Latest / Vigilante Vibes Podcast / Ep. 263. Who is Bishop in Marvel Comics?!

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Ep. 263. Who is Bishop in Marvel Comics?! · Vigilante Vibes Podcast

• 0:11
  Hello Marvel fans, comic geeks, and all the nerds between My
• 0:14
  Name is Megan and I'm here with another character breakdown
• 0:16
  today. And it is a course of mutants.
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  And it is a mutant I think should be talked about way more
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  than he actually is. So we're going to talk about
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  Bishop. Lucas Bishop is a character I've
• 0:26
  wanted to make an episode about for quite some time.
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  Even though he's so well known, he is still disrespectfully
• 0:31
  underrated and extremely underused in Marvel Comics, and
• 0:35
  I think it's time we put some respect on our boy's name.
• 0:38
  So Bishop first appeared in Marvel Comics in Uncanny X-Men
• 0:41
  #282 that was in September of 1991, but he was just on the
• 0:46
  cover and the last page, which is a super big tease.
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  He actually had his first full appearance in Uncanny X-Men #283
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  he was created by John Byrne and Weils Portaccio.
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  Lucas Bishop was born into the kind of future that makes every
• 1:03
  dystopian movie look optimistic. Mutants have been shoved into
• 1:07
  concentration camps after a so-called mutant Messiah
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  supposedly killed a million humans.
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  The X-Men were mostly dead, Sentinels ruled everything, and
• 1:17
  humanity basically decided coexistence was a failed group
• 1:20
  project. Bishop and his sister Chard grew
• 1:23
  up in one of these camps with a giant M tattooed on their eyes.
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  Like the government really said, let's make impression extra
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  dramatic. His parents, Australian mutants
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  Burnham and Katie, tried to survive in this nightmare world,
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  but life in the camps crushed everyone.
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  Eventually. Bishop watched his mother slowly
• 1:42
  lose hope before she died, and from a young age, he blamed the
• 1:45
  mutant Messiah for ruining mutant kind forever.
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  So while most kids were learning multiplication tables, Bishop
• 1:52
  was learning generational trauma.
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  Eventually, humans and mutants teamed up in the summer's
• 1:58
  rebellion and overthrew the Sentinels, proving once again
• 2:02
  that humanity only cooperates after things become
• 2:04
  catastrophically bad. But peace didn't magically
• 2:08
  happen afterward. Anti mutant hatred was still
• 2:11
  everywhere, mutant extremist groups were running around, and
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  Bishop's parents ended up dying in the rebellion when he was
• 2:17
  only 7. Casual comic book childhood
• 2:20
  stuff, you know? Separated from his family,
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  Bishop survived on the streets of Manhattan, where a mysterious
• 2:26
  old man called the Witness basically adopted him and taught
• 2:30
  him how to steal. So Bishop's childhood resume at
• 2:34
  this point included concentration camp, survivor,
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  orphan, pickpocket, and deeply angered child.
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  Very, very healthy development. 10 out of 10 would recommend.
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  He eventually reunited with Chard and his grandmother in Las
• 2:49
  Vegas, where his grandmother constantly told stories about
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  the X-Men and Xavier's dream of peace.
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  Bishop honestly was not buying it at first, which is fair and I
• 2:58
  wouldn't have either. To him, the XSE, the mutant
• 3:02
  police officers trying to maintain order were basically
• 3:05
  the enemy while anti human mutant rebels looked like
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  freedom fighters. Then one day, an extremist
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  mutant named Virago grabbed Shard hostage, and little Bishop
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  jumped onto her back without hesitation.
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  Virago was fully ready to Merc this child before the XSC
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  officer named Shershot blasted Virago first.
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  That moment completely changed Bishop's worldview.
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  He realized that the XSE weren't corrupt monsters, but actually
• 3:33
  were people trying to stop the world from falling apart.
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  So naturally, Bishop decided, Yep, that's what I'm going to do
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  now. Soon after, another pair of
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  mutant criminals attacked Bishop and Chard while trying to save
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  his sister. Bishop's mutant powers finally
• 3:48
  kicked in, and two XSE officers were impressed enough to recruit
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  him real quick about his powers. Bishop is basically a walking
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  cosmic power strip. He can absorb any kind of
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  energy, magic, sound, light, psychic attacks, random
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  explosions, and then fire it back however he wants.
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  Energy blasts, plasma, explosions, flaming, chaos, it
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  is all on the menu. But the best part?
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  He can send the energy back the same way he got hit with it,
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  except cranked up to you should have minded your business levels
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  anyways, Bishop agreed on one condition.
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  Shard comes too. Because if there's one thing
• 4:29
  consistent about Bishop, it's that his loyalty to his family
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  is absolutely unmatched, even when comics repeatedly
• 4:36
  weaponized that against him. It's comics, you know?
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  At the XSE Academy, Bishop trained along future psychopath
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  Trevor Fitzroy, which in hindsight should have been a
• 4:47
  gigantic red flag. Bishop and Chard eventually
• 4:51
  became officer, but tragedy hit when Fitzroy indirectly
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  transformed Chard into a horrifying energy draining
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  monster called an M Plate. And because Marvel writers
• 5:02
  apparently saw Bishop smiling once and decided to punish him
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  for it, Bishop was forced to kill his own sister to stop her
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  suffering. Except comics really never let
• 5:12
  people stay dead, usually unless your name is Uncle Ben and Karen
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  Page. Yep, both of them.
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  They're done. Shard's consciousness got
• 5:24
  uploaded into a hologram projector onto Bishop's wrist,
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  meaning Bishop basically walked around with a ghost Wi-Fi sister
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  support for years later, while hunting Fitzroy, Bishop
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  uncovered A cryptic warning from Jean Grey about a traitor among
• 5:38
  the X-Men survivors. Fitzroy escaped through time to
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  the X Men's present era, and Bishop chased him there with two
• 5:45
  friends, Malcolm and Randall, fully aware they had no home.
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  Malcolm and Randall died during the mission, and Bishop got
• 5:53
  wrecked physically and emotionally, and somehow this
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  still wasn't the worst week of his life.
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  He ended up joining the X-Men, though his methods were
• 6:02
  aggressive. Like if an alarm went off and
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  Wolverine might say sneaked and Cyclops might make a plan,
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  Bishop would simply shoot through three walls because the
• 6:12
  doors were apparently optional in his mind, to put it in
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  perspective. Then came time travel disasters,
• 6:19
  alternate timelines, the Age of Apocalypse.
• 6:22
  You might have heard of it. Chronal energy nonsense and
• 6:26
  enough reality rewrites to give anyone a migraine.
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  Bishop became one of the few people who remembered the real
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  timeline during the Age of Apocalypse, meaning he basically
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  carried the burden of knowing the world was fundamentally
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  wrong while everyone else acted normal.
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  Imagine being the only person who remembers the group project
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  got deleted. So he fought alongside the X-Men
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  for years after that, surviving space missions, alien prison,
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  apocalypse and every imaginal cosmic problem.
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  But then came the moment that absolutely broke him.
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  After M day. It always goes back to M day
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  with the mutants. Which it should.
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  It's kind of a big deal. It's when almost all mutants
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  lost their powers that thinks to the Scarlet Witch.
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  The first mutant baby born afterward appeared.
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  Bishop became convinced she was the same mutant Messiah from his
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  future, the one responsible for the death of millions of humans
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  and the destruction of mutant kind.
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  That baby was Hope Summers, and Bishop absolutely lost it.
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  He sabotaged Sentinels, destroyed the Xavier Institute,
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  tried to Merck Hope as an infant as a baby, shot at Cable,
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  accidentally shot Professor Xavier in the head instead.
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  Which is fine, I'm good with it. Stole time travel tech and spent
• 7:46
  literal years chasing Cable and Hope across history like the
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  world's angriest Terminator. The worst part is, the more he
• 7:54
  tried to stop the future, the more suffering he caused.
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  Entire timelines got obliterated because Bishop convinced himself
• 8:01
  that those people weren't real yet anyway.
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  At one point he even teamed up with Strife, which is basically
• 8:07
  the mutant equivalent of saying I can make worse decisions
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  actually. And he still failed.
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  Cable stranded him thousands of years in the future with No Way
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  Home, leaving Bishop alone in a wasteland with nothing except
• 8:19
  regret and enough motional baggage to collapse a star.
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  That's where everything finally changed.
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  A group called the Order saved him and gave him a home and
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  helped him rebuild his life hunting monsters called the
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  Revenants. For the first time in forever,
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  Bishop stopped running on rage alone.
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  Then he met a possessed little girl named Amber during a hunt,
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  and when she begged him not to kill her, he hesitated.
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  That hesitation mattered because for years, Bishop believes
• 8:50
  survival meant making the hard choice.
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  Don't matter the cost. Kill the threat, stop the
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  future. Sacrifice who you have to.
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  But in that moment he realized he'd become the very thing he
• 8:59
  hated, someone willing to destroy innocence in the name of
• 9:02
  fear. Eventually he returned to the
• 9:05
  present, got possessed by a demon bear because apparently
• 9:09
  the universe still was not done hazing him, fought X Force and
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  had his memories tampered with, and finally confronted the
• 9:16
  damage he caused. Hope Summers herself eventually
• 9:19
  had the chance to kill him for everything he'd done to her, and
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  she chose not to. That mercy broke through
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  whatever years of war could not. Since then, Bishop has built
• 9:31
  himself piece by piece, brick by brick.
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  He fought alongside the X-Men again, survived alternate
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  realities, got trapped in worlds where love itself is illegal,
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  and eventually rose to become one of Kirkowa's top military
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  leaders and great captains. At his core, Bishop's story is
• 9:49
  about survival, guilt, and redemption.
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  He started as a man trying to stop for the future from
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  destroying mutant kind, only to become dangerously close to the
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  very thing he feared. What makes Bishop such a
• 10:02
  compelling character, for me at least, isn't that he's perfect.
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  It isn't that he's an absolute Angel.
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  It's because he actually isn't. He absolutely is not.
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  This man has made catastrophically bad decisions.
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  But Bishop is what happens when someone is shaped entirely by
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  trauma, fear, and survival, then spends the rest of their life
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  trying to crawl back from the edge of becoming a monster.
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  He's not a clean cut hero who always makes the right decision.
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  He's the guy who's seen the worst possible future, carried
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  it on his back for years, lost himself trying to stop it, and
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  then kept fighting anyways. Lucas Bishop isn't inspiring
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  because he never fell. He's inspiring because after
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  falling harder than almost anyone in the X-Men world, he
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  still found a way to stand back up.
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  So that is Lucas Bishop. I think he's a fantastic
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  character. He has, like all X-Men, like all
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  mutants, they have such a tragic back story and it's such a
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  tragic upbringing, and I dig that about them.
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  Maybe it's me, maybe I'm the problem.
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  I don't know. So that is my character
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  breakdown for Bishop. I hope you enjoyed it.
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  I hope you'll like and subscribe, and I hope you have a
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  marvelous day.