Cable is arguably the definitive early-nineties Marvel superhero, with his vaguely-defined powers, his ridiculous shoulder pads, his incomprehensible back story, and his cumbersome weaponry.  And yet here we are again, in 2008, with another new Cable title.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that the "Messiah Complex" crossover was largely devoted to promoting this new title, by introducing a baby mutant, and setting up Cable as her protector.  That's the set-up for this new title.  It's built around a single idea, as shown on the cover: Cable, as a gun-toting warrior, with a little baby strapped to his chest. 

This has the advantage of cutting through Cable's baffling history and giving us a nice, simple premise: the baby is Very Important, and Cable is protecting her.  Nothing could be easier.  Besides, with Ariel Olivetti's art, it is a striking image.  And hell, it's been a good decade or so since Fabian Nicieza did the same gimmick with Nomad, so the statute of limitations for reusing it has probably expired by now.

The series has another neat idea: setting up Bishop as Cable's opposite number, still trying to get rid of that bloody child before it can bring about his dystopian future.  Both Bishop and Cable have exhausted their original premises, and are left as paramilitary time-travellers from the future.  What's left is similar enough that pairing them up seems a smart move.  Separately, they'd just be two iterations of the same idea, but together, they're opposite sides of the same coin.

Now, granted, there's a limit.  Tearing off Bishop's arm simply so that he can be outfitted with his own cyborg parts is tantamount to putting up a neon sign saying "Look, they are very similar in many ways, do you see?"  Olivetti has also given Bishop a weirdly oversized fake arm, which I'm not entirely sure about.  It sort of works if you want to make him look a bit monstrous, and Olivetti's art has enough of a cartoony edge to accommodate this sort of thing.  The design might not work for other artist, though.

Okay, so that's the good.  The downside: most of this was set up perfectly adequately in "Messiah Complex", and Cable #1 doesn't take us a great deal further.  Here's what actually happens.  Cable shows up in a ruined New Jersey in the year 2043.  A bunch of local thugs attack him, and Cable fights them off before changing the baby's nappy (for three pages).  Then he has a flashback recapping "Messiah Complex", then he wanders around a bit more, and then Bishop shows up at the end.  And that's it.

What's missing... well, what's missing is any other characters.  The kid is a prop rather than a player, and aside from Bishop in the last panel, the other characters are generic.  We're not even told why Cable has come to this particular place, although logically it ought to be a major question: if his goal is to protect the kiddie from horribleness, why he has taken her to a dystopian future?  Only a single throwaway line about trying to get to Manhattan hints at him having a goal, and that's not much to work with.

So.  It's okay as a recap of what came before.  It makes reasonably decent use of the babysitter image, and Ariel Olivetti does a very good Cable.  If you're joining the story from scratch, it's fine.  If you've been reading it already... it probably needed to do a bit more in the first issue.  Frankly, it reads like the sort of first issue we used to get in the Bill Jemas era, where you could see some promise in the concept, but nothing actually bloody happened until the last page.  I thought we'd seen the last of this, but apparently not.

I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now, though.  I do like the idea and the art; and what's here is quite good.  There just ought to be more.

Rating: B

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