{"id":7019,"date":"2021-08-10T21:47:12","date_gmt":"2021-08-10T20:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7019"},"modified":"2021-08-10T21:47:12","modified_gmt":"2021-08-10T20:47:12","slug":"cable-7-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7019","title":{"rendered":"Cable #7-12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>CABLE vol 4 #7-12<\/strong>
\nby Gerry Duggan & Phil Noto<\/strong><\/p>\n

Farewell, Kid Cable. We hardly knew ye.<\/p>\n

Well. We knew him for a bit over two years, in fact. The\u00a0Extermination<\/em> miniseries, then a year of pre-Krakoa\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, and then this solo title. That’s long than Teen Tony Stark managed, isn’t it? Chalk that up as a win!<\/p>\n

Kid Cable was introduced with much fanfare in a baffling plot twist where he showed up and killed his own older self because… Um. Integrity of the timeline something something need to send the Silver Age X-Men home something something bang thud. It never made any sense, and while\u00a0X-Force<\/em> made a heroic effort to convince us that it was something that needed doing to stop time unravelling or something, it was still a plot point which called for an awful lot of goodwill from readers willing to shrug their shoulders and accept that random gibberish just\u00a0happens<\/em> in time travel stories.<\/p>\n

This is not a promising thing to have at the heart of a character. Kid Cable was being rehabbed almost from the moment he first appeared.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And yet\u00a0Cable<\/em> worked, more or less. In large part, it did that by leaning in to the absurdities of the character and the whole Krakoan set-up. This is Krakoa as the refuge where everyone just gets to be more or less happy for a while, and teen Cable gets to enjoy banal family life with Scott and Jean (and sister Rachel, for that matter). And while previous stories had played this version of Cable as a scaled down version of the gun-toting Cable Classic, Gerry Duggan dumps the gun, dumps most of the experience, and plays Cable Jr as a naive child.<\/p>\n

Maybe that’s a bit overplayed. He’s still got a back story of growing up in warfare and all that; maybe he’s just a bit giddy about finally getting to live somewhere like this. But\u00a0despite the storylines about child abduction and the like, this volume of\u00a0Cable<\/em> often plays as a gentle comedy. And it makes that work. The book has a ton of charm, and Phil Noto gives a lot of life to young Nathan and his relationship with the permanently eye-rolling Esme from the Stepford Cuckoos. Noto can do understated comedy, and this book calls for a lot of it. It’s a sweet, somewhat goofy comic, done with a character still best known for embodying macho 90s excess.<\/p>\n

So it’s a\u00a0Cable<\/em> book defined by how little it resembles anything to do with\u00a0Cable<\/em>. It could easily have been filled with foreshadowing and such forth, but instead Duggan doesn’t really bother troubling himself with trying to explain how Cable went from this to the character we know. He just leaves that hanging in the background as a reminder that there\u00a0must<\/em> be more to this kid than presently meets the eye.<\/p>\n

The recurring theme in these stories seems to be to pair Cable with one other character – Rachel, or Domino, or Cyclops, or eventually the original Cable. Whether we learn all that much about him from this exercise is, let’s be honest, a little dubious. Ultimately this seems to play out as a warped coming of age story, in which the young Cable starts off thinking that he knows best and that he was right to supplant the older generation (which is obviously what Extermination<\/em> was meant to be getting at – the problem is that the metaphor collapses when you try to make sense of it in terms of the actual plot). Eventually, from his tour of partners and his encounters with Stryfe, he recognises that the world needed his older self after all. It’s time to bring the original back through the miracle of resurrection, and go back to his own time to complete the process of growing into him. Cable learns that he needs to grow up.<\/p>\n

There was a time when comics were aimed at kids who would see teenagers as aspirational figures. These days, the readers are assumed to be adults who look down condescendingly on teenagers. In some ways this is a coming of age story written for that audience – one where the upstart brat learns that the grown ups were right after all. You need a hell of a lot of sparkle to get away with that, but\u00a0Cable<\/em> does.<\/p>\n

It’s tempting to wonder whether the book has been cut short – was there ever really a point to that Galador stuff, or to having Cable join the cast of\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.<\/em>? – but the various flashes of the older Cable throughout this series help to tie things together and give a sense that it was all planned this way. Apparently this really was the idea – a year or so’s worth of stories to reverse Kid Cable and restore the status quo. It\u00a0certainly could wind up feeling in hindsight like a curious diversion, like that time Wolverine spent a year wearing a bandana and growling. But he wound up being likeable in the end, and he didn’t outstay his welcome.<\/p>\n

None of this can quite escape the fact that the plot falls apart if you start looking at it too closely. It’s never really clear why Cable had to kill the older Cable in the first place. And if there was a good enough reason to make Cable Not Crazy, what’s changed? Does Stryfe really have any coherent agenda in here beyond being a dark side of Cable who has endless fights for its own sake? And, again, what was all that with the sword? The book just about<\/em> gets away with a lot of these things by shrugging its shoulders, muttering something about time travel, and grinning sheepishly at the reader. And time travel stories can get away with an awful lot as long as the plot mechanics don’t really matter, and the character arcs land. But it’s still a story on the verge of spinning to pieces. Best not to think about that stuff too closely.<\/p>\n

For all that, though, this was fun. It took a highly questionable character and made him entertaining company for twelve issues, and that’s a good result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CABLE vol 4 #7-12 by Gerry Duggan & Phil Noto Farewell, Kid Cable. We hardly knew ye. Well. We knew him for a bit over two years, in fact. The\u00a0Extermination miniseries, then a year of pre-Krakoa\u00a0X-Force, and then this solo title. That’s long than Teen Tony Stark managed, isn’t it? Chalk that up as a […]<\/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-7019","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\/7019","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=7019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7021,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7019\/revisions\/7021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}