cable #89-100
THE CREATORS: Robert Weinberg, Michael Ryan and Tom Pertzborn up
until issue #96. After that, David Tischman writing and Igor Kordey
on art.
THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Two, both during the Ryan run. But in
fairness to Ryan, he's done a lot of work elsewhere this year,
including a three-issue Citizen V miniseries.
WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The resolution of the Dark Sisterhood
storyline; a single issue story about an immortal neanderthal; and
Cable goes to Peru to fight the Shining Path.
Cable was the last of the relaunches to take place, by which time
most people had forgotten that it was being relaunched at all.
The first half of the year, though, saw Robert Weinberg and Michael
Ryan wrapping up their storyline. Weinberg had apparently planned
something much longer and more complicated for Cable, including
the return of the characters from alternate futures in his first
storyline, but instead he sensibly focussed on dealing with the
major outstanding plot, the Dark Sisterhood. This still took a
fairly hefty chunk of time, though.
Weinberg and Ryan's run had a very loyal audience, although that
level of interest doesn't seem to have translated into orders for
Weinberg's creator-owned Nightside series. It was a good, solid,
well-constructed series, but seemed to never quite cross the line
into something truly original. At the end of the day, the Dark
Sisterhood storyline was about a secret society plotting to
overthrow the government, and the ideas raised weren't breaking
new ground. Still, what they did, they did well.
David Tischman and Igor Kordey are a more offbeat proposition.
Tischman is best known as Howard Chaykin's co-writer on American
Century, a somewhat underwhelming Vertigo title in which a guy
with no personality visits areas of the world that the writers
find interesting, meets a ton of other characters without much
personality who are hard to tell apart from one another, has
sex with some of them, and then buggers off home. At least, that
was the general pattern up to the point where I gave up reading it.
Lots of ambition, little in the way of drama.
Oddly, Cable seems to be more successful, perhaps because Tischman
is including a more structured plot here. His version of the
Peruvian terrorist group the Shining Path was eminently plausible,
helped by some excellent artwork from Igor Kordey. If nothing
else, it was nice to see an American comic resisting the usual
stereotypes and drawing Lima as a fully functioning city. (During
the time this story was coming out, one of the Spider-Man books
visited Lima and depicted llamas wandering around outside the
airport. This sort of thing is at best patronising, but still comes
up far too frequently.)
Tischman and Kordey's storyline wasn't entirely successful - in an
attempt to avoid easy answers, Tischman seemed to lapse back into
American Century's problem of not clearly resolving anything. The
story never provided enough information about Peru to let the
reader form any real opinion as to whether or not a Shining Path
government would have been an improvement, and so its attempts to
strike a note of moral ambiguity weren't entirely successful.
Still, despite its flaws, Tischman's Cable is making an interesting
effort to address some unusual and difficult subjects. It isn't
quite there yet, but the direction is a promising one.
