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Bishop: War College
Bishop: War College (2023) #3
TWO BISHOPS, TWO PASTS — AND ONLY ONE LEADS TO THE FUTURE! Back on Krakoa, Blightswill is sweeping the island, poisoning mutantkind’s sentient paradise. The trainees Bishop left behind are outnumbered and outpowered. Trapped underground and leaderless, can they band together to save their home, or is Orchis’ long game finally about to pay off?
25 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 19, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 21, 2023
*rubs temples* So many layers to my problems with this...
The first and foremost problem, obviously, is that this is not how alternate realities are supposed to work. Marvel uses the bifurcation theory of time travel. That it's impossible to change the past; instead, when you travel to the past, the very act of traveling there splinters the timeline in two. You can stay in the new reality you have created (where you might possibly have a double), or you can go back to the reality you originally came from-- where you would have changed nothing.
The multiverse exists by way of natural splintering. Any choice a person makes creates a new reality. If you go to the Appendix (marvunapp), you'll find a catalogue of a bunch of known alternate realities. What if Magneto had founded the X-Men, what if the Punisher killed Spider-man, etc. Realities start from a common point, but there is supposed to be a bifurcation point where someone made a choice, and the realities diverge from that inflection point.
In this issue, we find out that Bishop isn't just visiting a reality that happens to have a couple of black mutants who style themselves like Cyclops and Jean. Rather, the nature of this reality is that ALL mutants are black. The X-gene is somehow tied to melanin, possibly specifically from the region of Western Africa.
That all by itself I could almost get behind, but I cannot stand that there are black "versions" of all the X-Men here. The artist did his level best to style Mystique and Nightcrawler as "Black," even though they're normally blue. Even the way Destiny's mask was drawn was reshaped, made bumpier, to somehow resemble African art more.
I don't dispute the importance of POC representation in comics. I just take issue with the writers bastardizing continuity to do this. There is no way different choices characters made could result in there being Black "versions" of the characters we already know and love. It's bordering on the offensive to suggest otherwise. What, as if white people can all channel their inner Dolezal and somehow choose to be a different race?
When you realize that these black mutants in this alternate reality are completely different people, who through some strange convergent evolution (rather than the divergent nature of alternate realities) styled themselves along similar lines to white mutants in 616, it becomes a little pathetic. When given the premise that an entirely Black team of mutants could be whatever they want, the writer writes them as second-class versions of popular white mutants.
And how the fuck could there be a nerdy version of Bishop hanging out with the Black version of the X-Men? Bishop isn't a native to the 616 universe. He's from some alternate reality future. The only reason he time-traveled to the 616 present is because he's a police officer on a mission to hunt down Trevor Fitzroy (boy, haven't heard that name in a while) and try to save the X-Men. If this version of Bishop isn't tough, and isn't a cop, what is he doing here? How does he exist in this reality at all?
*Shakes head* If the writer just wanted to start a conversation, they're succeeding. But, this is bad.
Meanwhile, some younger 616 mutants are trying to figure out what the Fenris twins have planned underneath Krakoa. I could almost get behind their subplot, except that Armor and Surge are working with some newbie mutants I neither know nor care about in the slightest.
It would be a whole other can of worms if the writers dared to address the fact Armor and Surge are Asian. Which means they have their own racism and discrimination they have to deal with in the United States. This attempt at a Black Power message gets confused and thrown off kilter when other races are brought into the conversation.
The first and foremost problem, obviously, is that this is not how alternate realities are supposed to work. Marvel uses the bifurcation theory of time travel. That it's impossible to change the past; instead, when you travel to the past, the very act of traveling there splinters the timeline in two. You can stay in the new reality you have created (where you might possibly have a double), or you can go back to the reality you originally came from-- where you would have changed nothing.
The multiverse exists by way of natural splintering. Any choice a person makes creates a new reality. If you go to the Appendix (marvunapp), you'll find a catalogue of a bunch of known alternate realities. What if Magneto had founded the X-Men, what if the Punisher killed Spider-man, etc. Realities start from a common point, but there is supposed to be a bifurcation point where someone made a choice, and the realities diverge from that inflection point.
In this issue, we find out that Bishop isn't just visiting a reality that happens to have a couple of black mutants who style themselves like Cyclops and Jean. Rather, the nature of this reality is that ALL mutants are black. The X-gene is somehow tied to melanin, possibly specifically from the region of Western Africa.
That all by itself I could almost get behind, but I cannot stand that there are black "versions" of all the X-Men here. The artist did his level best to style Mystique and Nightcrawler as "Black," even though they're normally blue. Even the way Destiny's mask was drawn was reshaped, made bumpier, to somehow resemble African art more.
I don't dispute the importance of POC representation in comics. I just take issue with the writers bastardizing continuity to do this. There is no way different choices characters made could result in there being Black "versions" of the characters we already know and love. It's bordering on the offensive to suggest otherwise. What, as if white people can all channel their inner Dolezal and somehow choose to be a different race?
When you realize that these black mutants in this alternate reality are completely different people, who through some strange convergent evolution (rather than the divergent nature of alternate realities) styled themselves along similar lines to white mutants in 616, it becomes a little pathetic. When given the premise that an entirely Black team of mutants could be whatever they want, the writer writes them as second-class versions of popular white mutants.
And how the fuck could there be a nerdy version of Bishop hanging out with the Black version of the X-Men? Bishop isn't a native to the 616 universe. He's from some alternate reality future. The only reason he time-traveled to the 616 present is because he's a police officer on a mission to hunt down Trevor Fitzroy (boy, haven't heard that name in a while) and try to save the X-Men. If this version of Bishop isn't tough, and isn't a cop, what is he doing here? How does he exist in this reality at all?
*Shakes head* If the writer just wanted to start a conversation, they're succeeding. But, this is bad.
Meanwhile, some younger 616 mutants are trying to figure out what the Fenris twins have planned underneath Krakoa. I could almost get behind their subplot, except that Armor and Surge are working with some newbie mutants I neither know nor care about in the slightest.
It would be a whole other can of worms if the writers dared to address the fact Armor and Surge are Asian. Which means they have their own racism and discrimination they have to deal with in the United States. This attempt at a Black Power message gets confused and thrown off kilter when other races are brought into the conversation.
May 25, 2023
Levando em conta que esse é o volume 3/5, e a quantidade de páginas de cada volume também, tô começando a achar a história em si e a solução das coisas meio simples/fácil demais.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews