It's the week before Christmas, and Marvel are giving me a nice light workload - just the three X-books.  Not by design, though. 

As often happens when we approach the end of the year, the number of late books has been spiralling again.  Wolverine, X-Men, X-Force and New X-Men were all meant to be out this week as well, but they aren't here.  For that matter, Astonishing X-Men, Gambit, NYX, Ultimate Nightmare, Ultimate X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine: The End have all slipped off schedule too.  Minor slippages for the most part, but it hasn't been this bad in a long time.

Anyhow, that leaves us with a clutch of peripheral titles, and that means we can get through this week's reviews fairly quickly.  After all, I'll need to save the energy for next week's Year In Review post.

Cable & Deadpool #10 wraps up "The Burnt Offering", which was originally going to be the first two thirds of a storyline called "The Passion of the Cable" until Marvel took fright.  In fact, the original title would have been perfectly justified, given the story.  Cable expects his psychic powers to burn him out and kill him in early course, so he embarks on a high-profile stunt to try and kill himself while teaching humanity to be nicer to one another.  He's buying outright into his own messiah role, and making a real stab at dying as an influential martyr.  So Cable really was trying to get himself killed in messianic fashion.  However many buttons it may have pushed, the original title would have been a fair reflection of the plot.

Reading between the lines, I suspect another motivation here is to get rid of Cable's insanely high power levels, and reset him to gun-toting paramilitary mode.  Aside from achieving consistency with X-Force, it has certain other obvious appeals.  There are limited stories that you can tell about omnipotent characters, and Cable's core appeal always lay more in the big guns than the pseudo-religious meditations.  Plus, depowering him results in a much more workable team-up book with Deadpool - who might finally get to do something in the book other than act as the comic relief.

Nicieza and Zircher largely succeed in what they set out to do here.  It's not a flawless book by any means - the co-star hasbeen marginalised into a horribly contrived subplot where he has to hunt components of an improvised device which has the amazing inability to resolve the plot if you switch it on during the final act.  And come to think of it, it's never been terribly clear how anyone worked out that they should be looking for it in the first place.  The story relies on momentum to carry it over these problems.

But momentum more or less gets it there; the creators pull off a good extended fight scene between Cable and the Silver Surfer, wisely keeping the Surfer's dialogue to a minimum instead of having him spell out his position to anyone who hasn't got the point yet.  And the book has a definite charm to it, running merrily with the sheer absurdity of large-scale superhero stories rather than trying to tone them down. 

It benefits from re-reading, since there are moments which don't make an awful lot of sense unless the details of earlier issues are fresh in the mind (for example, to understand why Weasel hands over Deadpool's location, you'd need to remember some throwaway dialogue about the Cat's tattoo from three months ago, and I'm not convinced how many readers remember earlier issues in that much detail).  Still, it's worth the read - the plot flows much more smoothly on a second read through.

Good fun, if a little overcomplex.  Sure, it's basically a Cable book with a superfluous character hanging around, but it's solid entertainment.

Rating: B+

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