I have given quite some thought to this story, trying to work it out.<\/p>\n
I mean, I follow it. \u00a0I follow it just fine. \u00a0It’s simple. \u00a0There’s a thingummy called the Time Sword which is desperately powerful, and it’s been split into five parts which are scattered through time. \u00a0A baddy called Conquest is trying to collect the pieces, so that he can re-create the Time Macguffin and use it to control reality. \u00a0Cable is chasing after him. \u00a0So we get a bunch of time jumps where Cable visits various eras, and each time Conquest has been there before him, and there are a bunch of local goons with futuristic technology for Cable to fight. \u00a0After a while Cable meets up with an Incan priest (who has a load of Eternal technology, unrelated to Conquest) and finds out where the other two pieces are.<\/p>\n
So he goes to Russia, where Conquest has just got piece four, and there’s a fight, and Cable says he’s going on ahead to the fifth piece. \u00a0Conquest follows with an army of goons, and seemingly beats Cable to get the last piece, but wait! \u00a0It’s a fake, and when Conquest tries to use the Sword it doesn’t work properly and he gets lost in time.<\/p>\n
And that’s it. \u00a0Five issues. \u00a0That’s it.<\/p>\n
But the point was… what, exactly?<\/p>\n
This has the hallmarks of a troubled production. \u00a0It’s written by James Robinson, who doesn’t stick around for the next arc. \u00a0It’s drawn by Carlos Pacheco… until a fill-in artist has to do the end of issue #3, and Yildiray Cinar winds up doing the last two issues. \u00a0This isn’t to say that the art is bad, by the way – it’s very decent, and both artists get the importance of selling the local colour for each stop. \u00a0But beyond that, what’s it about? \u00a0This is James Robinson writing; he can be hit or miss these days, but he’s rarely pointless.<\/p>\n
Let’s take a step back. \u00a0Cable was the quintessential early-nineties character. \u00a0He started as pseudo-paramilitary antihero with impractically large guns and gritty ethics that put him at odds with more traditional superheroes. \u00a0Then, on top of that, he was saddled with an insanely convoluted back story. \u00a0Yet he’s still here, 28 years after his creation.<\/p>\n
As it turned out, if you dialled back on the big guns and just ignored the more intractable bits of his continuity (which weren’t central anyway) there was a reasonably viable character in there. \u00a0If you wanted to go with his history, he was basically a time traveller who had come back to avoid a dystopian future, which is a fairly solid trope. \u00a0If you weren’t even bothered about that, he could simply be a reliable old soldier, a sort of sci-fi Nick Fury. \u00a0Ironically, instead of being the gritty rebel against traditional superheroic values, he turned out to work rather well as a straight man for disruptive characters like Deadpool to kick against.<\/p>\n
So James Robinson’s idea seems to be to try and purify the character even further, and focus on the idea that he’s the time travel hero who sorts out time travel problems. \u00a0In a sense that is indeed his unique selling point in the current Marvel Universe. \u00a0And I can see that there might be some mileage in the idea that Cable’s doesn’t really have an era where he’s entirely at home, and could be having all sorts of adventures in parallel in other settings entirely. \u00a0That series is basically\u00a0Dr Who<\/em>\u00a0(in “historical” mode) with the lead replaced by the wandering western hero archetype, and it could work.<\/p>\n But this… this is Cable chasing a one-dimensional villain through a bunch of locations where he fights the local henchmen and (Incas aside) doesn’t do a huge amount else. \u00a0The story is a chase for a macguffin, and the pay-off is that when part of the macguffin is replaced with another macguffin, a plot device ensues. \u00a0Maybe the plan was to set up Conquest for a future story, but it’s hard to see what’s interesting about him here.<\/p>\n It’s boiled down too far, I think. \u00a0It’s distilled to the point where (despite the artists’ best efforts) you lose the appeal of time jumping, which is to play with the other locations; they all just become superficially different backdrops for the same stuff to happen.<\/p>\n With a lot of squinting, I can imagine what the idea might have been. \u00a0But it’s a misfire, and a bad one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have given quite some thought to this story, trying to work it out. I mean, I follow it. \u00a0I follow it just fine. \u00a0It’s simple. \u00a0There’s a thingummy called the Time Sword which is desperately powerful, and it’s been split into five parts which are scattered through time. \u00a0A baddy called Conquest is trying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3920,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions\/3920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}