Oh god. \u00a0Where do we start with this?<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Cable<\/em> ongoing series got off to a shaky start with James Robinson’s Conquest arc. \u00a0Now, it proceeds to jettison the creative team in favour of writer Ed Brisson and penciller Jon Malin, change the numbering to #150, and cast around in Cable’s back catalogue for something that might make a Marvel Legacy arc. \u00a0Since the Legacy remit can be amply satisfied by “dig up something we haven’t mentioned in a while”, and Cable has had an assortment of dead ends over his thirty years in print, there’s no shortage of ammunition.<\/p>\n Brisson opts for the Externals, a plot thread from early\u00a0X-Force<\/em>\u00a0about a hidden group of immortal mutants. \u00a0The Externals aren’t particularly Cable-ish – they were introduced more as a Cannonball plot – but they have a couple of things going for them. \u00a0For one, they exemplify the early nineties style of Rob Liefeld. \u00a0For another, the story kind of ran into the ground without getting a decent resolution, so there are loose threads to pick up. \u00a0You can see the thinking.<\/p>\n But the result is a hopelessly confused mess.<\/p>\n Partly that stems from a total failure to coherently establish the time frame in which anything’s taking place. \u00a0The story is set “thirteen years ago”, with our Cable travelling to the past, and hanging out with characters from the time. \u00a0But later issues tell us (three separate times) that it’s been “more than a decade” since Selene killed some of the Externals. \u00a0And that was in X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#52. \u00a0It even gets a footnote. \u00a0So… it’s been over 23 years in story time since\u00a0X-Force<\/em> #52? \u00a0Really? \u00a0This would actually be just about correct if the Marvel Universe worked in real time – X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#52 was cover dated March 1996 – but\u00a0the Marvel Universe obviously doesn’t work like that, for fairly obvious reasons to do with the characters not being pensioners. \u00a0So the time frame references in this story are all\u00a0utterly baffling.<\/p>\n So, “thirteen years ago”, Candra is murdered by somebody killing Externals. \u00a0Since this is meant to leave Selene as the last one, Cable rounds up Longshot, Doop and Shatterstar to investigate. \u00a0It turns out that Selene is not the killer, and that a bunch of other Externals (being immortal) are not in fact dead, but hanging out with her. \u00a0Cable decides to round up some\u00a0more<\/em> characters for his makeshift team, choosing Armor (who’s apparently already at the Xavier Institute by this time) and a runaway-era X-23, and they hunt down some of the other Externals. \u00a0This leads to one of the few good scenes in the story, where Burke – a very minor\u00a0X-Force<\/em> character – turns out to be a friendly chap who’s bored of repeated impermanent death and simply wants to throw in his lot with anyone who can make it all stop for good. \u00a0Oh, and meanwhile, Selene rounds up Blink to help her. \u00a0Blink\u00a0spends the whole arc as a mind-controlled servant, anyway, because this is apparently somewhere in the gap between Exiles<\/em> and the 2009 “X-Necrosha” crossover.<\/p>\n Looking for unaccounted-for Externals, Cable’s group track down the body of Gideon – the one who actually got a bit of a push in early\u00a0X-Force<\/em> as a hot new villain. \u00a0They find that he’s apparently been in stasis ever since Selene “killed” him. \u00a0But the baddie, it turns out, is\u00a0another<\/em> Gideon, from 3,000 years in the future, who says that he’s come back to stop the Externals. \u00a0Then again, he also says that he’s going to kill them and, as the last surviving External, take all of their power for himself. \u00a0There’s a big fight which takes most of an issue, Selene hooks up with Cable’s team, there’s another big fight. \u00a0There’s a supposedly clever bit where Gideon’s new precognition powers allow him to see what his opponents are going to do, but Cable says that if they clear their minds, then Gideon won’t know what they’re about to do. \u00a0But surely that’s mind reading? \u00a0Anyway, Selene explains that having all the power would just consume Gideon, and then Blink teleports his head off and the story ends.<\/p>\n What was the point of any of that? \u00a0Cable rounds up a bunch of guest stars to help in his quest, and none of them really matter to the story at all. \u00a0Sure, some of them get a moment to show off their powers, but that’s not a reason to clutter the story with so many guest stars who have no connection to the plot. \u00a0And even if you leave that clutter aside, you’re left with a story about Gideon trying to get power for no particularly interesting reason and but then losing when he gets decapitated. \u00a0There may be plenty of busy work to fill the pages, but there’s nothing going on underneath. \u00a0There are some interesting ideas – a flashback to Gideon’s emaciated corpse finally coming back to life three thousand years in the future is nicely done, for example. \u00a0That’s about your lot, though.<\/p>\n Then there’s the art. \u00a0Art on the X-books generally lands somewhere in the range from bland to very good; it’s not often that we get presented with the downright bad. \u00a0But here’s Jon Malin, who has serious problems. \u00a0Occasionally there’s a striking page – there’s a splash of Armor which is actually rather good – but mostly Malin does stilted characters in bland environments. \u00a0If it’s a talky scene, characters either stand statically or pose histrionically; if it’s a fight scene, they just hurl themselves around at random. \u00a0Even at best, the effect is like a poor man’s Whilce Portacio. \u00a0Even if you wanted to make an argument that it echoes the spirit of Cable’s creator, Rob Liefeld, this story isn’t set in that period, and for all his faults, Liefeld’s early nineties X-books at least conveyed a sense of childlike enthusiasm. \u00a0This is just bad.<\/p>\n I can see how this book ended up doing an Externals story for Legacy. \u00a0Pretty much every other decision in here bemuses me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh god. \u00a0Where do we start with this? The\u00a0Cable ongoing series got off to a shaky start with James Robinson’s Conquest arc. \u00a0Now, it proceeds to jettison the creative team in favour of writer Ed Brisson and penciller Jon Malin, change the numbering to #150, and cast around in Cable’s back catalogue for something that […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4056","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\/4056","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=4056"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4058,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056\/revisions\/4058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}