Cable: More Ammo than Plot
Few Marvel comics characters are as complex as the one known as Cable. Or Nathan Christopher Charles Dayspring Askani’son Summers, if you want his full name post-retcons. Cable began his life as what could be considered a throwaway character, a cool guy with guns made to capitalize on the popularity of Wolverine and Punisher. Both Rob Liefeld and Louise Simonson are credited with making Cable, but his own creation is debated on which creator had more (or if any) input. However, Cable has found his way into showing up in Deadpool 2, alongside one of his biggest rivals and best friends, to the cheers of many fans. But where did he come from?
So, let’s wind back to March of 1990, the start of an era that produced incredible excesses, multiple comic covers, holofoil gimmicks, and tons of guns and pouches. We open on The New Mutants #87.
This is a really great cover. Rob Liefeld does a great job on pencils, but Todd McFarlane really makes that art shine once he added on his inking. Really top-notch stuff. It is a real shame that he didn’t do the interiors, though.
Our tale, “A Show of Power,” was written by Louise Simonson, drawn by Rob Liefeld, inked by Bob Wiacek, and colored by M. Rockwitz. Liefeld himself actually asked to be put on the New Mutants book, as it was a low selling series at the time, and he wanted to see if he could make it more popular with his art. And, well, his art sure is something.
At least the goons have a great dental plan.
It’s dynamic, it’s loud, it’s got a great sense of action… but it also looks like people are hopping everywhere, almost everyone tends to lack feet, and mouths tend to be crammed with more teeth than a shark.
As for who these goons are, they’re the Mutant Liberation Front. Essentially the evolution of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Rob Liefeld designed them all to be throwaway villains. They fill the role well, but aren’t necessarily memorable because of it. For example, the guy in the image above is named Forearm. Because he has four arms. The other guy is Reaper, who has a scythe that basically has a built-in strobe light and no other powers. There are six others, but they’re all equally unmemorable and bizarre. It’s going to be hard to see these guys showing up in a movie, but stranger things have happened.
Cable, meanwhile, shows up just after the MLF rampaged through a secret energy research station for unknown reasons.
Everything then explodes around him, and Cable’s brief scene ends. While we wait for Cable to return, the story does take some time to give the title characters of the book to recover from adventures in Asgard. It was pretty awesome and worth checking out if you want some sword and sorcery with your Mutants, but won’t be covered here.
Also in this issue,we also meet the MLF’s leader, and one of Cable’s long standing enemies, Stryfe:
Stryfe is… complicated. And pointy. It’s also very likely he actually can’t enter doorways without turning sideways, ducking, and crabwalking through. He chokes out one of his underlings, and sends them off to a new location to cause more chaos: a high-security jail to free captive mutants. Of course, the guards fall in seconds. Luckily, Cable is there!
Cable takes out several of the MLF, and then begins to shoot and punch out the rest if he can. Unfortunately, he is taken down and captured while the MLF succeed in their goal of freeing a few mutant captives. Cable vows to get some form of help, once he breaks out, because he can’t do this alone anymore!
In many ways, Cable is the poster child of the comics released in the late-1980s and early-1990s: Big, beefy, begunned, and shooting anything that moves. Like the comics themselves, Cable would also improve as a character to become a richly nuanced guy who still shoots things with comically big guns. In fact, Cable is the one character in comics who has almost exclusively improved through the power of the retcon.
The mystery of who Cable was existed for a good, long time. Many thought that Cable was a known character from the future, while others thought he was a non-mutant with a prosthesis and random glowing eye. From the future. The truth, as retconned, has become hilariously complex.
Cable is the child of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone, sent into the distant future when the villain Apocalypse infected him with the Techno-Organic virus.
Cable was raised by “Slym” and “Redd,” clones of Cyclops and Jean Grey who were possessed by the original Cyclops and Jean thanks to their own alternate-future-daughter Rachel. It’s complicated. There was a clone made of him without anyone’s knowledge as a backup plan, who would become Stryfe. This, too, is complicated.
Cable is back from the future to defeat Apocalypse, who at this time was becoming retconned as well to be an immortal dictator who would eventually rule the future.
Cable also comes back in time to stop Stryfe, later retconned into saving one mutant, later retconned into fighting Apocalypse. He also generally tries to improve the future by shooting things. The results tend to be mixed.
