Eight X-books in one week.  Eight!  It's like some kind of demented satire.  Either that or some kind of weird physics experiment where Marvel try to see how many X-books they can publish before the line achieves critical mass, turns into a black hole, and consumes the industry.

Anyhow.  I'm running a day late, so let's see if we can be relatively quick with this batch.

Cable/Deadpool #6 wraps up the first arc, which in a better paced world would have happened two months ago.  To be fair, this book was delayed for a few months, and much as I roll my eyes at many of the current Marvel policies, the move away from dragging everything out to a six-issue arc is something I definitely welcome.  Mind you, the next arc's set down to be a six-parter as well...

The big problem with an ongoing Cable/Deadpool series is the fundamental implausibility of the two characters sticking together, when they don't like one another and haven't even got any common goals to band behind.  Nicieza has opted for something akin to the solution tried in the recent Defenders series, where the characters are stuck together against their will.  As you might expect, this calls for a hefty dose of pseudoscience and the reintroduction of a piece of early-nineties Kirbytech.  But the upshot is clear enough - because their bodies were intermingled, Cable's HQ can't tell them apart, so Cable can't get rid of Deadpool if he wants to get in. 

Contrived?  Well, yes.  Hugely.  But it's kind of essential to the premise of the series, so I'm just about prepared to let it go (on the principle that for every series, you have to be prepared to swallow one fundamentally ridiculous proposition, and see what flows from that).

More promising is the dynamic set up between the two.  Cable was always introduced as a messiah figure whose role was to get rid of Apocalypse.  Once Apocalypse was out of the way, the character became rather directionless and spent the next few years wandering around in search of a new raison d'etre (eventually settling in Soldier X for... well, vaguely promoting a kind of cut-price Buddism he picked up during the Jeph Loeb run).  This book is setting up the idea of Cable as a highly untrustworthy figure who's decided to throw his weight about again.  He's still entirely well-intentioned, but he's starting to throw himself into highly controversial causes.

Now, the set-up seems to leave us in a position where Deadpool has to keep Cable in check, but it's hard to see how that's going to work.  Deadpool's comprehensively outpowered by Cable, after all, and I still get the distinct feeling that the characters have been shoved into a book together for no real reason other than to see if they can get better sales together than they managed apart.  (And thus far, the answer is yes.)  But Cable's position is interesting enough, so if the next arc can give Deadpool a meaningful role, Nicieza might yet pull this title off.

The fiddly plot contortions don't help the book, but there are interesting ideas in here.  This is a decidedly flawed, and overlong, storyline.  But despite that, I'm intrigued to see where Nicieza is heading with the title.

Rating: B

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