Cable & Deadpool #27

Original posted to facebook.

WARNING: This Review Contains Spoilers

I've just read 27 issues of Cable & Deadpool and I've thought long and hard about it.... It sucks. It really does. I heard that this series when it came out was like SO AWESOME!! GAAAAH!!! A lot of times I get annoyed by hype of anything but in the case of Deadpool's own original monthly series I found the hype was deserved as that series was amazing. But as for Cable & Deadpool, this series just went from mildly disappointing to why did anyone buy this in the first place for me. Don't get me wrong. It's not all bad. This series is like the Star Trek Voyager of X-men books. It has it's moments of awesome. If you pick up this book you will be rewarded with Cable and Deadpool occasionally doing awesome things, other kickass Marvel characters doing awesome things, and the general sci-fi action that makes comics worth reading. I've had fun reading this comic and you will probably enjoy a lot of it as well, however this comic has some absolutely terrible writing. What saves this comic is there is a great deal of cool shit happening that distracts you from the why it's happening and as of the conclusion of the Blood of Apocalypse prequel it's become too stupid to ignore.

So what sucks about this book?

1.Cable.

Cable was created by brain trust Rob Liefeld to be a generic 80s action hero who blows shit up. He endured because he was good at blowing shit up and had a gritty bitter quality that made him intriguing and made us want to know more about this mysterious byronic hero. As a mutant cyborg, he as well as many stories connected to him in 90s Marvel had a very cyberpunk feel and theme to them and that along with the Liefeld inspired para-military look that was prevalent at the time with many characters particularly in X-men created a look and feel I feel of his stories I like to call Mutant Punk: there was just an oddly large number of mutant dudes at that time that ran around with huge guns and cybernetics for no reason and that's just part of X-men's history now and I'm cool with that. Cable used to run around killing random criminals and dictators for no real discernable reason. Eventually Marvel thought it might be a great idea to make the character have, you know, a point, so it was eventually revealed he was Cyclops' son from the future in a world where Apocalypse rules the world with an iron fist and he has traveled back in time to kill him and prevent that future. So this alone with the Days Of Future Past storyline is X-men paying homage to the Terminator franchise (great minds think a like, or at least rip off good ideas ) and basically Cable is Kyle Reese. Or Trunks for you kids who watch to much anime. He finally got his opportunity to kill Apocalypse and prevent his sucky future in the Twelve storyline where he finally killed Apocalypse and as far as I can tell regardless of Apocalypse eventually getting better this has not been undone. He achieved exactly what he set out to do.

So what's wrong with him here?

Since killing Apocalypse, Cable has turned into an arrogant time traveling Jesus figure who wants to save the world by violating every nations soverignty, infected us all with a virus that turns us pink and will eventually melt us to death only to reverse it at the last second to get us to “wake up” and change our ways, and basically just pics a fight with a bunch of concerned heroes all while preaching about how he knows better than we do about how to save the world because “he's from the future and he knows best.” Blow me. It's really infuriating because he does a lot of stuff early on that is good, feeding the hungry, curing disease, stopping wars, that's cool. He starts his own little hippie commune of people who want to live in a better tomorrow. That's cool. But he always does so with this smug arrogant attitude that it makes you want to hit him. And it comes off as very hypocritical from a gun who used to solve all his problems by blowing holes in people with guns bigger than my car. It feels like Fabian Niecza is trying to write him like Superman and Cable is very much not Superman. And in Superman's case, Superman would do stuff like this but he wouldn't be smug about it. Clark is just a guy who wants to help. He doesn't think of himself as superior to human kind. He thinks of himself as one of us with some advantages. Regardless of that people are in awe of him because of what he can do and the good that he does with those abilities. When Superman is written well, he comes across as a hero who everyone looks up to because he's a genuinely good person who does everything he can to help people and just so happens to be able to move continents. When he's written well. What I hate about Man Of Steel is they portray Superman as an arrogant alien who knows better than all of us and we can never be as good as he is. He allegedly will make us strive to be better people, you know, after he destroys our cities while trying to violently punch out one man with no regard to civilian casualties. And that's how Cable comes off in this book. More on that later.......

Needless to say, I don't care for Buddy Christ Cable or his obnoxiously happy hippie commune Providence. I'm kindof looking forward to it being destroyed by the Marauders. I'm all for him doing good things now that he's achieved his goal of killing Apocalypse but his messianic view of himself is the type of attitude that is normally considered a fatal flaw in other characters, especially in comic books. Seriously the best part of this book was the Silver Surfer handing him his ass physically and verbally, telling him that the bullshit he's doing could lead to the destruction of the earth. And Cable learned nothing from that encounter.

2.Deadpool

So I've always liked Deadpool but I've never been a huge super fan of him and I have often greeted the extreme fandom the character enjoys with an eye roll. But thanks to my friend Robin who some of you know, I have received the complete (or almost complete) Deadpool collection for Christmas, the reading of which has lead to this review. Having now read his entire original monthly series along with the entirety of Merc With A Mouth, I now absolutely adore Deadpool. I totally get why he is so loved. His stories whether they be humorous, action packed, dramatic, or frightening have been a joy to read. One thing that is great about the character is his supporting cast of characters which include regular Marvel favorites both heroes and villains (Wolverine, Juggernaut, Bullseye, Constrictor, Death, Taskmaster, Siryn and Warpath, etc.) and his own personally supporting cast unique to his book (Weasel, Blind Al, T-Ray, Copycat, Exiter and Monty, Agent X, Outlaw, and Sandi Brandenburg all kick ass). So after reading all that I was super pumped to start reading Cable & Deadpool. A lot of his own supporting characters don't appear in Cable & Deadpool, but that can be forgiven as instead we get to see him have run ins with other cool Marvel characters such as the X-men, the Silver Surfer, Apocalypse and Sinister, and Captain America. A lot of those high profile encounters didn't happen every day in his own book and I'm happy to see them here. Also, three of his regulars, Weasel, Siryn, and Agent X did appear so that's cool. Now while Deadpool still does get to do a lot of the kickass action I'm used to seeing him perform and his humor is still on display, it still feels like the writer, Fabian Niecza, who I should point out is the co-creator of Deadpool, doesn't really understand the character. Deadpool is another character created by Rob Liefeld who was saved from being crap by being written by other people, most notably Joe Kelly. Joe Kelly's run on the character has become classic and comes highly recommended to anyone who is interested in getting into Deadpool. Regardless of the fact that Fabian co-created the character with Liefeld, he has spent as much time developing the character like Kelly, Christopher Priest, or Gail Simone have, a fact him mentions frequently in the letter columns expressing his own shortcomings compared to their work. While Deadpool is still a badass and is still funny, he's not AS funny as he has been previously under other writers. This may be because 50% of the issue has to be devoted to Cable who is the most grim and melodramatic person in the Marvel Universe but it just feels like Wade Wilson's sledgehammer wit is gone, and his pop culture references are less frequent as well. There are also at least two occasions I can spot where Fabian doesn't seem to know (or worse, care) about Deadpool's history. The first is shown in a flashback where we see the death of Deadpool's father at the hands of drunk thug in a bar. Apparently his father was a military man trying to get young Wade out of trouble at a bar and guy Wade had picked a fight with attacked his father, stole his gun, and shot him. It's actually pretty powerful stuff. I would consider it well written if I hadn't just read 69 issues of Deadpool's regularly series that contradict and predate that story. In Christopher Priest's run of Deadpool's regular series, or old pal Loki cursed Deadpool to look like Tom Cruz until he asks forgiveness from his father. At the very end of Priest run, Deadpool gets into an argument with an old guy he runs into at a diner who he than apologies to and asks him to forgive him. He then discovers while walking down the street that the curse has been broken and he's gone back to his horribly scarred self much to Wade's delight. It's blatantly clear that the old man in the diner is Wade's long lost father who didn't recognize him otherwise the curse would not have been broken. So if his real father was some army guy that was shot and killed then who was that guy in the diner and why was the curse broken after he spoke to him. It just feels like Fabian didn't know or care about this fact and liked his touching story of Wade's dad dying when he was a teenager story better so he wrote that without caring. The other example I noticed was while sneaking into the Avengers tower Deadpool saw Aunt May Parker walk by and immediately began lusting after her and comparing her to Bea Arthur. He seemed to have no recollection of the fact that he has run into Aunt May before, literally when he and Blind Al time traveled back to the 60s and fell ontop of Aunt May knocking her out and leading to an adventure where Blind Al had to pose as Aunt May and Deadpool had to pose as Peter Parker to preserve the time line. I understand he hasn't been writing Deadpool all this time however I find it disconcerting that he appears to have done no research on what the character has been doing in some of the his more popular stories and it makes me feel that both of these characters could have been in better hands.

3.The first 6 covers of the book are lies!!!!

For those of you who read comics, you are familiar with this problem. Often times the cover of books shows something SUPER FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!! designed to get you to spend money on the book but not having anything on it that is relevant to the story within. Cable & Deadpool early on is very guilty of this and lends to my overall problems with the mood and tone of the book in general. The first 6 issues approximately have covers that are basically poster shots of Cable and Deadpool shooting big guns at unseen bad guys and I must admit that they look pretty awesome in those poses. The covers make you think that you are about to read a classic team up book where Cable and Deadpool are going to team up and save the day. It made me think that the overall tone of the book was like a buddy cop movie. Two wildly different characters, one serious and one silly with different ways of doing things, forced to work together for the greater good against a common foe. It's really not like that at all and nothing I have seen so far has changed my mind on that. In the first few issues Cable and Deadpool don't really team up; they're just IN the book together. The whole thing feels like this book was just made to give both Cable and Deadpool a monthly title but to do so cheaply by forcing both characters to share the same book. Although Cable and Deadpool do eventually work together in the book it takes like oh I don't know about 15 to 18 issues to get the that point. Up until that point and honestly after that as well, they seem like to people who really don't like each other and have almost nothing in common other than the fact that they have to put up with each other because they're sharing a comic book and for no other reason.

For those of you who have roleplayed with me, you know that when I run a game, I have a tendency to let my players do whatever they want, allowing them to play literally anything which often times leading them to play characters inappropriate to or too powerful for the setting. I do this because I'm not well and I believe in letting the inmates run the asylum And normally my games are more fun for me because of that. However, I have bitten myself in the ass for running things that way.

Why do I bring this up?

Cable & Deadpool feels like a roleplaying that I am running where I have two players. Each player has chosen a character that completely clashes with the other character and they have nothing in common. When the game begins I ask my first player what he's going to do and he says he's going to go off and do this one thing. When I ask the second player if he's going to go and help the first guy he says, “No! Fuck that guy! I'm going to go over here instead and do this completely different thing!” So now I have to players who off having completely different adventures separated from each other but are still playing during the same session and yet wanting nothing to do with one another. And now it's my job as the Dungeon Master to desperately try and combine the plot of what's going on with the first player to what's going on with the second player as awkwardly and unnaturally as possible in order to get the story to make some kind of sense.

That's Cable & Deadpool in a nutshell.

When you read this book your not reading a team book. The comic lies to you. What always happens is Cable is off doing him time traveling mutant messiah bullshit where's trying to save the world in the vaguest and arrogant way possible and meanwhile Deadpool is off doing his mercenary thing, killing bitches for money. And somewhere in the middle Fabian Niecza connects these two wildly different stories. And really at the end of the day, the only reason Cable and Deadpool are working together is just because they ran into each other and now sortof kindof have to put up with each other. And that's it. I don't know what that is, but it's not a team up book and it's certainly not a buddy cop story. If you want to read a good team up book, I highly recommend Superman/Batman where you will get what's advertised, Superman and Batman teaming up and working together on a single case and going on adventures together. In Cable & Deadpool, you can be assured that both Cable and Deadpool are both IN the book but there's not guarantee that they will have anything to do with what the other is doing in it. And that's not necessarily a bad story. But it's not a team up.

4.The Straw The Broke The Camel's Back

Ok, so all that I've written above is merely disappointing but it didn't kill the book for me. But issue #27 did. All of this bad writing and poor choices culminated in this issue and I've decided to give this book the stamp of stupid that it deserves. I feel the blame can be laid squarely at the Fabian Neicza who although I have been told is allegedly a good writer I haven't seen anything in many years to prove that statement and never forget that this man is guilty of creating NFL Superpro, the greatest comic character none of you have ever heard of. Here's what happened.

Ok, so issue 26 and 27 are a prequel to the Blood Of Apocalypse storyline which I did read a little bit of and what I read I did enjoy but apparently this is what started it. Ok, so Cable goes missing and Deadpool and Irene Merryweather go looking for him. They track him to Apocalypse's Egyptian themed space ship where they find him and here Cable reveals that he is trying to resurrect Apocalypse...... the guy he came back in time to kill....... and did kill....... to prevent his nightmarish future from happening.......... and now he wants to bring him back.....

And why does he want to do the stupidest and most out of character thing possible?

Because if he resurrects Apocalypse and let's Apocalypse almost destroy the world, then that means he can save the world and achieve the super fluffy peaceful future he's been trying to get for almost 30 issues.

I know we're all thinking it so I'm just going to fucking say it. Cable's a fucking idiot.

Or at least he's written that way.

The entire point of his fucking character is that he's been trying to prevent Apocalypse from making the Terminator future come about, he achieved that goal and stopped that future, and now he's just going to resurrect him and risk undoing all the hard work? Are you fucking kidding me?

For those of you who have watched Dragon Ball Z, I would expect this kindof crap from someone like Vegeta who in an effort to satisfy his own ego allowed Cell to consume Android 18 to make himself more powerful so he would have the satisfaction of defeating Cell at his most powerful, regardless of the fact that it would jeopardize his own life and risk getting the entire planet destroyed. And like good old fashioned instant karma, yes Vegeta got his ass kicked for that decision and got his son killed in the process. I expected that kindof idiocy from Vegeta who is ruled by his arrogance and pride. Not Cable. Cable was originally not written this arrogant and regardless of it becoming his most defining feature in this book he has been consistently shown to be a man who has seen the horrors of war and tyranny and has been allegedly trying to make the world a better place. And instead he just resurrects his greatest enemy and risking countless billions of lives in order to make his perfect little hippie utopia. Fuck this character and his hypocrisy. Meanwhile Deadpool, who is an anti-hero in this very series killed a guy just cus he felt like it is acting like more of hero than Cable. Now of course Deadpool has been a hero and saved the world of several occasions but he's also done some horrible things. When you make a character who has once locked an old woman in his house for years, thrown her into a booby trapped torture chamber for “being bad”, hunted down and murdered her boyfriend in front of her when she escaped and then recaptured her again, and also murdered the occasional delivery boy or mail man who interacted with her and then sealed their bodies up in the walls of his apartment and you make him more heroic and sensible than the stand up guy who came back in time to save us from super Hitler, your doing something very wrong and maybe your a shitty writer. And on top of that there's a sub-plot that states that Apocalypse is going to come back anyway do to him being able to clone himself endlessly from his own blood and he was already working on coming back anyway meaning that Cable HELPING his greatest enemy come back to life was entirely pointless and stupid. He would have come back anyway if Cable had done nothing. So all we've accomplished is made Cable out to be more of an arrogant prick that deliberately almost got us all killed to realize his “vision.” His stated reasoning is that he needs Apocalypse alive so that mutants who are now an endangered species due to the Decimation can unite together and with human kind against him and realize Cable's perfect bullshit future. Apocalypse's ability to clone himself is a direct result of Cable time traveling back to the dark ages and killing Apocalypse and mixing his techno-organic blood with Apocalypse's blood accidentally meaning Cable is directly responsible for making Apocalypse insure that the horrible future he was trying to stop would come about. And now after finally ridding the world of Apocalypse and that future he has most like ensured that that time line will return again and probably worse than before. Fuck you Cable you arrogant prick.

It's a real shame to because there's still a lot of fun to be had in this book. If your a Marvel fan or a science fiction fan, there's plenty of fun to be had in this book. You've got Cable and Deadpool running around fighting villains. Due to Cable's actions, there's a lot of hero vs. hero fights with legitamitely good reasons for them to happen due to the narrative. There are cool sci-fi concepts like the little inter-dimensional trip Deadpool, Siryn, and Cannonball took, awesome characters I was unfamiliar with like Prester John, who is SO FRICKIN' AWESOME!!!, and all in all the book has held my interest. However, the writing is brainless, especially when it comes to Cable's character and it's disappointing to a legend like Fabian Neicza not to have any understanding of the characters he's writing or their motivations. If you wish to pick this book, you can have fun with it but just keep in mind, you will be hit with stupid at some point. This book is not as good as the fan boys claim it to be. Let's not pretend that just because two popular characters get together that their work will automatically be good and Cable & Deadpool is a shining example of how that concept can be wasted.

Addendum: Now having read issue #28 as well, I can seen that this series is going absolutely no where. To adjust my review slightly, I can't really recommend this book, not to general audiences or new readers. I would recommend this book to extremely hard core comic fans like myself who just have to read every comic they find, completionists who have to do the same thing, or for people who are just hard core fans of Cable and Deadpool and need to see everything they are in. For everyone else, you may enjoy this comic as a superficial read; there is lots of action, cool sci-fi stuff, and cool characters, lots of pretty things to be enjoyed, but all they really do is distract you from the story, which in of itself is terrible. Cable's morality is incredibly questionable and the book often praises his behavior only because he's the star of the book. And how did this win #7 greatest Marvel buddy team? Again Cable and Deadpool really don't interact all that much. I beloved this books popularity is due to the cover art and the mere idea of these two characters interacting. I have a sinking suspicion that most of the people who have praised this book have only heard about it but never actually read it. And honestly, I had a better time reading Identity Disc.