Stories of Comics Past: Peter David’s Visit to the X-Men’s Future

Days of Future Past holds the title of the most well known dystopic X-men future. Sentinels hunt the last free mutants while the remaining mutants hatch a plot to halt their present from occurring. The epic story has set the basis for much of the alternate future X-Men stories and parallels other post-apocalyptic futures.

A second less-popular future that awaits the X-Men is somewhat brighter, a world where humanity and mutants living in relative peace, despite the shadow of hatred and violence lurking everywhere. This is the future of Bishop, an X-man who first appeared thanks to Whilce Portacio in 1991.

Bishop arrived while hunting temporal fugitives from his own time and for one reason or another never returned to his own time and joined the X-men’s Gold Team. Bishop remained a mysterious mutant whose back-story was fleshed out in a series of excellent comics by John Ostrander.

Bishop’s future represented a return to Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence. Humans and mutants worked together to rebuild society after a dark age of Hounds (indoctrinated mutants hunting their own) ferreting out their fellows and imprisoning them in camps. After the end of the internment camps, humans and mutants held a fragile peace that could be destroyed at any second. Violent fringe groups, such as the Exhumes (a future Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) and the Emplates (mutant vampires based on the Generation X villain Emplate), preyed on the populace, and there was even an incarnation of the Hellfire Club led by a man named Shaw. The truce seemed destined to end with so many forces working against it.

Fortunately, even in this dangerous time, there were those who upheld justice and worked hard to maintain the peace between the two races of man. There were the XSE, Xavier’s Security Forces. Bishop was just one of these future law enforcers and did what he could to hunt down those that would reignite the war between sapien and superior.

Of course, this future wouldn’t have been possible if not for a key event, which up until this week had yet to be told. Back during the time of the prison camps, when Hounds (indoctrinated mutants hunting their own) ferreted out their fellows in service to a brutal human/Sentinel government and all mutants were branded with an M so that there heritage could not be hidden, a single voice cried out for it to end and bring freedom to the imprisoned mutant populace. This jarring act would become known as the Summers Rebellion and unite the humans and mutants against the Sentinel threat. The Rebellion would later be the basis for the fragile truce maintained by the mutant-human leadership of Bishop’s time.

This future has been mostly ignored for the last decade until Jamie Madrox and Layla Miller took a trip there during the recent line-wide Messiah Complex storyline. Jamie’s duplicate was killed, but Layla Miller remained, a branded prisoner of a mutant internment camp. Her story continued in the new X-Factor Layla Miller one-shot, which came out this week. I had the pleasure of reading it last week, but waited until it released to comment on the book.

Peter David has a good grasp of X-Men history as well as the various mutant characters he is responsible for. He took a reviled one-note character from the House of M mini-series and turned her into a vital member of X-Factor Investigations, despite her only power of ‘knowing stuff’. His X-factor run is a diamond in the rough of the inconsistent X-titles that come out each month. Even though he has characters that most of the other x-writers don’t want to use (likely due to the lack of ‘prestige’ of characters like Wolfsbane, Strong Guy, M, and Rictor), he has created a well-defined cast and doesn’t avoid the long history each of them brings to the table.

David’s dedication to history (whether in marvel comics or the novels he writes) makes him an ideal writer for the telling the history of the Summers Rebellion. He takes elements first introduced in Morrison’s run and adapts them to the future of the Summers clan. An interesting new character is introduced and the first shot in mutant liberation is fired. I really hope that Peter David or another qualified writer returns to this future to continue the story. The rest of the tale of the Summers Rebellion needs to be told after an exciting first chapter.