Brandon Zachary is a freelance writer and has written for CBR since 2018. He covers breakouts on comics, film, television, video games, and anime. He also conducts industry interviews, is a Rotten Tomatoes certified film critic, and knows a LOT about the X-Men. For requests, comments, or to hear one of his many pitches for What If...?, you can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com

Thanks to the wealth of characters and perspectives the series has generated over the years, X-Men stories tend to present plenty of differing views on similar concepts. Many mutants have ideas on what is justified in the name of security, which doesn't line up with anyone else in their orbit. This has been a great source of drama in many modern X-Men titles, and now a particularly effective version of that debate has resurfaced.

Bishop and Dani Moonstar's debate in Bishop: War College #1 (by Jason Holtham, Sean Hill, Victor Nava, and VC's Travis Lanham) speaks to a long-running theme of X-Men stories, and applies a new perspective on one of the oldest debates in the mutant-centric stories. At the heart of it, Moonstar is calling out Bishop over the X-Men's habit of turning students into soldiers. This rejects the peaceful principals at the heart of the team's entire concept in the name of defense.

Moonstar Confronts Bishop About the X-Men's Hypocrisy

The mutant nation of Krakoa has multiple layers of infrastructure, with multiple branches dedicated to different objectives. While the Quiet Council operates as the day-to-day leaders of Krakoa, it falls to the Captain Commander and the War Captains to lead the mutants in any major conflict. Cyclops, Magik, and Psylocke currently serve as the War Captains, while Bishop was elevated to Captain Commander during the events of Inferno. To further push members of the community in the name of combat readiness, Bishop has also established a Krakoa War College, where he's been drilling tactics into a group of young but experienced mutant heroes like Armor and Surge.

Bishop's drill sergeant-esque tendencies bristle against the recruits, which prompts a blunt rebuttal and reassertion of authority from Bishop. He's preparing them like soldiers for a war he's seen up close and personal. But this is contrasted directly by Dani Moonstar, the leader of the New Mutants and one of the primary educators of young mutants on Krakoa. Moonstar directly asks Magik to keep an eye on Bishop's time with his recruits. After weeks of harsh training, Moonstar openly confronts Bishop about his style of leadership, leading the two to have an argument on the beach. It's a debate that eventually inspires Bishop to try an alternate path toward training the young mutants, but this is just the latest in one of the X-Men's longest-running thematic threads.

The X-Men Fluctuate Between Being Soldiers or Students

From the earliest days of the X-Men as a concept, there was a divide between mutants who sought change through unity and peace and those who would try to fix the world with force. The different tactics of the X-Men and the Brotherhood were relatively black and white in terms of morality, but eventually, the lines between intentions blurred. Mutants switched moralities frequently, with villains becoming heroes while heroes exposed darker sides. For the sake of survival, the inherent optimism of the X-Men as a place of learning was steadily chipped away, and instead what is nominally a school quietly became a boot camp.

When Cable became the leader of the New Mutants and shifted them into X-Force, the ensuing tension between Nathan Summers and Charles Xavier played into the chaos and in-fighting of X-Cutioner's Song. The slaughter of Genosha inspired a more militant voice in the Xavier Institute, led by Quinten Quire in the New X-Men story "Riot at Xavier's." The dwindling mutant population left on Earth in the aftermath of House of M saw Cyclops become more cynical and demanding as a leader, with his expectation to treat students as soldiers setting off Schism and the ensuing splintering of the X-Men. At its heart, it's a debate that highlights the inherent hypocrisy of the X-Men as a concept.

The X-Men are a Living Hypocrisy

The X-Men are always cast as peaceful heroes who seek to change the world, but proactive tactics from the team or spin-off groups like X-Force use violent means to deal with threats. They may preach peace in the school, but teach violence in the field. Even a pessimistic view of the team as a means of containing dangerous mutants in a school takes on a darker motivation when introducing a "by any means necessary" motivation. This debate, of how far to harden the young generation of mutants has fueled plenty of debate within the Marvel Universe over the years.

It's an interesting discourse, as the circumstances the X-Men and their students often find themselves in make it a thorny issue. It's something characters actively wrestle with. A mutant war college is a perfect place for such discourses to play out, highlighting the need to find a compromise between two contradictory premises. As the Fall of X is imminent while threats like Orchis and Sinister risk the eradication or corruption of everything the X-Men are meant to mean, violence may be the best way to respond. If that's the case, then the school has ceased to be a school, something characters like Moonstar can't abide by. But Bishop's not necessarily wrong, either. It's the kind of morally dubious debate that's more richly complex than typical good guys versus bad guys.