Once again, I'm only back in town over the weekend, so I'll be taking this week's X-books quickly.  Or as quickly as reasonably possible, considering that there's eight of the bastards.  You'd have thought that even the most brainless of short-term thinkers could grasp that eight X-books a week is a bit many, but of course that presupposes that anyone's actually thinking about this stuff at all.

Anyhow, we kick off with Cable & Deadpool #11, the first half of "Thirty Pieces."  Apparently, this is the arc which was originally going to be the final third of "Passion of the Cable", before it was decided that it actually made more sense to bill it as a completely separate arc.  Hence "Passion" being cut down from six issues to four.  And they're right; to all intents and purposes, we're now starting on something new.

Don't ask me why Deadpool's fighting Domino on the cover, by the way.  They're both in the issue, but not actually on the same page.

Thus far, Cable & Deadpool has been a Cable book with Deadpool hanging around the edges.  Now that Cable's resting gently in a coma, Deadpool finally gets to take over the book.  Considering that he's a raving nutcase, Deadpool has always made a surprisingly good protagonist.  Nicieza's got the right approach here - Deadpool rambles and bounces all over the place, but there's still a proper character in there.  You have to look past the one-liners to see it, but the motivations are all there when you look for them.

Interestingly, the Cable-as-messiah angle hasn't been dropped.  On the contrary, plenty of characters still believe in him (including, it would seem, Deadpool himself).  But now, he no longer has the power to back it up.  That's a much more interesting set-up for the future.  Cable's had his messiah role for years, but giving him some actual followers is a nice move.

Meanwhile, the Six Pack try to track Cable down and end up getting dragged into his mind.  That gives us some wonderfully odd scenes, as it turns out that inside Cable's mind, everyone's a superdeformed cartoon character.  Cable, naturally, looks just like he did when he was first created.  ("Flashing eye, telepath and telekinetic... it was all the rage back in the '90s.")

Fun stuff.  And as always, the key thing about this book is that I really get a sense of direction and momentum here.  Unlike so many of the X-books these days, it really feels like there's a point to all this, beyond just filling the pages and raking in the cash.  That's the way it ought to be.

Rating: B+

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