Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Cable #13
Marvel Comics
Swierczynski & Olivetti
The second chapter of the Messiah War has an awful lot of Deadpool. He was revealed to be alive in the future and an apparent ally to Cable and X-Force. Well, in this issue you get know him very, very well. I’m not sure I would have devoted this much time to Deadpool in a crossover that doesn’t involve his title, but it was fairly entertaining nonetheless.
Last issue left off with Cable and company standing on the edge of what appears to be Apocalypse’s headquarters. Rather than dealing with that though we get some long story from Deadpool. I’m all in favor of him filling in some of the gaps of what has happened over the thousand years he’s been alive but not from his perspective while he’s underground. Yes, Deadpool is trapped in building underground for hundreds of years and he provides the play by play. It is very funny dialogue, but four of five pages of it?
When he gets to the present (1000 years into the future) we find out exactly how Stryfe is involved. This triggers some interesting reactions from Cable. It’s consistent with how he has been in this series but he doesn’t exactly explain his reluctance on all of this. Cable is also very leery of X-Force, which you would expect to some degree.
The issue ends with Stryfe and Bishop cooking up a plan to snare their prey.
The issue has some moments worth talking about. For one thing, X-23 seems have a connection with Hope which isn’t fully explained but has very interesting possibilities. X-23 is a clone of Wolverine, but has a “mother” which had a family. Could this kid be related in some way? Maybe, doubtful, but maybe.
Another item worth noting is the discussion Cable and Wolverine have. Wolverine is explaining their trip into the future as a way of retrieving Cable and the baby because Cable failed at his task. Is that really the case though? How could Cyclops possibly know that Cable failed in his task, but was able to confirm that Cable was alive in the future? If Cyclops thought Cable to be a failure wouldn’t it make more sense to sick X-Force on Bishop and then on Cable? Especially seeing as how X-Force failed to detain Bishop the first time around. This has some explaining to do later but helps to keep the distrust among them all very high.
The art is more polished than usual which is a good thing. There is a lot of Deadpool looking like the Crypt Keeper so there isn’t a ton of variety but the art has its moments.
This issue takes more time giving some background but doesn’t help the new reader to the title learn about Cable or Hope. This is a drawback I feel. While the scenes of Deadpool spewing are amusing, the arc is far too short to waste too much time on filler. I did like a couple of the themes that were introduced here, especially the paranoia aspect, but the issue was only slightly above average. I’m expecting more from such a big arc and crossover.
3 out of 5 geek goggles
