The week's only other X-book is Cable #5, completing the opening "War Baby" arc. 

You'll recall that at the end of "Messiah Complex", Cable fled into the future with the new mutant baby.  Bishop gave chase, hoping to kill the baby off.  And in this storyline, they both spent five issues running around a future New Jersey shooting at each other and at the locals.

It's all perfectly readable, but I don't get the feeling that we're heading anywhere.  After five issues, what have we achieved?  Well, we've established that Cable can only flee further into the future, which is one thing.  Aside from that, though, all we know is that Bishop wants to kill the baby and Cable wants to save her... and we knew that in "Messiah Complex."  So the book has basically devoted its opening arc to setting up a premise that the vast majority of its readers knew already.

Aside from that, there wasn't much to this story.  You've got an unpleasant local regime, and you've got a clunky subplot about a waitress being inspired by Cable's example to, er, get some really big guns and kill people.  This comes across a lot sillier than it was probably supposed to, as we never get a good reason to care much about the fate of this generic dystopia.

Oh, and this issue does drop some very heavy hints about the identity of the baby - although for most readers, they probably won't do more than confirm that you're on the right track.

I don't particularly dislike this book.  It meanders along happily enough, and there's something curiously engaging about Ariel Olivetti's art, with its combination of hyper-real backgrounds and cartoonish figures.  There's a deadpan ridiculousness to the book, which I sincerely hope is intentional.  But it's a quick, superficial read, and it's taken five issues to advance by a fraction of an inch.

Rating: C+

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