For the most part, April is the X-books' transition month.  It wraps up existing storylines, it sets up material for Reload, and in the case of the X-Men books, it shamelessly kills time.

Bucking the trend, however, is Cable & Deadpool, which only launched last month and is ploughing gamely on with its first storyline.  Last time I reviewed this issue, I spent half the time mocking the cover.  It is only fair to note that this issue, Liefeld's cover is marginally improved.  Cable has at least got rid of the rucksack.

Issue #1 was effectively a Deadpool story with Cable turning up towards the end.  This issue, Deadpool gets shunted into the margins and Cable takes the lead.  All very good for equal time, but it does result in an obvious change of tone - when you've got Cable as protagonist, the comedy has to be toned down enormously.  There's such an obvious gulf in the approach to these two characters that I'm still baffled as to how an ongoing series with the two of them is meant to work.  I realise it's an odd couple gimmick, but they don't really seem to complement each other.

A Fabian Nicieza story wouldn't be complete without a really complicated macguffin, so this story has both Cable and Deadpool hunting down the Facade virus, a bioweapon which has been stolen from its laboratory.  Deadpool's employers want the virus because it can give you shapechanging powers.  Unfortunately, as is the way with bioweapons, it also kills you.

Most of this issue is devoted to Cable running around after the low-rent criminals who stole the thing in the first place, a bunch of rather dimwit anarchists who don't really have much of a clue what they're talking about.  It does make a nice change to see Cable brushing this stuff aside as not being proper anarchism, which indeed it isn't.  (In fact, it generally isn't.  It's probably fair to say that 99% of people using that A-in-a-circle emblem have no idea why the circle is there, what it stands for, where the quote comes from, who said it or what he meant.)

Quite what the villains are up to is a bit confused, although in fairness, that's partly because they're supposed to be rather clueless themselves.  It seems that the idea was to use their new shapechanging powers to cause confusion and spread their (garbled) message, but that never really comes across all that clearly before they go nuts and start shooting at everything.  Of course, they're really just cannon fodder for Cable to brush aside, but the idea of the characters - which is basically quite good - doesn't come through as clearly as it might.

It's a generally good looking issue, albeit that Udon's art style seems more at home with Deadpool's more explicit comedy than Cable's trenchcoated brooding.  I've never been entirely sure about Udon's strangely cuddly take on deformed characters, for that matter, but in the context of this story they seem to get away with it.  Nice dynamic action sequences, though, which is the main thing.

Not bad, but the comic still seems like a bit of an awkward fit - Deadpool and Cable show no obvious signs of working together as lead characters, and while Deadpool at least has some character interest in anything that can fix his scars, Cable seems to be cast in a generic hero role at this stage.

Rating: B

back | continue