BISHOP

After years of chasing fugitives across centuries, Bishop took the least glamorous posting of his career: a desk and a precinct. The growing mutant population of Manhattan’s Alphabet City had packed into a few rough blocks everyone called Mutant Town, and the ordinary police were losing control of the 11th Precinct that covered it. Because of his standing with the X.S.E., Bishop was assigned there as a federal detective in District X Vol. 1 #1 (2004).

His guide to the neighbourhood was NYPD patrolman Ismael Ortega, a baseline human officer whose own wife was a mutant — which meant the precinct’s problems followed Ortega home every night. Together the two worked cases no regular detective wanted: a street drug brewed from mutant biology and sold as Toad Juice, two mutant crime bosses carving the district into rival territories, and a string of killings traced to mutants living in tunnels beneath the streets.

The assignment ran through District X #1–14 (2004–2005) and into the retitled Mutopia X, and it quietly rewired who Bishop was. The man imported to hunt the X-Men’s supposed traitor spent those issues protecting ordinary mutants from landlords, dealers and each other — police work at walking pace, in a neighbourhood that had decided the law was just another gang with better paperwork.