Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto send Cable on a timeline spanning ride as he battles for The Light Of Galador while learning a bit about growing up in Cable #4.
Ian Gregory: After last week’s Deadpool-dominated issue, I was a little worried about the comedy going forward. This week, however, had me laughing out loud during some parts and feeling extremely satisfied at others. Last week’s issue felt a bit like a stop-gap, and it’s here that I felt like Duggan was hitting all his marks.
Ritesh Babu: Yeah. We didn’t touch upon it, but WWAC has an excellent piece discussing some of the messiness here, which we strongly recommend reading. In a lot of ways, the last felt kind of like the one on a checklist, while this feels less so. There’s a sense of letting go, and there’s a greater, tighter sense of focus. Even the laughter it goes for here is less juvenile, and more genuinely sincere by the end.
IG: As Cyclops says in this issue regarding Deadpool, “I think you better keep your distance from him.”
RB: Excellent life lesson and advice by Scott right there. Words we could all live by.
Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey
IG: For the first time in this series we got some real time travel nonsense, and this is exactly what I’m here for. Kid Cable realizing that he could transmit orders to his order self by thinking real hard was hilarious, and even funnier was Old Cable’s grumbling complaints as he built the boobytrap in the past (he’s sending orders forward in time, which is actually in the past, and that’s why I love Cable, baby). It makes sense if you squint your eyes a little, and that’s good enough for me.
RB: Non-Linear time travel nonsense is a GREAT deal of fun here. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous and it’s the kind of wibbly wobbly timey timey nonsense you don’t try to break down, but just relish and enjoy. It knows what it is, which is why it has fun with it, playing with it, leaning into it, as Old Cable is complaining like the crankiest man under the sun. Never has a ‘Just according to Keikaku’ bit been this self-awarely dumb. It’s quite wonderful.
IG: It’s also a nice bit of vindication for long-time Cable fans, too. He wasn’t actually blindsided by a 16-year old – he went into that fight eyes open, knowing what was coming. He even sets up a plan to save this kid’s life after he gets killed by him. This is the expert Cable we see in his original appearance, and even in X-Sanction. He may be old and tired but he’s always several steps ahead. It’s a soft retcon, but one that adds a lot of nuance to both versions of Cable.
This scene also does a bit of confirmation – Kid Cable is the younger version of Old Cable (as evidenced by his ability to “think” commands into the future), so for the rules of resurrection they’re a single person despite their divergent pasts. If you think about this too long, though, you should probably go see a doctor.
RB: Time Travel can be a fun tool, whether it’s for fun gags like this, or for recontextualizing previous moments in stories, wherein the past is granted greater meaning. I’m glad this book opted for both at once, as the whole Old Man vs Kid confrontation fundamentally changes now when you revisit it in your reading, acquiring a new layer of meaning it never had.
But beyond that, what Duggan, Noto and Sabino are doing here is building on that mental confrontation sequence from that last issue’s opening, which Kid Cable kept replaying in his head. That, too, gains an additional layer that it never had, and its purpose is made more clear. This isn’t just ‘Kid is haunted by what he did’, no. It’s the book establishing, and laying out the scene it means to rewrite the context of in the next issue. And beyond that, it’s about helping establish just how fundamentally tied together past and the future are, and how anything’s open to change, utterly malleable with this time boye you’re dealing with.
Growing Up
IG: I’m glad Duggan didn’t decide to go with “agonizing angsty Cable” through that scene. Instead, what we see here, is that this is about Cable coming into his own. We talked last week about how Cable both wants to live up to his legend and also be his own man. That’s reinforced here with Cable coming home to the moon and getting sat down by Cyclops for family dinner. He’s still a teenager, and he still needs guidance and help. Cyclops telling Cable “don’t be in such a hurry to grow up” is a great scene because Cyclops is getting another chance here to raise his son, whose life he missed most of the first time around. And Cable, for as cool as he acts, really wants to be a part of this family too. It’s a character element that gives him a lot more complexity than just “smart alec teenager with gun.”
RB: That last beat is both heartbreaking and so genuinely touching, as you see how much this means to Scott Summers and his family, that they actually get to raise their kid, be with him, before he shows up as this tough behemoth of an old man from the future. They get to find their ‘normal’, whatever that is, however utterly insanely bizarre it may be, from blowing up Space Knights to thinking about the past which is also the future, too. And it’s why the comedy by the end shifts, as the very real emotions come into play, and they contextualize what this all is, for this family which has been through so much, which has lost so much.
The dynamics in play here are delving into the most fundamental desires of the characters, and granting it to them, to see how things play out. It’s a ‘Let’s actually give them, at least a version, of what they all so desperately wish for’, and it’s…kind. It feels like a gift, both for the characters, and the readers, who’ve seen so much with these characters. And it’s not devoid of conflict, messiness, drama or any of that, in fact, it’s only got more, if you take one look at that AMAZING, all-timer Emma scene. It’s the kind of iconic silent gag designed to be memed the hell out of, and it may spell trouble for poor Kid Cable, but is deliciously juicy soap opera nonsense for the rest of us to chew on.
IG: Why is Emma on a horse? Where did it come from? Was she just riding around looking for them? I love it. This series is doing something X-fans are constantly demanding but never get enough of, which is just casting X-Men characters as people just living their lives, doing family stuff. It means we get concerned dad Cyclops and strict mom Emma. It puts them in situations that lets them play off of each other in new ways, and expand their characters. Emma being suspicious of Cable dating the Cuckoos is hilarious, as is the way she has a blind spot to the ways they mess with him. But Esme also seemed to really enjoy her time with Cable here, which is a bit of a change of how she was looking at him in issue two. I love getting a more well-rounded view of these characters, and it’s enhancing every aspect of the book.
RB: People talk often about how hard X-Men is to get into, how it’s ‘confusing’ and you need to read a huge backlog of stuff and all that, but let me tell you, I don’t need to read a single back-issue beyond this book to be hit by Scott’s words. It’s real, you feel it, and it’s hard not to.
Galadon’t
IG: What did you think about the way this Galador stuff ended up? We got a bit more backstory on our SpaceKnights in the first few pages, and by the end of the issue that had gone up in a nuclear inferno. Bit of a short shelf life for their backstory.
RB: So as someone who knows next to nothing about SpaceKnights, only of them, I found the backstory both helpful and interesting, in that the premise here plays them as sort of a Space Suicide Squad of sorts, only minus ‘gruesome supervillains’ with poor victims whose greatest sin was stealing from a rich scumbag. So the set up isn’t too shabby. I’m assuming with X of Swords coming, they had to go like this, one way or another. That, and also to make room for the more slice of life moments in the book, which is what this essentially is at its best. A slice of life drama and young people in this new Krakoa status quo of DoX. It’s just that…y’know, being a young mutant means non-linear time nonsense.
IG: I think their history and motivations don’t quite track with some of their actions in this series to me. Why, if their goal was the destruction/conquering/reformation of Galador would they want to turn Earth into New Galador? Duggan doesn’t quite show their intentions as being wrong – if I were a political prisoner (more likely than you might think) and turned into a cyborg killing machine, I, too, would want to destroy the society that made me. Cable knows all this, too, since I suppose Esme is the one delivering that opening exposition. I guess I’m hoping this comes back to haunt him in some way, or we get some explanation for how they went from petty thieves and political prisoners to war-crazed planet killers. I guess thousands of years can do that to a person.
RB: There really is a strong sense that the team is improv-ing this whole plot thread to some extent, isn’t there? I’m glad that the one data-page at least lays out the fact that we’re not done with this, we’ll be picking this back up once XoS wraps, hopefully. You don’t just close off the SpaceKnight narrative after the big bomb gag, fun as it is. The book needs to delve into them in a more substantial way, and hopefully it will.
IG: Esme does say that the SpaceKnights are winging it, which is a delightful inversion of how these things usually go. Normally, the villains have some intricate plan and the heroes have to improvise a solution. Instead, both the SpaceKnights and Cable are playing everything by ear and trying to pretend to the other that they have it all under control. That’s probably why things escalate so drastically, and exactly why I think Cable will end up in trouble later. His tendency to just jump into action headfirst is one of the things that separates him from his older self, and if he keeps doing it he’s going to keep ending up in the vicinity of major explosions.
RB: On the whole, this felt like maybe the book’s strongest issue, in that unlike all the others, it was less set-up, split between the various narrative threads, and more the payoff (see: KABOOM!), the big punchline. There’s a focus here that’s appreciated, and even the dull Order Of X thread is only there for one brief data page, so there’s a stronger sense of cohesion that clicks here.
IG: I agree that finally wrapping up some stories (just in time for X of Swords, apparently) was a good call, and it gives this issue powerful momentum. I also like that Duggan doesn’t completely seal off the SpaceKnights, so I think we can expect to see more of them post-event. The Order of X story has been afforded progressively less space in the issues, and today’s single data page didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know (though it was funny). We also didn’t get any Cable in Hell for the second issue in a row. We’ll see if any of these stories tie into X of Swords, or if we’re going on an extended plot break while we deal with the event.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Solid data page comedy throughout the issue. The names of the SpaceKnights (Kron, Kron II) are great and I suspect the binary names may work out to some kind of gag if you want to take the time.
- Also on a data page, “Acknowledge receipt of fate by giving this message a thumbs up” is an outrageous sentence and beautifully executed.
- X OF SWORDS, BABY!
Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.
Ritesh Babu is a comics history nut who spends far too much time writing about weird stuff and cosmic nonsense.
