The Factual Opinion

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Clap Your Atomic Hands Say Yeah

Welcome to the fourth in a six-part series examining some nine-year old Marvel Comics featuring their Cable character, written by myself, Tucker Stone, and Noah Berlatsky. The first part is located here, the second is here, the third is here.

Soldier X #7
Written by Darko Macan
Art by Igor Kordey
Published by Marvel Comics 

Following the six part arc that saw Cable exercise his deity muscles in Russia, "The Low Budget Action Movie" sees him at play in the skies over Kashmir. (Part of the reason Soldier X is remembered fondly has to be Macan's diversity of location. When's the last time somebody set a super-hero comic in Kashmir?) Arriving just in time to save a young boy from the certain death that being thrown out of a plane has to offer, Cable is once again using his powers--which now seem to be limited only by imagination--in a way that paints him as religious icon, this time a classic angel/lumberjack hybrid. Holding a full size military cargo jet stationary high above the Earth with only his mind, he rescues a group of children (and then grants sanctuary to one of their would be murderers as well), carrying them telekinetically through the sky, using oxygen itself as his own elevator.

Upon his return to solid ground, he becomes intrigued when hearing of a stranger using a word that comes from Cable's past. Believing it to be a possible lead on his friend Blaquesmith, who had previously sent Cable off to the tiny Russian wasteland that had spurred the previous storyline, Cable agrees to head over and check it out. Upon arrival, he's once again given a chance to play super-hero, and in keeping with the "Low Budget" aspect of Macan's title, he ends up saving the day with yet another use of his not-so-flashy-when-you-get-down-to-it powers.

Here's the thing about Cable, by the way. As far as history explains it, the character is one who brought two particularly stupid things to a great popularity during his short reign at the top of comics. The first one is guns, and the second one is pouches. Now, I don't have anything to say about the pouches--I don't get why those were fun for artists like Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee to draw, but they clearly were--but the first one makes a whole lot of sense. You know what is sort of lame, always? Looking at a comic about telekinetic people who can redesign the very fabric of reality. It's not that lame to read about it--telekinetic stories in and of themselves are fine--but there's just nothing to look at other than a guy screwing up his face into a look of concentration, and if you've seen one "i'm thinking so hard that it's making me grit my teeth" panel in your lifetime, you've seen the exact amount you need to see to get by in life, forever. And you know what does look kind of crazy interesting, especially if you've got an artist who is hell bent on going bigger every time, as Rob Liefeld was during those brief, heady days when Comics Featuring Cable were outselling things like "books by Haruki Murakami" and "milk"? Guns. Guns that grow to insane, page-spotlighting fashion, guns that make no logistical sense as weaponry, guns that, if real, would weigh as much as a Honda Prelude. If you were a 13 year old trying to choose between looking at a comic book drawing of Cable thinking all of his enemies into naptime--which Macan and Kordey depict as something he could do without the slightest effort, instantly--or looking at a drawing of a guy shooting two lazer bazookas into their faces while screaming, you'd pick the bazookas, everytime.

Of course, if you're funny enough, maybe you can make the other thing work too.

When Cable arrives on the scene in the tiny village, he met by a division of the Pakistani army, who have arrived at the behest of their "greatest of generals" to enlist our hero as their latest recruit. (In keeping with the previous issues, Kordey's lollipop obsession gets prominent placement in the splash page above.) And while, as Cable immediately points out, he could "disarm his army in the blink of an eye", Macan plays the scene out for seven pages...until Cable snaps his finger and teleports all of the surviving bad guys away anyway. Following the lessons learned in Russia regarding personal responsibility, Cable exercises his power to an extreme degree while still basically letting people punish themselves. (For whatever reason, the person who suffers most--besides the General, who is executed by his own men out of a misunderstood notion of personal safety--is the translator, who Cable transforms into a hideous bird-man hybrid.) But after that, we're done with Soldier X for the most part. There's three more pages where Blaquesmith reveals himself not to be Cable's longtime compatriot, but instead a professor at the University of Calgary surgically altered by Jackie Singapore (the Bond villian from Cable #107) so as to trick Cable into becoming a Singapore-sponsored movie star cult leader. It's not hard to see in this little twist, so abruptly delivered, the seeds of what Macan and Kordey might have been planning. After all the actual religion stuff in the first six issues, what other follow up could there be then a post 90's commentary on celebrity? 2003--hell, we didn't even have Real Housewives until 2006.

Closing things out, faux-Blaquesmith's weird "teach me how walk" line lands funny, but then again, nobody ever does morals in a way that isn't a bit queasy. Thankfully, there's one last joke, a third-wall breaking apology to the reader that serves as an acknowlegement that this comic never did a good job of playing by the rules "nuMarvel" had set up, and then we're done. There was still an epilogue to come from Macan and Kordey, and then there was one of the sharpest turns into hellish shit that any super-hero comic would see until Tan followed Quitely, but for all intents and purposes, this was as far as they let the rope play out.

And then none of these people ever worked for Marvel Comics again.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Now That's How You Say Goodbye

Welcome to the third in a six-part series examining some nine-year old Marvel Comics featuring their Cable character, written by myself, Tucker Stone, and Noah Berlatsky. The first part is located here, and the second is here, and the fourth part is here.

Soldier X #5
Written by Darko Macan
Art by Igor Kordey
Published by Marvel Comics, 2003

Before I get into anything about these particular issues, I feel I must take up a sidebar: you've got to look at these covers. Don't focus on the Kordey illustrations--they're great, it's not that I'm stuck on--instead, take a look at the background colors, specifically on this issue and the sixth. How gorgeous are those? I doubt whether the color selections had any specific meaning, but doesn't it add a certain layer of...not seriousness, not maturity, but a certain adultness to the material? You know, that sort of fake adultness that super-hero comics still, even now, does better than iCarly or Big Time Rush? Maybe it's just me. I doubt it, that I'm the only one who still gets a bit jacked in when super-hero comics play at being grown-up and serious in ways beyond somebody cutting the Joker's face off and hanging it on a wall while the Joker makes a joke about how said torture made him cum. (That example is from a comic that was released today.) It's that feeling, the one you get when fake-Thing realizes what friendship can mean in "This Man, This Monster", or what Bruce Wayne's say when he shakes his fist at his empty costume in "Death in the Family", that feeling that has nothing to do with being a real grown-up but still encompasses what you thought being a grown-up meant.

That's what that washed in background reminds me of, I can't help it. It reminds me that this was a series from a couple of guys who were resolutely committed to making an American comic, but couldn't help the fact that they were serious dudes from serious places. They cared about stuff that a lot of American super-hero comics just don't care about as a general rule, and one of those things was the way the background colors on the covers had to look handmade. (And if it is handmade, even better.)

Following Cable's accidental resurrection of mutant healer Magdalena in the previous issues, "The Siege of Saint Lenin" opens with him once again in the position of beggar, trying to convince a young mutant not to take risks and exploit her powers. And like before, his attempts to convince fail--but this time, Macan makes it more obvious why:

It's an old twist, a classic one: he's the same as what he condemns. Arriving in an impoverished, crime stricken wasteland of no hope and old religion under the vague, unconfirmed orders of someone Cable hasn't seen in years, the character sets about doing "what's right". And Macan whips it up into a lather--here's a mutant girl, her mother's a religious harpy happy to suck the last cell of life off her daughter's albino flesh, her father a broken wimp; here's violent crime, the poor, the stupid, the hopeless and weak--all the better for Cable to save the day, right?

And yet he accomplishes so little. Like a man who considers fatherhood to end at orgasm, or a kid who adopts a dog because he liked a puppy, Cable resurrects a damaged, fearsome young girl and then finds her repellent when she fails to act like a high quality victim. But unlike before, Cable doesn't run a broad spectrum lobotomy on the surrounding locals, most of all, he doesn't run. He's learned a lesson.

He's got to learn one more.

I don't completely disagree with Noah's criticisms of Cable as being a bit of a boring slug, after all, I think that might be, in part, what Macan and Krodey thought of him as well. Look at the way he's depicted in those first three issues--a death tourist, an oblivious wrecking ball. He goes down into the bowels, gets irritated by the way those in the bowels operate, and then he destroys. When he's accosted for his failings and offered direction--one that's unclear, but a direction nonetheless--he flies off into the sky, yelling for attention like a grounded teenager pounding pillows. And now, in the abandoned art dumps (ridiculous, hilarious, overwrought sculptures of historical Soviet icons) of Russia, he wanders, trying to accomplish a task.

It's the Geo character--that's him screaming at Cable in the panels above--that seems to make Macan's curious case the best. A quaint (and yet not at all harmless) terrorist credited for the destruction of hundreds of McDonald's, the fight scene between Geo and Cable takes up only a scant few pages in "The Siege of Saint Lenin", but the point is still made, albeit as bluntly as possible. After listening to Cable bark around about "orders" and "superiors", Geo finally snaps and tries to beat some sense into him. Like the rules or hate the rules, but this isn't where Cable lives. It's Geo's home, Magdalena's, and the constant braying that his values and priorities apply here, that his cell phone should work, that people should talk in calm voices or at the very least make some kind of sense...it isn't just arrogant, it's obnoxious. Now, Geo's screaming ranges all over the place. Not all of it makes sense. Some of it might be a philosophical argument, so Macan just goes one better, and works it into the lens of what is, basically, a comic foil with insecurities and earthy lusts. Geo doesn't have a firm worldview to advertise, he's not that kind of dude. He's a simple, emotional person, and he's sick and tired of seeing this hard edged soldier prick treat this little Russian hellscape like Yojimbo's chessboard.

Geo can't beat Cable in a fight, that's always clear. The most he can hope for is to get Cable out of his head for a minute, to make him realize his value isn't to be found in the processing, but in the doing. He doesn't know that's what he's shooting for, of course--but neither did Falstaff when he leads Henry astray, he was just trying to get the kid to learn about good times--and the intent isn't what matters, and it's instinctual either way. Who hasn't tried to convince Mr. Serious to come outside and fuck around a bit?

Of course, as Noah has pointed out, this is a Marvel comic. There's certain other tricks we've got, when gags won't work.

Throughout this portion of the comic, Magdalena's mother has been getting tortured by the local Russian gangsters. Macan isn't kind about it either--he works really hard to make those gangsters funny, and he lays the overall horribleness of the victim on with a trowel. She's as close to evil as civilian characters get in comics, with that stock religious mania that always bodes extremely bad tidings forMarvel mutant characters (in the last few decades, only the Scarlet Witch has outpaced religious zealotry in devastating Marvel's mutant population).

But forget about complexity, say Macan. A naked woman is getting tortured in broad daylight by a bunch of angry young men. Her daughter is listening, on the verge of becoming a monster herself. The husband? A weak, sniveling mouse of a man. The local, homegrown hero? Bested.

This? This is a job for Cable. Hell it's perfect for him--right on the verge of becoming a complicated person, right on the verge of realizing that his save-the-girl, punch-some-dudes, and talk-righteous method doesn't work that well when he's surrounded by people who are more indebted to personal passions (be they hate, be they love) than they are ennamoured with rules. Some blind righteousness is needed. There's a lady that needs rescuing.

Get to stepping.

Soldier X #6
Written by Darko Macan
Art by Igor Kordey
Published by Marvel Comics, 2003

The sixth issue of Soldier X is pure, bloody climax. And like those three Cable issues that came first, it's a specific subversion of expectation. Every minor note that was hinted at before--religious mania, resurrections, the Passion--is blasted again, at a diabolically loud volume. Every character gets a chance on the stage, but they gotta be prepared to ham it up.

First, of course, is Cable. Given the opportunity to play hero, he spins the dial to eleven--he won't just win, he's going to make some people believers while doing so. Specifically, he walks into a neverending hail of gunfire, forcibly shutting down his own super-hero shields so that the bullets can rend his flesh and explode through his skin. His severed fingers fall to the earth below, separated from the muscle, torn from the bone. Of course, he's never really in danger--he dedicates that never-ending powerset of his to repairing the damage even as it is occurring--and his would be killers and the civilian populace read into him right what Macan wants them to: a savior, right here in our shitty neighborhood.

(I feel like I've seen this joke a million times, but I can't remember it being done with a guy who is actually missing a limb.)

Due to space limitations, the comic has to leap from "Everybody thinks Cable is some kind of God" right to "They decide he's not, and attempt to kill him, crazy mob style" in the span of four panels, and yet this makes it the perfect set-up for our next Classic Genre Beat, Extreme Edition, this one most commonly known as The Previously Emasculated Joke Character Sacrifices Himself. Geo, delivering what has to be my favorite bit of dialog he gets, and he's got a lot, literally shoos Cable away, before welcoming the mob to beat him to death, one pipe wielding fucker at a time. Again: these aren't the gangsters doing the slaughtering. This is just regular old people, the poor, bored and sad. It's been a shitty couple of lifetimes, there's been a lot of bloodletting, and this is one of those nights where everybody goes a bit too far. Geo is more than happy to draw the short straw. Make fun if you want, he seems to say.

No problem guy. (You know it's raining, right?)

From there, the conclusion to this six part arc is finally reached. Magdalena forgives her mother (by killing her, but hey, that's how forgiveness works sometimes) and Cable puts her on a truck out of town. Our gangsters commit a quick, sanity-saving coup, and the local church decides to toss the only body part Geo has left behind--his cheap cyborg arm, stolen from a gorilla who would've wasted it--up on the alter.

It's a cheap, standard present that Cable leaves behind--release and religion, the same shit that missionaries always have in their rearview. But this being a Marvel comic, he can give them a miracle, and before Macan and Kordey close the door on this--the only true "arc" that Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada let them have--that's exactly what Cable does. In keeping with Kirby, it's big and loud, and in keeping with Lee, there's an unbelievably cornball rainbow in the background.

(I don't know if those are the best kind, but I'm pretty sure they're the only kind I like.)

-Tucker Stone, 2011

 

Great Haircuts of Future Past: In The Beginning, Rio Was Her Name

Welcome to the first in a six-part series examining some nine-year old Marvel Comics featuring their Cable character, written by myself, Tucker Stone, and Noah Berlatsky. We've teamed up like this before to write about some amazing comics by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, but our second attempt to capture that bottled lightning resulted in us getting pretty depressed. Here's hoping for a charming third time.

The second part of this series is here, the third is here, and the fourth is here.

Cable #105
Written by Darko Macan
Art by Igor Kordey
Published by Marvel Comics, 2002

Three issues away from the series conclusion, the first issue following Igor Kordey's notoriously blunt depiction of 9/11's smoking towers (in an issue he wrote as well as drew), "The Sound of the Arena" was Darko Macan's initial dose of Cable. At first blush, the story isn't that far removed from something that his predecessor David Tischman might have written. Cable is struggling with his powers, which are greatly increased and somewhat out of control following a prior plot twist, and he's trekking around the world. After accidentally destroying a hotel room, he aimlessly wanders out to while away the evening on the beaches of Rio. There, he watches a young mutant boy ruin a soccer game (by telekinetically destroying the soccer ball), and after rescuing the kid, Cable is led to a local underground fight club, where drugged up mutants are pitted against each other in death matches.

So far, so standard. These are the sorts of stories that a thousand Wolverine comics are made up of, to say nothing of the thousands of television shows that use the same format. A singular character, usually a loner, who bums around, looking for problems to solve. There's the cliched kid--he's not necessarily cute, but a kid nonetheless, at the crossroads between going good or breaking bad--and there's some nasty sons of Satan that need to be taught a lesson. Insert Cable in place of Wolverine/Caine/The A-Team, cross the t's, and you've got yourself a story that everybody knows, and more than a few love.

Except:

When Cable's half-hearted attempt to "talk some sense" into this young mutant combatant fails, his immediate solution is to sterilize the mutant powers in her brain. It's a strange, brutal choice, but most of all, it's just lazy. He's only just happened upon the girl, the fight club, and even though some of the dialog makes it clear that the girl is drugged--and that Cable knows she's drugged--he seems to be more irritated about the situation than he is concerned. He jumps into the ring, tells her she "doesn't have to do this" and "she's wasting the gift", and when that lame attempt at reason fails, he jacks up the juice. His powers overreact--as they've been consistently doing, worse, as he's aware they've been consistently doing--and along with the girl, a large portion of the audience is completely lobotomized. That gunk coming out of the mouth? It's probably just blood, but for story purposes, that's basically the parts of their brains that make them individuals. After Cable leaves the room--which he does immediately, with zero attention paid for the young child who brought him to the arena--those victims are left behind, vegetables for life.

And then the comic ends where it begins, with Cable on the beach. The only difference this time is that he's feeling sorry for himself instead of swimming with whales.

It's tempting to expend some energy here talking about what Cable was like before this issue came along, but if that's going to come up, it'll have to come up later. What's interesting to me in this story, and the reason why this little team-up is starting here instead of with Soldier X's first issue, is the character that Macan and Kordey are working with. Even though there's 100 odd issues of Cable that had gone under the bus, Macan decided not to focus on what the guy supposedly is, but on what he doesn't have--which is a reason to do anything at all. From the little I've been able to glean about what Cable had gone through in the issues prior to these, the character was one who had accomplished what was apparently his primary objective (the Terminator 2 style time travel murder of Apocalypse) and now, like a soldier returning from front to 'burbs, he had to figure out what he was supposed to do with the rest of his life. And due to the circumstances involved in the character's creation--that he was controversially, yet essentially, the product of Rob Liefeld's lust for drawing certain things--he was fictionally cursed with a set of powers far beyond those that could make any sort of rational narrative use. Unlike Superman, a character whose historical relationship with his adopted Kansas family fundamentally hardwires him to always care about people, Macan's Cable stories are more reminiscent to stories about a young Old Testament God: omnipotent, irritable, and purposeless. And if there's one thing the God of Genesis enjoyed, it's widespread destruction. And birds.

Cable #105
Written by Darko Macan
Art by Mike Huddleston
Published by Marvel Comics, 2002

And here both of those things are, in the one non-Kordey issue that Macan wrote. Also? Jokes! Like most of the ones you'll find in a Marvel comic, they're not funny, exactly, but unlike the stinkers that clog up Spider-Man comics, there's never a sense that they're supposed to be. First, there's the setting: Cable is trying to crack wise with a pretty young secret agent chucked into Kazakhstan's bewildering maw with so little oversight from her CIA overseers that it almost seems like she should be wearing a target around her neck. Second, there's Mike Huddleston, who seems to be teetering on the verge of drawing a Mad Magazine style parody of a Cable comic, while at the same time drawing a regular old Cable comic.

It's all silly stuff, groaner comedy, dad jokes and lame pick-up lines--and that's exactly the kind of humor that you'd expect from a character like Cable, which is probably why he became such a popular straight man for Deadpool during the course of however long that Cable & Deadpool comic lasted.

During the course of Cable's journey with this young American spy, Cable reflects on the actions he took in the previous issue--accordingly, we're told that the lobotomy count rests at a frightening 83--revealing that he's come to the conclusion that he didn't feel bad about what he did to those people. But he doesn't come to this conclusion like an adult coming to a realization, he comes to it at the tail end of some whining. It's even sandwiched between the clarion call of the teenage malcontent, a preening "you wouldn't understand", and immediately dispensed as a subject for discussion when his bored traveling companion lets him know that he's probably going to get laid, after all.

And then two pages of the comic pass by, and our young pretty spy is shot in the head.

While Cable's response to this moment of out-of-nowhere cruelty is predictable to anybody who has ever seen any piece of American entertainment, what makes this version different is some foreknowledge of what's to come. Macan's Cable, in these two issues, is somebody no one would rely on--he's good at taking care of himself, but he's basically shit for everybody else--and there's yet to be a evidence why that would change. He's a lousy super-hero, one whose every act thus far has resulted in death or destruction for anyone unlucky enough to be in his square mile radius. The only reason he ended up hanging out with this unlucky secret agent and her arms dealing murderers (who Cable completely annihilates) is because a local hustler kept bugging him about pumpkin seeds when he was trying to sit around on his ass.

The fragmentary images of Cable on the cover of the final issue aren't the best advertisements for the character's history. They mostly serve as a reminder that Cable's a weird character with a weird history, a glowing eye, and that he's always had better haircuts than any other super-hero. Unnecessary!

While 107 served as the final issue of Cable's long-running series, the Soldier X series was launched only a few weeks later. Macan's job in 107 wouldn't have been to write a conclusion--after all, Marvel would've wanted Cable's readers to continue on to Soldier X--but he couldn't really start anything, either. That's not how the renumbering trick works. So instead, he had to do a placeholder, and his solution was, like his first two issues on the title, to present another standard loner super-hero tale and then screw around with the ending. This time, Cable's peace is interrupted by both a gross-out version of Criss Angel as well as a newly-introduced James Bond style supervillain, complete with a pet sidekick. After hearing "Mr. Singapore's" villainous pitch, which involves so many empty buzzwords that it wouldn't be out of place at a TED conference, Cable delivers his response--an extreme showcase of his godlike power where he transmutes grapes to poison and then destroys localized portions of oxygen--before stealing away in the villains helicopter, which he flies into a lightning storm screaming "hit me". It's Macan laying it at its thickest, shaking your shoulder and saying "this is a guy whose shit is not 100% together" while still chucking in all kinds of silliness, like a helicopter in the shape of a merlion or a villain whose security forces are made up of 35 year olds genetically altered so as to appear as small children.

I'll be blunt though--this is my least favorite issue of the three. These three Cable issues are all visually interesting comics, even if the Huddleston one can't compare to his more recent work, but Macan is ultimately hampered by the fact that he can't really get moving until the first issue of Soldier X. There's just nothing for him (or Cable) to do beyond subvert some expectations and paint the character as one without direction or maturity. But that's not enough for these types of comics to rest upon, and by the time you get to the third iteration of "look at God lose his temper", there's just not enough plaster to cover up the skeleton.

Luckily, there was more plaster to come. Check out The Hooded Utilitarian for Noah's take on the first four issues of Soldier X.

-Tucker Stone, 2011