STORY: "Bishop to King's Five" (23 pages)
Bishop, Malcolm and Randall get into an enormous fight with some of the criminals they're tracking, and Malcolm and Randall get killed. (Well, there's a surprise.) The X-Men find Bishop and take him in. Professor X invites him to join the team.

What you need to know:
Obviously, Malcolm and Randall die, and Bishop joins the X-Men.

But that's not the important bit. The important bit is that this is the issue that starts off the notorious X-Traitor plot, which is finally resolved years later in Onslaught: X-Men.  Bishop reveals that in his timeline the X-Men are believed to have been killed by one of their allies, and that he stumbled across a video recording of a call for help by Jean Grey.  Who is the X-Traitor?  Well, it turns out to be a bit of a copout, but the plot hovers over the book for years to come.

That flashback also contains our first glimpse of Bishop's timeline (which is grim, as you might expect from an alternate future in an X-Men story).  And it reveals how Bishop, Malcolm and Randall ended up in the present.  Basically, they followed the escaping criminals through the portals Fitzroy created in issue #282.

And also in this all-important flashback is the first appearance of the Witness, later identified as an alternate future version of Gambit. The Witness never does anything terribly important, although he does at least do something in the XSE miniseries. But we assume he must be important somehow.

Comments:
With the Posse Comitatus out of the way, the book gets back to the much more interesting Bishop storyline - but without any of its regular creative team.  Portacio doesn't contribute to this issue at all, leaving his co-writer from the other X-Men title, Jim Lee, to provide the plot.  Everything else is left to fill-in creators, with John Romita Jr doing a generally excellent job on the artwork.

This is Scott Lobdell's second issue as scripter, though it would be a misnomer to say he was a member of the regular creative team at this stage (by his own account, he sort of drifted in as an emergency writer, and eventually realised that he seemed to have kept the job).  Although there's some pretty shameless attempts to mimic Claremont's style, the issue actually reads very well, striking an effective balance between showing Bishop as a violent zealot and a genuine hero. It's actually one of the strongest issues of the period, for all its rushed origins.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (last in X-Men Annual vol 2 #1), Jean Grey (last in Wolverine vol 2 #65), Archangel, Colossus, Iceman (all five next in Uncanny X-Men Annual #16), Forge (between X-Men Annual vol 2 #1 and X-Men vol 2 #8), Storm (last in Wolverine vol 2 #51) and Bishop (joins the X-Men; last in issue #285; also in origin flashback following the flashback in XSE #4 and preceding issue #282; the latter two both next in X-Men vol 2 #8, then in the third story in Uncanny X-Men Annual #16)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Malcolm and Randall (both last in issue #285; both die; both also in origin flashback following the flashback in XSE #4 and preceding issue #282)
The Witness (first appearance; a character at one point suggested to be a future version of Gambit, and subsequently retconned into being some form of cross-temporal entity; chronologically last in flashback in XSE #4; next in Bishop: the Last X-Man #2; possibly the same version of the Witness who appears next in Gambit & Bishop #2)

VILLAINS
Styglut (last in issue #283; also in flashback following the flashback in XSE #3 and preceding issue #282, where he is behind the scenes)
Mountjoy (behind the scenes in flashback; last in flashback in XSE #4; next behind the scenes in issue #282)
Bantam I (last in flashback in X-Factor #140), Eye-Beam, Burke and Stylles (chronologically earliest "appearance" for the latter four; all behind the scnenes in flashback only, preceding issue #282)
Onslaught (of Bishop's timeline; behind the scenes in the video footage he finds in the flashback, where he is the person firing on Jean Grey from off camera, as revealed in Onslaught: X-Men; first and only "appearance" of this version of Onslaught)
Trevor Fitzroy (in flashback; last in flashback in XSE #4; next in issue #281)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Jean Grey of Bishop's timeline (on video; first and only appearance)
Shackle (real name unrevealed; first appearance; in flashback only; last in flashback in XSE #4; no further appearances)

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