, the dialog was face-palmingly on-the-nose, but the idea of the pro-establishment X-Man fit Bishop’s history particularly well and gave him a unique role in the X-universe (which otherwise consists almost entirely of rebels and misfits).
I consider his role in “District X” an extension of that idea, and like many commenters above, I rather liked the book.
I haven’t followed the latest incarnation of “Uncanny X-Force”, so I don’t know if it’s still an option, but I remember Paul theorizing, during the last “Cable” run, that this might be another Bishop from a slightly different future than prior Bishop. I think I’d like that please.
Fantomex actually killed a child and he’s going to be teaching at the JG School soon.
Storm ripped out the heart of a teenager and Wolverine stabbed one through the heart. Both of them are headmasters of the school.
So, I don’t see why a failed attempt at baby-killing would disqualify anyone from being an X-man.
The endangerment of young lives is basically required.
See, I actually disagree that trying to kill a baby is the worst thing Bishop has done. The worst thing he’s done is actually murder billions of people.
That doesn’t stop counting because you did it in a different time period. If I traveled back in time to the 1800s and was telling folks about how bad a guy Hitler was, it would be a tad fucked up if people in the nineteenth century reaction was, “Eh, whatevs, those six million Jews haven’t been born yet, so it’s all good.”
Funny you should mention Hitler in this context because I was going to swap him out with Bishop in Si’s argument. Had Hitler survived the end of WWII, then somehow managed to back travel to the 18th or 19th century, repentant or not, I don’t think anyone would argue that he’d be redeemable just because the Holocaust victims haven’t been born yet.
They want to salvage Bishop, they need to retroactively assert that he was under someone else’s influence or he was replaced by a doppelganger or something like that. Feeling bad about having committed genocide isn’t going to cut it.
I agree that murdering billions of people is far worse, but again, in context of the X-men even that doesn’t disqualify someone from membership/forgiveness.
Jean Grey destroyed a populated planet (depending on which retcon you want to follow) and exterminated an entire species in “Here Comes Tomorrow.” You could argue that since that timeline was severed it doesn’t “count.” But you could argue the same for Bishop.
The 616-Beast killed the entire population of an alternate Earth in “Ghost Boxes.”
And I’m not entirely sure, but I believe Namor flooded New York city as an act of terrorism, probably killing some people in the process.
Also, the X-men are friends of the Shiar empire, which has been shown recently as a blood-thirsty, oppressive society (or at least the Shi’ar Empire in the Warbird flashbacks).
Why should the X-men start caring about letting mass-murderers on the team now? Especially, since Bishop was right in a twisted way. If Hope was killed, the phoenix force wouldn’t have come to Earth and wouldn’t have destroyed those planets in its path.
It’s probably best to just “Draco” the whole fiasco and pretend it never happened.
“Jean Grey destroyed a populated planet”
…well, she did, until the retcon reversed that, and it was a Phoenix-created doppelganger all along. And the point of that retcon was precisely that the character couldn’t be used if it was the same character who had committed genocide.
Is your reference to “Here Comes Tomorrow” a reference to Jean killing Sublime? Because that’s one (intelligent) bacterium, not killing a species. Even if Sublime was the last – or only – member of his species, destroying him in essentially an act of self-defense hardly amounts to genocide.
“The 616-Beast killed the entire population of an alternate Earth in ‘Ghost Boxes.’ ”
But does anyone care about “Ghost Boxes”? Much like the Chuck Austen run, it’s almost been retconned away simply from the sheer force of everyone already wanting it to be gone already.
“And I’m not entirely sure, but I believe Namor flooded New York city as an act of terrorism, probably killing some people in the process.”
Namor has always flip-flopped between hero and villain, and the very fact that he was recruited to the X-Men at all can probably be comfortably filed away in a drawer labeled Really Bad Decisions Scott Summers Was Making For A While, along with “bring all the mutants in the world to one place on the floating remains of Asteroid M” and “put Wolverine in charge of a team that kills whoever they want.”
Look, I like Bishop (or at least, I’ve liked him in the past). But you can’t reasonably use a character as a hero when he has willfully and deliberately murdered billions of people. I realize the bar for heroism has fallen pretty low in comic books, but Captain Genocide is still too squicky to join the team.