Writing: Jim Lee and Scott Lobdell
Art: John Romita Jr.
What Went Down: Bishop, Malcolm, and Randall track down the last of the evil mutants that Fitzroy brought from the future in #282. They are in the middle of executing the bad guys at a seedy nightclub.
The Gold Team is on its way to stop the future cops. In case you’re curious, Iceman explains that Mikhail Rasputin is at home resting since last issue.
One of the thugs forgets Bishop’s power for a minute and shoots him with a laser, charging him back up. Once the bad guys collect themselves, they focus their gunfire and wind up killing Malcolm and Randall in an explosion. Ah, we hardly knew them.
Bishop swears vengeance when Colossus falls through the ceiling, and the rest of the X-Men show up. Bishop still doesn’t believe they are the real X-Men because they won’t condone violence; he appears to attack them. Then Colossus punches him really hard, and Bishop lands with a pipe sticking through his midsection. The Gold Team realizes that Bishop was really attacking an evil mutant who was targeting Storm. In the mean time, Bishop manages to disappear, despite having a hole through his body.
Bishop flashes back to the future, where Malcolm and Randall are still alive, and they are chasing Fitzroy through some abandoned tunnels. After catching Fitzroy with a neuro-collar, the three stumble upon the remains of the X-Men’s war room, where they watch a distress call from Jean Grey. In it, Jean warns of a betrayal before getting killed by someone off screen.
His curiosity aroused, Bishop goes to a prison called the Pool and meets with a criminal named Lebeau, who is assumed to be the future Gambit. He is also known as the Witness since he is the last person to see the X-Men alive. Bishop tries to get answers from him, but receives nothing except for some vague ramblings. The Witness also alludes to a prior relationship between Bishop and himself.
Fitzroy escapes his cell by absorbing the energy from a rat and lets the rest of the prisoners out. Bishop and his partners go to the basement only to find all of the escapees going into a portal. The three friends decide to follow, and this leads into Uncanny X-Men #282-283.
When Bishop wakes up from his flashback, he is in the X-Men’s medical facility, and he accepts that they really are the X-Men. Professor X asks to be left alone with Bishop, where he presumably learns everything about Bishop’s future. Out in the hall, the Gold Team questions whether or not they should trust Bishop. Professor X calls them all back in and announces that Bishop is the newest X-Man.
How It Was: Quite good, to put it succinctly. The flashback scenes for Bishop go a long way towards defining him as more than just the mutant Punisher, and the deaths of Malcolm and Randall, although completely expected, still lend Bishop a little pathos.
Of course, the best tidbit is the scene in the abandoned war room that starts off the X-traitor subplot. It’s a genuinely surprising and creepy scene with the stuttering video, and who could forget the gravity of the statement, “Professor Xavier was the first to die.” Of course, like most plots, the X-office stretched it out for too many years before resolving it in a completely unsatisfying way. But it was very cool at the time.
John Romita Jr. is up at pencils, and he draws a spectacularly energetic gun battle between all of the time travelers. Unfortunately, the scene does have one awkward hiccup when a bad guy forgets Bishop’s power because the writer needs to remind the reader what he does. Also, it’s a little unclear what causes the explosion that takes out Bishop’s partners, and some of the scenes in the future look more like they take place in space. But these are minor complaints for what is a really, really great issue.
A
No comments:
Post a Comment