Yes, it's another of those ridiculously heavy weeks when Marvel deluge the market with X-books.  Regular readers will probably have noticed by now that my level of enthusiasm tails off enormously in these weeks.

It's not so much that they're deluging the market with bad titles.  Of the current line-up of X-books, only Excalibur and X-Force could really be described as consistently bad, and X-Force doesn't count, because it exists at right angles to quality in the first place.  Nonetheless, it is also not as though Marvel are deluging the market with superlatively good comics.  What we are getting is a load of comics which would be perfectly decent second-tier books in a reasonably sized line.  But in these numbers, they begin to feel bloated.

It is not so long ago that Marvel pruned back the line, cancelling superfluous books like X-Men: The Hidden Years and Excalibur, with a view to having a smaller line where every title actually had a purpose.  This showed remarkable signs of medium-term thinking.  But Marvel doesn't seem to go in for that any more, so instead we're back in a ludicrous rush to drain the franchise dry by publishing as many X-books as the market will afford.  And Marvel wonder why there aren't any readers left over to care about any of their other new launches.

To be honest, even though the individual books tend to be alright, I find myself hoping for many of them to suffer a swift and brutal cancellation.  If Marvel insist on thinking exclusively in the short-term, I can only hope it goes very badly for them.  The line is ludicrously over-extended, damaging the X-books themselves, and squeezing out everything else, and the sooner it suffers a scorched-earth devastation of the lower-tier X-titles, the better.  The mere existence of this many X-books is a bad thing, unless they're superlatively brilliant, which they're not.

So.  With that enthusiastic start, let us begin.

Cable & Deadpool, to be fair to it, has one of the more persuasive claims on continued existence.  The characters don't really fit together in the same title, but Fabian Nicieza has been fairly successful in turning that to his advantage.  Despite the title, this book is really Cable Versus Deadpool, with Cable going back to his old Messianic themes, and Deadpool as the clown who keeps undercutting him.

It's not a perfect fit - it feels decidedly as though Nicieza has a big idea for a Cable story he wants to tell, and Deadpool has been shoehorned in because that was the remit.  But if it isn't Deadpool's story, at least he's been given a productive niche as a supporting character.  And more to the point, if Nicieza doesn't have many Deadpool stories he wants to tell, at least he clearly has a Cable story he wants to tell.  While much of the line feels like the product of an editor phoning a creator at random and saying "Hey, we're doing a solo title for Character X, want to write six issues?", I really get the feeling from this book that Fabian has a story he wants to tell.  That makes a world of difference.

Cable is being presented as a self-proclaimed voice of reason, who  may well have a point but seems worryingly oblivious to the number of people he annoys in the process.  Rather than give him an extreme viewpoint, however, Nicieza has him championing the sensible middle ground which adversarial politics precludes; Cable wants to be the champion of the silent majority who don't really feel as strongly as the shouty people.  I'm not sure about the choice of example he gives to Irene - for a character with a global worldview, it would be questionable to choose the Republicans and Democrats as examples of polar opposites, since by global standards, all American politics is extremely right-wing.  Still, the basic idea isn't bad.

Deadpool is left to act as a foil for the X-Men, who are working to get Cable under control.  Strictly speaking you could do this story perfectly happily without him, and just have the X-Men fill his role themselves; he has a plot device function in getting the team aboard Cable's base, but that wouldn't be hard to work around.  But the character's useful to put a bit of life into what would otherwise be staid plot-advancement and exposition scenes, largely because he won't shut up and listen to them.

Patrick Zircher's art hits the right mix of cartoon and dynamism, fitting both Deadpool's comedy scenes and the action sequences.  It's a nice-looking title, and flows well.  He sells the deadpan comedy moments quite effectively, too.

Not perfect by any means, but a title I actually enjoy reading even in a glut week like this - and most importantly, a title that feels like it has a reason to exist.

Rating: A-

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