In many ways, Cable & Deadpool is one of the most interesting X-books.  It's managed to drag both of its characters off the beaten track, but it's done so while retaining a clear idea of what makes them work.  On top of that, by placing Cable's world-changing ambitions front and centre, it's largely abandoned the conventions of the superhero genre and started to become a weird political thriller played out with Marvel Universe elements.

"The Domino Principle" isn't exactly the most commercial story they could have done in this book.  The dramatic hook is that Cable and Deadpool are overthrowing the terrorist government of Rumekistan, and Cable's going to instal himself in its place.  Domino shows up to make a nuisance of herself, and agonises about how far she can trust Cable.  And Cable, who has been largely unbothered by anything other characters have said about him up till now, is finally rattled by the thought that even Domino doesn't trust him in this role.

Although she's appeared before in this title, this is the first story to really focus on Domino and Cable's long-established relationship.  That seemed a slightly odd choice in the past, given that she's one of his major supporting characters, but now it makes more sense.  Precisely because Domino is the only character in the book who relates to Cable as a friend rather than a messiah figure or a cryptic leader, she can cause more disruption by showing up late for the story.

What makes the story so wilfully uncommercial is the use of Rumekistan.  We can leave aside the garbled geography that places a country of that name in "central Europe", half a continent west of where it should be.  This is a sequel to Citizen V & The V-Battalion: The Everlasting, a 2002 miniseries which sold about twelve copies.  That might not have been an issue if we'd simply picked up with ULTIMATUM in charge - their utopian post-nationalist philosophy is a neat match for Cable's anyway.  But Citizen V also turns up to complicate the story with a guest starring role unlikely to send sales soaring.  There's some suggestion of a recurring plot role here for him, but even so, I'm not convinced that he needed to be quite so prominent in this particular story - other than the practical requirement of finding somebody for Deadpool to fight.  He really just ends up reminding us of a rather obscure miniseries that isn't especially crucial to the plot, and I suspect the story would have run more smoothly without him.

There's also some credibility-straining material as Cable swiftly brings Rumekistan under control by sheer force of personality, as rebels and terrorists unite with a minimum of grumbling to set about reconstruction work.  I wondered whether there was some sort of mind control element involved here, but it really does seem as though we're expected to accept that Cable has the sort of supernatural leadership charisma that this would require.  It's not a fundamental problem - it's too rushed, rather than hopelessly implausible - but it does read rather strangely.

Nonetheless, there's a lot to enjoy in this story - Domino finally shaking Cable's self-confidence over two years into the series, and the ideological similarities with ULTIMATUM's utopian terrorists both make for interesting reading.  And a book with such a tenuous link to the usual superhero formula is always intriguingly unpredictable.

Rating: B+

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