Trust Cable & Deadpool to mess up my lovely new format idea.

"Why, When I Was Your Age..." bills itself as being simultaneously an epilogue to the previous storyline and a prologue to the next one.  Which means it doesn't quite fit into either.  Curses.  So I'll just take it as a self-contained story and review it anyway.

Cable is still returning to his normal age after being turned into a baby during the previous storyline (don't ask), so Deadpool decides to take Teen Cable out on the town.  Exercising his usual judgement, Deadpool chooses the town of Intercourse, PA, simply because he likes the name, and then takes Cable to a bar, where he's too young to drink.  Then they start talking about what they were like when they were seventeen.

This looks like another attempt to address the lingering problem with this whole book - given a choice, why on earth would these two characters choose to remain together?  Up till now, Fabian Nicieza has largely ducked the point by forcing them together and letting them get annoyed about it.  Now, after eighteen issues together and with Deadpool's mental health somewhat improved, it's time to try and give them a more stable relationship.

It's an odd little story, based on both telling stories about their teenage years, chopped up into bits, presented out of sequence, and with narration that doesn't always match what we see in the art.  Basically, Deadpool tells us about the death of his father, while Cable talks about one of his missions.

Deadpool's bit is much stronger.  We've seen virtually nothing about his background before now (and much of what we've been told is utterly confused by the latter issue of Joe Kelly's run).  But this issue does a nice job of establishing a multi-layered relationship between Deadpool and his father.  At first the father's presented as a standard abusive father, but there turns out to be more to him than that. 

As for Cable, it's infinitely harder to relate to anything in his part of the story.  Some confusing storytelling doesn't help, but Cable's future has never really worked for me as a convincing world.  It always feels like a random assembly of elements that artists think are cool, and this is no exception.  Who on earth designs wartime technology that looks like that?  It just doesn't ring true. 

The point of all this is meant to be the extent to which Cable and Deadpool have controlled the direction of their own lives, or whether they've simply been going with the flow.  Cable's a soldier because he didn't see himself as having any choice, and Deadpool's just copped out and randomly done whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.  It's not a bad theme, but I'm not sure how clearly it comes across.

Still, it's a decent attempt to give these characters a proper reason to remain together, besides the demands of the immediate plot.

Rating: B

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