Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Cable #2
Marvel Comics
Swierczynski & Olivetti
Cable fights Bishop and then some locals fight Cable and Bishop. This issue doesn’t deal with much of the present, but with the past. Or should I say, it doesn’t deal much with the future, but with our present. Check that. Time travel is confusing and is illustrated as such in this issue. The issue is good, but not great. There are a lot of questions with this issue with regard to continuity and I’m not talking about overall X continuity, but with events within this issue.
The issue picks up with Cable down on the ground waiting for Bishop to finish him off. They fight a little bit until the locals intervene. Some of the problems with this includes the number of bullets Cable seems to take. One page says three and another says two and yet, the art appears to show only one in some places. Add in that Bishop uses his tentacles to wrap around Cable’s head rather than just around the baby makes the fight scene that much more frustrating to follow. I mean, Bishop wants the baby, not Cable, right?
We get a reprieve from the fight with a flashback. We watch Bishop lose his arm to Predator X and how he uses Sunfire to help him seal his wound. The art during this sequence is a little gruesome but really well done. We are treated to the replay of Xavier receiving Bishop’s bullet. Then Cyclops knocks Bishop clear and he escapes. Here things get murky.
How does Bishop get to Forge’s lab? When did Forge wake up? Didn’t Bishop and friends destroy the lab? If this is in an alternate time line when and where did Bishop get the device to time travel? It doesn’t appear that he gets the time machine device until he steals the arm from Forge. He steals his new arm from Forge and in perhaps the most disturbing part of the issue, he simply sticks it on his shoulder and he is good to go. You figure it out.
Then Bishops begins his detective work. He simply time jumps one year at a time from Muir Island until he finds a milk cartoon that must mean the baby was there. Okay, that’s just odd.
When Bishop finds the cartoon he traces Cable’s steps to New Jersey and uses time jumping to arrive just ahead of him at the diner. Hey, I appreciate the explanation. I realize how easily it can be picked apart. However, at least some attempt was made at explaining all of this. Many stories wouldn’t even bother to try.
The issue ends with Cable’s time machine broken and about to get crushed by a truck.
I liked the issue. I felt it moved the story along nicely with a good mix of action and point of view switching for the internal dialogue. I wasn’t totally in the tank for the artwork. Many of the head shots of Bishop make him look like Telli Savalas with a slight tan.
One item I really liked about the issue was the utter desolation that the future timeline shows. The backgrounds, the clothing - everything about the future looks really bleak and very definitively different from the regular timeline.
So far this series has been mostly good, but there are some points that make me question how easily a time jumping series can stick around and not give the readers a migraine. At some point I would like to know something about the baby. I’d settle for even a name. Anything would be good.
3 out of 5 geek goggles.
