The last issue of Cable & Deadpool came out during the week I skipped (and before any more of you e-mail me, no, I'm not going to go back and cover the missing issues - I just don't have the time).

So that makes this the first time I've written about "Enema of the State", a title which frankly doesn't make an enormous amount of sense at this point.  Yes, it's a play on "Enemy of the State."  But what the relevance of that is supposed to be, I have no idea.  It's got nothing in common with the Wolverine storyline, and the title doesn't bear any obvious relationship to the actual plot.

Cable is missing following X-Force #6, and Fabian Nicieza feels obliged to resolve the storyline rather than just politely ignore it.  So we have Deadpool jumping from universe to universe in search of Cable, with Cannonball and Siryn in tow.  The idea is that each jump should be taking him closer to Cable.  In practice, it means that we get a tour of various Cable-themed Earths.  There's an Earth where he becomes a lunatic soldier, an Earth where everything's ridiculously placid and he's a hippy leader, an Earth where the techno-organic virus ran out of control, and so forth.

There are some reasonably interesting ideas here about Cable's character, but it suffers from some of the same problems as Nicieza's earlier X-Men Forever, which used a similar "jump" structure.  It all feels rather disconnected.  I was tempted to say that it didn't feel like it was heading anywhere, but that's not really it.  Rather, the problem is that there's no villain here, and the set-up simply demands that Deadpool keep trying until he gets it right.  There's no real tension because the set-up allows Deadpool to keep going for as long as he wants.  And while the events they encounter along the way are interesting enough in their own right, there's no obvious reason to think that they matter.  Deadpool and co can simply move on to the next world and ignore it all.  We're being taken on the scenic route, and while it's all quite amusing, it doesn't seem like anything we see here has consequences.

Still, Deadpool's chatter is able to lighten up what could otherwise be an expository slog, and the New Age Cable world - which is so peaceful that a bunch of robots come round to your house to offer compulsory assistance with stomach upsets - is a nice extrapolation from Cable's tendency to impose his own ideas on other characters.  It's quite enjoyable from scene to scene, but it's not really much of a story.

Rating: B

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