XSE (Marvel) (Ltd. 1996) [COMICS]

Ah, the mid-1990s.  My high school years, when I stepped away from comics for a hiatus and didn't come back until college.  Think of how many convoluted story lines, ridiculously large guns, and skintight suits with pockets everywhere that I missed!  But although I wasn't present for that glorious era in comics, I can revisit it now to see what I missed.

XSE was a four-issue limited series written by John Ostrander that rode the long (and still enduring) popularity of all things X-Men related.  The initials stand for "Xavier's Security Enforcers", which is a group of mutants in a future timeline that help keep the peace in the post-Sentinel world where mutants and humans largely get along.  The series stars Bishop, a mutant capable of absorbing and unleashing energy, and his dead sister Shard who is now a hologram.  Hey, comics!

Issue # 1 starts things off immediately with an appropriately confusing sequence.  Bishop is in the "present-day" Danger Room showing holo-Shard holograms from the future of an evil mutant named Virago fighting XSE.  We then have a sequence of what are best described as "future flashbacks" that provide some backstory to Bishop's and Shard's lives in the future.  It's all a very disjointed and poorly plotted framing story that makes a lot more sense now than it did when I was reading it.  The artwork is classic 1990s terrible, with even the coloring inconsistent.  I really hope something like XSE wasn't someone's first exposure to comics, as that person would have no clue what these strangely distorted, vaguely human-like figures were talking about.

Issue # 2 starts with another "future flashback" to when young Bishop and Shard were cadets at the XSE and attacked by mutant vampires called Emplates.  Shard's mutant powers are triggered and Bishop rallies the other kids until help arrives.  The incident leads to Bishop becoming the youngest XSE officer in (future) history.  We then get a new scene: Bishop's first meeting with other XSE officers, Malcolm and Randall, whom he apparently led into battle where they died.  It's starting to make *slightly* more sense, but it's not more enjoyable.

In Issue # 3, present-day Bishop and holo-Shard watch a hologram of them capturing a dangerous mutant named Mountjoy, and how it led to Shard's promotion.  In the future timeline, she uses the opportunity to develop a hologram-based prototype field agent, but the technology fails and she and Bishop argue about it.  We then have another future flashback to Shard dating someone named Fitzroy.  Again, it's all very disjointed--maybe it's filling in continuity gaps that hardcore X-Men fans would appreciate?  You have to commit to the X-Men like a Talmudic scholar during the late 80s and 90s in order to figure out what's going on, so it's possible.  Anyway, the issue ends with the big explanation of how Shard dies: Fitzroy was evil and betrayed her to the vampiric Emplates.

In Issue # 4, future-flashback Bishop confronts his now dead and now evil sister who has been turned by the Emplates.  He's forced to destroy her, but rushes the body to the lab so he can use the hologram technology she created to replicate her.  The issue then rushes through a bunch of stuff I have no idea about (something about Gambit in the future being "The Witness", and someone called Shackle?).  The mini-series ends with Bishop deciding that Shard should stay with X-Factor instead of joining him on the X-Men.

Wasn't that enlightening for all concerned?