Before the "& Deadpool" days
So I've spent a few days digging through old comics featuring Cable's pre-C&DP appearances. Yeah - this even despite everyone being so helpful as to answer with a big 'nah, don't bother' to my question about how much I should worry about getting early canon right. Don't think I'm not pleased with that response though - when it comes to the really early stuff, I can rarely work up the interest to do more than skim-read, so it's nice to know no-one expects anything more. Even despite how I'm usually a big fan of kid-superhero groups, it's almost embarrassing just how difficult it's been to work up any real interest in the New Mutants/X-Force team - even the ones I kind of want to like based on more interesting things that have been done with them since. Then there's Cable, who, well. It does make a change to see an adult who doesn't believe the kids have to be coddled and protected 24/7, but Cable in his earliest appearances is such a humourless bastard most of the time it's hard to find more than the barest framework of the character I liked so much in Cable & Deadpool.
The good news is they do start building on that framework earlier than I'd counted on (I'd have given up far sooner if they hadn't). I know I'm biased by how much I want to find things to like, but once you get to the issues where the clusterfuck that is his family history get dealt with, there's a lot of material I genuinely enjoyed. Among the really important things I hadn't picked up from bios and web-discussion are that Cable arrived back in time with no idea he was from that era - let alone that Cyclops was his father. He had no idea that Stryfe was his clone (ah, the advantages of face-concealing helmets), or that he even had a clone. When a guy is as high-and-mighty as Cable, goshdarn but it's fun seeing him thrown off his stride as hard as he was when all those revelations came out, and it finally made it possible to empathise with the guy. And at least when we do have to put up with his uncompromising-bastard moments, there's generally at least one character around going 'damn, I hate what an uncompromising bastard Cable is', which makes you feel a lot better about it.
One of the few things that did impress me about the early comics was how many background details about him they were setting up years before they got to explain them in full - his history with Six Pack being the main one. With that in mind, I'm not sure whether to be impressed or unimpressed by how much the same issues make me wonder how many years it took before even the writers decided on most of the features that have defined him since: that he's from the future (probably very early on?), that he's telekinetic (I have no idea), that he's Scott's son (probably long before it was revealed officially, but I'd be very surprised if it was part of his initial concept), that Stryfe is his clone and Tolliver his son (probably the former well before the latter), that his mission centres around stopping Apocalypse (this I'm pretty sure they had no idea about for years), or that his mechanical arm is the result of a Techno Organic infection rather than just a regular bionic and responsible for keeping his powers in check (if this wasn't a big retcon, I'd be very surprised). Would love to hear if anyone knows any of these, or feels like asking the creators about it they happen to run into them at a con sometime, anyway.
If you need any further proof of just how little they bothered to set in stone at the start, you need look no further than how the extent of the TO infection varies from artist to artist - it could be anything from just his arm, to his arm and varying amounts of his torso, to pretty much the entire left side of his body. Yes - including his face, though on this account at least they're more consistent with the explanation that most of the time he has it covered with synthetic skin. This actually makes a lot of sense when you remember he's supposed to have a bionic eye, so at least some of the TO infection must have spread that far. Actually, while we're on the subject, apparently the fact that it glows has nothing to do with it being bionic, but is rather some kind of weird genetic nod to his father's mutant ability (and which does make sense considering that Stryfe and Nate Grey have the same eye despite having no TO infection - are you taking notes yet?). Why he doesn't bother putting synth skin over his arm is a whole other question - maybe it just doesn't last as long once he starts punching through doors and whatnot.
Anyway, for anyone else interested in seeing a bit more of Cable's pre-C&DP days, I can recommend at least the following as being worth tracking down.
Blood and Metal: Cable's first two issue mini-series, dealing with his falling out with Six Pack and discovery of who's face is under Stryfe's mask.
X-Cutioner's Song: Here's where most of the big revelations about Scott/Cable/Stryfe finally come to light. Massive fifteen issue crossover event spanning four different X-titles, every active X-character of the time, plus Stryfe and lackeys plus Apocalypse and lackeys plus Mr Sinister in the background somewhere and it's all huge and chaotic and I may have kind of enjoyed it to bits. *cough*
X-Force 26: I just had to list this one, because it's the issue where Cable reunites with the team after the events of X-Cutioner's Song, and you aren't going to believe this but it's cute! There are hugs! Cable coming clean about his past! Cable apologising for every time he went overboard! And then having kind of a bad run in with Magneto, but the mood mostly survives.
Cable 5-8: Listed mostly for completeness, as this wraps up the remaining mysteries around Cable and Stryfe, and also Tolliver who (just in case we hadn't fucked with Cable's head enough lately) has just turned out to be his brainwashed son. Personally, I found it a bit hard to get into the whole drama over who was the original and who was the clone (I mean, seriously, who cares? You're genetically identical and everything else is nurture!) and the execution is pretty seriously lacking in the subtlety department, but at least it ties off most of the loose ends.
Fun fact: Most of the above was actually written by Fabian Nicieza. Of course, he was also responsible for most of those X-Force issues I never got into, but he's been making Cable likeable for a lot longer than I'd realised.
I've poked through some of the later big events featuring Cable, but didn't really get as much out of them. The Onslaught arc seemed to suffer from too many different things happening in too many different titles (most of which I wasn't that interested in and many of which contributed practically nothing to the overall story). The Twelve - supposedly the big showdown against Apocalypse - had a little less of this, but instead lost me by never bothering to justify in any coherent manner what made the 'twelve' so important, beyond self-fulfilling prophesy ('the bad guy is after them because the prophesy says they're important, and the prophesy says they're important because the bad guy will be after them') or 'collect one of each element and two of the important ones' pokemon-completionism. Also, the abject failure of any of the good guys to prevent the bad guys from abducting even one of their targets while playing straight into their hands got old fast. I think I can safely say that the single most important thing to happen anywhere in the whole Twelve saga was an extended (and very nicely drawn) scene of Nate Grey and Johnny Storm naked in the shower in one of the early tie-in issues (#59 if you're curious).
Didn't bother with the 'Ages of Apocalypse' arc which followed it either - couldn't work up the enthusiasm - though I did enjoy the 'Search for Cyclops' miniseries that concluded it, and that featured Cable finally getting a reasonably lasting victory over Apocalypse. Well written, nicely paced and good art, though if there's a reason why Jean suddenly seems to have lost her telekinesis for the whole story arc, they didn't bother to explain it.
On reflection, I think there's a lot to be said for why X-Cutioner's Song worked so much better for me than almost any similar event since: it took over exactly four team-oriented titles in a regular sequence to tell one, coherent story, introduced every important character early on and kept them relevant (so you didn't feel like you were reading about a million characters you hated for one page of the one you were interested in), and didn't confuse things with excess tie-in issues from titles that weren't essential to the main plot. When a character's been co-opted for a big event, there's a nasty tendency for their own titles to find themselves reduced to producing a whole issue which ties into the event (for marketing/continuity reasons) but in which absolutely nothing happens. You get a whole issue of introspection, of random dream sequences, of the character attempting something which fails miserably and leaves them back at square one at the end - issues which equate to the kind of scenes that any decent movie director leaves on the cutting room floor (occasionally these are still excellent stories, but that's far more the exception than the rule). Alternately, the issue is important, and everyone following the story finds themselves inexplicably having to pick up Hulk #451 to find out what was supposed to have happened X-Men #34 and #35. If Marvel insists on crossover spectaculars, surely there's got to be a better way of handling these things. Issue 40 of Cable & Deadpool is a pretty classic example of 'absolutely nothing happens' - but 41-42 are absolutely vital in giving covering the consequences of the event (ie, goodbye Cable and Providence ;_; ) for the C&DP title, though you could probably skip them completely if you were only in it for the X-Men plot. It's a good example of one time the tie-in wasn't so important that anyone reading the big event has to pick up every tie-in issue to follow what's going on, but not so meaningless that there was no need to include it. The Civil War tie-ins were also unusually good - though it's unfortunately true that most of the tie-in issues were infinitely superior to the main event itself.
When you have an event as big scale as Secret Invasion or Civil War, I'm sure it is easier to find ways to give characters their own little side plots, that fit into the landscape of the event without being either crucial or meaningless - but I still made it only a couple of issues into Secret Invasion before the feeling that I needed to be reading a dozen other titles to make head or tail of what was going on made me give up. The latest big event, Dark Reign - centred around the idea that everyone wants to kill Norman Osborne - is stuck more in the meaningless category, since when everyone wants to kill the same guy, 99% are only going to get to fail at it repeatedly. It's a problem - the sales figures for big events speak for themselves, but I can only imagine how many fans drop a title because they can no longer figure out how many other books they're supposed to be reading to make head or tail of what's going on these days.
...okay, got a little carried away on that tangent there. Where was I? Right - early Cable issues.
I guess the bottom line is that there’s a surprising amount of fairly decent stuff, packed in between a not-at-all-surprising even greater quantity of ‘meh’. With no consistent ongoing story to ground things (no Providence yet, and Apocalypse can’t be expected to stop by every week) there’s not a lot to keep me reading, but Cable mellows out early enough to become a decently likeable character in his own right. It’s hard to picture 90’s Cable watching an old friend get himself ripped in half while doing him a favour without so much as a word of concern or gratitude, anyway. But that’s a whole other rant. >.>
The good news is they do start building on that framework earlier than I'd counted on (I'd have given up far sooner if they hadn't). I know I'm biased by how much I want to find things to like, but once you get to the issues where the clusterfuck that is his family history get dealt with, there's a lot of material I genuinely enjoyed. Among the really important things I hadn't picked up from bios and web-discussion are that Cable arrived back in time with no idea he was from that era - let alone that Cyclops was his father. He had no idea that Stryfe was his clone (ah, the advantages of face-concealing helmets), or that he even had a clone. When a guy is as high-and-mighty as Cable, goshdarn but it's fun seeing him thrown off his stride as hard as he was when all those revelations came out, and it finally made it possible to empathise with the guy. And at least when we do have to put up with his uncompromising-bastard moments, there's generally at least one character around going 'damn, I hate what an uncompromising bastard Cable is', which makes you feel a lot better about it.
One of the few things that did impress me about the early comics was how many background details about him they were setting up years before they got to explain them in full - his history with Six Pack being the main one. With that in mind, I'm not sure whether to be impressed or unimpressed by how much the same issues make me wonder how many years it took before even the writers decided on most of the features that have defined him since: that he's from the future (probably very early on?), that he's telekinetic (I have no idea), that he's Scott's son (probably long before it was revealed officially, but I'd be very surprised if it was part of his initial concept), that Stryfe is his clone and Tolliver his son (probably the former well before the latter), that his mission centres around stopping Apocalypse (this I'm pretty sure they had no idea about for years), or that his mechanical arm is the result of a Techno Organic infection rather than just a regular bionic and responsible for keeping his powers in check (if this wasn't a big retcon, I'd be very surprised). Would love to hear if anyone knows any of these, or feels like asking the creators about it they happen to run into them at a con sometime, anyway.
If you need any further proof of just how little they bothered to set in stone at the start, you need look no further than how the extent of the TO infection varies from artist to artist - it could be anything from just his arm, to his arm and varying amounts of his torso, to pretty much the entire left side of his body. Yes - including his face, though on this account at least they're more consistent with the explanation that most of the time he has it covered with synthetic skin. This actually makes a lot of sense when you remember he's supposed to have a bionic eye, so at least some of the TO infection must have spread that far. Actually, while we're on the subject, apparently the fact that it glows has nothing to do with it being bionic, but is rather some kind of weird genetic nod to his father's mutant ability (and which does make sense considering that Stryfe and Nate Grey have the same eye despite having no TO infection - are you taking notes yet?). Why he doesn't bother putting synth skin over his arm is a whole other question - maybe it just doesn't last as long once he starts punching through doors and whatnot.
Anyway, for anyone else interested in seeing a bit more of Cable's pre-C&DP days, I can recommend at least the following as being worth tracking down.
Blood and Metal: Cable's first two issue mini-series, dealing with his falling out with Six Pack and discovery of who's face is under Stryfe's mask.
X-Cutioner's Song: Here's where most of the big revelations about Scott/Cable/Stryfe finally come to light. Massive fifteen issue crossover event spanning four different X-titles, every active X-character of the time, plus Stryfe and lackeys plus Apocalypse and lackeys plus Mr Sinister in the background somewhere and it's all huge and chaotic and I may have kind of enjoyed it to bits. *cough*
X-Force 26: I just had to list this one, because it's the issue where Cable reunites with the team after the events of X-Cutioner's Song, and you aren't going to believe this but it's cute! There are hugs! Cable coming clean about his past! Cable apologising for every time he went overboard! And then having kind of a bad run in with Magneto, but the mood mostly survives.
Cable 5-8: Listed mostly for completeness, as this wraps up the remaining mysteries around Cable and Stryfe, and also Tolliver who (just in case we hadn't fucked with Cable's head enough lately) has just turned out to be his brainwashed son. Personally, I found it a bit hard to get into the whole drama over who was the original and who was the clone (I mean, seriously, who cares? You're genetically identical and everything else is nurture!) and the execution is pretty seriously lacking in the subtlety department, but at least it ties off most of the loose ends.
Fun fact: Most of the above was actually written by Fabian Nicieza. Of course, he was also responsible for most of those X-Force issues I never got into, but he's been making Cable likeable for a lot longer than I'd realised.
I've poked through some of the later big events featuring Cable, but didn't really get as much out of them. The Onslaught arc seemed to suffer from too many different things happening in too many different titles (most of which I wasn't that interested in and many of which contributed practically nothing to the overall story). The Twelve - supposedly the big showdown against Apocalypse - had a little less of this, but instead lost me by never bothering to justify in any coherent manner what made the 'twelve' so important, beyond self-fulfilling prophesy ('the bad guy is after them because the prophesy says they're important, and the prophesy says they're important because the bad guy will be after them') or 'collect one of each element and two of the important ones' pokemon-completionism. Also, the abject failure of any of the good guys to prevent the bad guys from abducting even one of their targets while playing straight into their hands got old fast. I think I can safely say that the single most important thing to happen anywhere in the whole Twelve saga was an extended (and very nicely drawn) scene of Nate Grey and Johnny Storm naked in the shower in one of the early tie-in issues (#59 if you're curious).
Didn't bother with the 'Ages of Apocalypse' arc which followed it either - couldn't work up the enthusiasm - though I did enjoy the 'Search for Cyclops' miniseries that concluded it, and that featured Cable finally getting a reasonably lasting victory over Apocalypse. Well written, nicely paced and good art, though if there's a reason why Jean suddenly seems to have lost her telekinesis for the whole story arc, they didn't bother to explain it.
On reflection, I think there's a lot to be said for why X-Cutioner's Song worked so much better for me than almost any similar event since: it took over exactly four team-oriented titles in a regular sequence to tell one, coherent story, introduced every important character early on and kept them relevant (so you didn't feel like you were reading about a million characters you hated for one page of the one you were interested in), and didn't confuse things with excess tie-in issues from titles that weren't essential to the main plot. When a character's been co-opted for a big event, there's a nasty tendency for their own titles to find themselves reduced to producing a whole issue which ties into the event (for marketing/continuity reasons) but in which absolutely nothing happens. You get a whole issue of introspection, of random dream sequences, of the character attempting something which fails miserably and leaves them back at square one at the end - issues which equate to the kind of scenes that any decent movie director leaves on the cutting room floor (occasionally these are still excellent stories, but that's far more the exception than the rule). Alternately, the issue is important, and everyone following the story finds themselves inexplicably having to pick up Hulk #451 to find out what was supposed to have happened X-Men #34 and #35. If Marvel insists on crossover spectaculars, surely there's got to be a better way of handling these things. Issue 40 of Cable & Deadpool is a pretty classic example of 'absolutely nothing happens' - but 41-42 are absolutely vital in giving covering the consequences of the event (ie, goodbye Cable and Providence ;_; ) for the C&DP title, though you could probably skip them completely if you were only in it for the X-Men plot. It's a good example of one time the tie-in wasn't so important that anyone reading the big event has to pick up every tie-in issue to follow what's going on, but not so meaningless that there was no need to include it. The Civil War tie-ins were also unusually good - though it's unfortunately true that most of the tie-in issues were infinitely superior to the main event itself.
When you have an event as big scale as Secret Invasion or Civil War, I'm sure it is easier to find ways to give characters their own little side plots, that fit into the landscape of the event without being either crucial or meaningless - but I still made it only a couple of issues into Secret Invasion before the feeling that I needed to be reading a dozen other titles to make head or tail of what was going on made me give up. The latest big event, Dark Reign - centred around the idea that everyone wants to kill Norman Osborne - is stuck more in the meaningless category, since when everyone wants to kill the same guy, 99% are only going to get to fail at it repeatedly. It's a problem - the sales figures for big events speak for themselves, but I can only imagine how many fans drop a title because they can no longer figure out how many other books they're supposed to be reading to make head or tail of what's going on these days.
...okay, got a little carried away on that tangent there. Where was I? Right - early Cable issues.
I guess the bottom line is that there’s a surprising amount of fairly decent stuff, packed in between a not-at-all-surprising even greater quantity of ‘meh’. With no consistent ongoing story to ground things (no Providence yet, and Apocalypse can’t be expected to stop by every week) there’s not a lot to keep me reading, but Cable mellows out early enough to become a decently likeable character in his own right. It’s hard to picture 90’s Cable watching an old friend get himself ripped in half while doing him a favour without so much as a word of concern or gratitude, anyway. But that’s a whole other rant. >.>