I’m on vacation this week so we’ll be posting some quick stuff, mostly sketches I picked up at New York Comic Con 2012 starting with this one of Cable by Reilly Brown.
Reilly is an awesome artist and I really loved his work on the Cable and Deadpool series. That said, getting a sketch of Cable from him made me super excited. You can catch up on his current projects on his Tumblr. You should also check out his own project Power Play which I highly recommend.
With the San Diego Comic Con next week, the net is buzzing about an announcement for a X-Force movie. Bleeding Cool has been speculating about it all week, and X-Force co-creator Rob Liefeld has been tweeting up a storm. That said who gets to be in the movie?
I would assume that it would be the original era, as opposed to the X-Force as Wolverine’s covert hit squad. That said, it would be safe to assume that Cable would be in this and would be front and center with the team. I would assume that the movie would branch off from X-Men: The Last Stand, with a group of mutant students from the Xavier Institute going on their own under his leadership.
You would need someone to be a more direct counterpoint to Cable, and I think that is where Cannonball comes in. But as far as the rest of who should (or shouldn’t) be in the movie is pretty up in the air.
Domino makes sense, as she kind of serves as a second to Cable. Warpath brings a unique choice, as they haven’t really had any Native American characters in a super hero movie before. Having Rictor and Sunspot, who are Mexican and Brazillian respectively, might help make the movie easier to market in Latin America. But would they make Rictor be openly gay in the movie as he is in the comics? The same question could be raised if they bring in his boyfriend Shatterstar into the film. That would be another first, too, with having a gay super hero in a mainstream movie.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone would notice or miss Feral and Boom Boom if they weren’t included in the film other than me. So what do you think?
Rob Liefeld’s cover of New Mutants #99 is a homage to X-Men #138.As that much earlier issue was about changes, this issue serves as the beginning of the transition period from the New Mutants to X-Force.
It’s been a rough few months for the New Mutants, and Cable’s leadership of the group is becoming more apparent and causes a lot of discord. As the cover shows, Sunspot leaves the group at the end of the issue. After being informed that his estranged father was murdered, Sunspot is returning to Brazil and Cable is mostly apathetic to this.
That sets up a yelling match between Cable and Cannonball about the direction of the team. Cable sees the New Mutants as soldiers he has to train and develop for an upcoming war, with little regard for the people themselves. Cannonball gets even more upset, when Cable has the same reaction to the news to Rictor’s leaving.
You really get the feeling that there is a huge changing of the guard, both in the make up of the team and in the group’s philosophy. Out of the remaining members you have Cable and Domino, both of whom share this bleaker outlook. Even Boom Boom is buying in on their more hard line approach. And then there is Cannonball, who is begrudgingly hanging on to this group he helped start in the first place.
With Rictor and Sunspot out, the team will need new members. This issue conveniently provides them. Warpath has returned; the Apache reservation he lived on was seemingly destroyed by the Hellfire Club and he wants revenge. Cable promises he will assist in that as long as he’s dedicated to fighting the war to save mutantkind.
On the brightside, this issue is the debut of the cat-powered Feral, who is looking for protection from the Morlocks, and the end features a yet-to-be-revealed Shatterstar popping up in the Danger Room.
New Mutants #87
New Mutants #87 introduces Cable to the Marvel Universe. It’s not every month a character who is going to have this big an impact on the series debuts every month.
Not only did Cable debut in this issue but his primary nemesis Stryfe does as well. Stryfe is part of a group of terrorist mutants called the Mutant Liberation Front. They’re attempting to rescue the incarcerated New Mutants Rusty and Skids. And by rescue, I mean wind up brainwashing them into joining their ranks.
As this is going on, Cable shows up in an attempt to stop Stryfe from abducting the duo. The book ends with the MLF escaping and Cable being locked up by the government, as he was blamed for the attack.
What this issue did was set up the last year of the series, as well as it’s relaunch/metamorphosis into X-Force. In the issue, it wasn’t very clear why Cable needed to protect Rusty, Skids or the rest of the New Mutants, but it was established that there was some reason he would not accept them joining Stryfe’s forces. There’s a lot of mystery about what is going on and it does get explained in later issues.
New Mutants #87 is also pretty cool in my book, as it’s a collaboration between writer Louise Simonson and artist Rob Liefeld, both of whom I am a pretty big fan of
We’re back after a break do an extreme case of being too busy. We have a battle of Cable vs. Satellite Deathstroke the Terminator! What would happen if these two bad-ass silver foxes did battle? These two might be a little more similar than you may think.
The first thing that comes to mind with Deathstroke and Cable is how similar the two of them are. First, their appearances come to mind. Both are white-haired. They both also happen to be missing an eye, but both manage to overcome that by being amazing supers. They’re master tacticians And I’m sure that there is no weapon they haven’t been trained to operate, and probably have faced every kind of hand-to-hand combat imaginable.
On the weaponry end of things, I would have to give Cable being that he is from the future. He has access to blaster weaponry that Deathstroke can’t even imagine. That said, I would have to say that Deathstroke is a much more disciplined fighter, being that he is the best assassin/black ops type in the DC universe.
So what it comes down to is their powers. Cable does have some telepathic and telekinetic abilities, but for the most part he uses them to keep the techno-organic virus that plagues his body in check. Deathstroke has enhanced reflexes and physical strength. But it’s not his brawn that tips the scales in his favor.
Deathstroke is able to operate using 90% of his brain power, allowing him to think steps ahead of everyone around him. And at the end of the day, that’s all he needs to terminate Cable. WINNER: Deathstroke
It’s six months later and I’ve finally gotten past issue #1 of X-Sanction. This Loeb and McGuinness pretty much sets up the whole Avengers vs. X-Men crossover this summer in a quick manner.
The whole point of X-Sanction was to set up a rift between the two camps. Cable is protecting his adopted daughter Hope–the last mutant and the future savior of mutantkind–from the Avengers. And by protecting her, I mean killing the Avengers.
Cable is under the assumption that they will kill his daughter and he won’t allow that. Loeb uses a series of flashbacks to the future where Cable finds out that the Avengers wind up possessing several weapons designed to kill mutants. Because the Avengers are awesome, Cable is nearly dead thanks to being physically beaten and the techno-organic virus wreaking havoc on his body. Hope–now controlling the Phoenix force–is able to not only save her adopted father, but completely remove the techno-organic virus, something that has not been accomplished in the disease’s twenty plus year history.
What it also accomplishes is a huge distrust between Captain America and Cyclops, which again makes this a starting point for Avengers vs. X-Men.
So should you read this?
I’m going to say its you can pass it. Don’t get me wrong, it all made sense story wise and McGuinness’ art is always great. But at the same time, this is just a feeder story for another crossover.You can skip this and start straight at Avengers vs. X-Men #1 without losing anything.
Uncanny X-Men #273 has the incredibly fitting tagline “Too Many Mutants! or Whose House is This Anyway?”. This issue has the three battle weary X-teams–X-Men, X-Factor and New Mutants–recovering from the events of the X-Tinction Agenda storyline at a battle ravaged X-Mansion.
Remember when there were ONLY three X-books?
Anyway, this is pretty much a Storm issue with her deciding what the future of the X-Men will be. Cable urges her to take a more proactive stance and preemptively strike threats to mutant and mankind. Jean Grey and Cyclops disagree with his plan. The conversation ends with Cable pretty much saying that he’s claiming the X-Mansion as his base of operation and that Storm has to decide whether she stays and shares his vision, or moves the X-Men in with X-Factor. Storm mulls the decision for the rest of the issue, only for the X-Men to be teleported out to the Shi’ Ar empire to save the long missing Professor X!
Along the way, there’s some fun scenes like the pictured Gambit/Wolverine battle in the Danger Room (where our favorite Cajun mutant wins by some awesome cheating), and Iceman and Boom Boom constantly bickering for comic relief.
Chris Claremont wrote this issue like it was a season premiere of a television show. It covers everything that had just happened previously in the X-books, but also sets up a whole year’s worth of stories like:
Getting back to the creative side, inker Scott Hanna is the book’s MVP as he manages to tie the pages by John Byrne, Michael Golden, Klaus Janson, Jim Lee
Rick Leonardi, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri and Larry Stroman together. You read that right; this book had eight different pencillers.
I feel kind of sorry for the X-Sanction mini-series. The creative team of Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately for X-Sanction, it comes before and is a prequel of sorts to the upcoming Avengers vs. X-Men mega-crossover. That said, it still looks like an interesting book.
I can sum up this issue pretty quickly. Cable has been informed that Hope, the last mutant born after M-Day (the time Scarlet Witch wished all the mutants away) and his ersatz daughter, will be killed at the hands of the Avengers. Obviously, he’s not going to let that happens so our time-travelling cyborg mutant has his sights set on them. This issue has him taking out Falcon and ends with him in a position to literally pull the trigger on Captain America.
You can’t help but have that feeling that you know what is going to happen by the end of the mini series. Cable is going to do something drastic that is only going to widen the rift between two sides. I think I’m going to wait till this is in a hardcover or trade paperback format to continue reading. That’s no fault of Loeb or McGuinness; I just have too much other stuff already in the reading pile at this point.
Ridiculously Awesome 