SDCC: Omar Sy is Bishop! Will His Movie Debut Lead To A Comic Revitalization?

I was born in the 1990’s, sort of. I was actually physically born in 1981, but I was reborn in the early 90’s when I discovered comics. My favorite characters were the X-Men, and one of the most popular X-Men was Bishop. He was a big, cool lookin’, time travelling black dude with a huge gun. He was also super enigmatic, leading to one of the biggest mysteries of the 90’s- who was the X-traitor that caused his dystopian future?

At Comic Con, Fox revealed an official character portrait of Omar Sy in his Bishop gettup! Sy was rumored to play Bishop in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and now it official. Holy moly, my geek out-ometer is at a new high! He looks sooooooo cool, and I can even see his trademark M over his eye. I never thought I would be so excited to see someone get branded with an anti-mutant signifier, but it looks just as bad@$$ as it does in the comics.

Fox also released other cool character portraits of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), and some Wolvie (Hugh Jackman) shots. But to finally see Bishop in all his glory is everything I dreamed it would be.

The past few years have been tough for Bishop in the comics. He had gone from anti-hero to all out maniac super-villain. Even when he turned bad, he was still an empathetic character because he truly believed he had to kill Hope Summers, then a child, in order to stop her from destroying the future. But after some more wacky time traveling adventures, his character disappeared in 2010. Prior to his whole villain persona, I had really gotten to love Bishop. He was sort of a republican mutant who added a diverse outlook on the battle for mutant rights. Recently, he returned in Uncanny X-Force, but it was not the Bishop I yearned for. (It literally was not him, it was his body possessed by some weird @$$ demon bear, WTF!)

Hopefully his character’s big screen debut will lead to revitalization in the comics. I cannot wait!

Here are the other character shots:

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Jay Deitcher, LMSW(@mrdeitcher) is an educator on comic history and runs successful Free Comic Book Day events yearly.  You can see a listing of his incredible articles at JayDeitcher.com.