THE CREATORS: Fabian Nicieza and Patrick Zircher

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2005: "Thirty Pieces", with Cable being reset to a more sensible power level; "A Murder in Paradise", where Deadpool plays detective; "Enema of the State", with Deadpool jumping between alternate worlds to disentangle the climax of X-Force #6; and "Bosom Buddies", with a cast of thousands chasing a magic widget.

Last year, I said that I hoped Cable & Deadpool would continue, but given the discouraging sales figures I wouldn't place money on it surviving 2005.  Evidently I should have taken the bet, because the title has levelled out in sales, and it's still hanging in there.

If ever a comic shouldn't have worked, it's Cable & Deadpool.  It takes two hopelessly mismatched characters with no obvious reason to work together - not to mention a massive disparity in power levels - and nails them together in a single comic for no immediately obvious reason.  But to his credit, Fabian Nicieza has managed to make the book work.  Having successfully racked down Cable's powers to sane levels again, he's now playing up the odd couple dynamic for all it's worth.

Cable has long since drifted away from the original character designed by Rob Liefeld.  He's now a utopian schemer, quietly manipulating all the other characters - and especially the dimwitted Deadpool - into doing his dirty work for him.  And despite the mixed results of his previous forays into this area, Cable still thinks it'd be a great idea to remake the world into a better society.  But does he really know what he's doing, or is he just going to cause even more problems than he's solving?  After all, even though he has the benefit of hindsight, it's not like his world turned out so well.

Deadpool, meanwhile, provides the point of view character who allows Cable to remain suitably enigmatic, as well as the goofy comic relief that stops the series becoming too heavy going.  After almost two years the book has finally got its two protagonists into a relationship where they can believably work together - Deadpool tacitly admires Cable, and Cable thinks Deadpool is a useful idiot.  It's a fabulous little character dynamic with a ton of potential.

What's more, the book isn't afraid to nudge at the boundaries of taste for mainstream superhero books.  The "Murder in Paradise" arc, with Deadpool investigating the murder of a thinly disguised Osama bin Laden in Cable's idyllic model community, had some jawdropping moments - such as Deadpool cheerfully attacking a mosque on the grounds that, hell, there's got to be something suspicious about a mosque.  ("Why let statistics, truth and reality cloud my judgment?")  One of this year's few "Did I just read that?" moments from the X-books.

On the down side, Fabian Nicieza is still prone to bogging his stories down with dementedly overengineered plots.  Horrifically convoluted macguffins like the Dominus Objective don't help the series, because the reader is too busy trying to work out what the hell is going on to pay attention to the bits that are really important.  For all that there was a degree of self-parody to that arc, the underlying problem was there too.

But the good far outweighs the bad in this title, and it's a pleasure to see that it's found a niche for itself.

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