CABLE #17

Having succeeded in his quest to turn the Earth into such a living shithole that there will be no future for Cable to flee into, Bishop takes control of the last remaining city and hunts for Hope at the scene of humanity's last stand. Cable, having been separated from Hope for two years while suffering from the loss of telekinetic control over the techno-organic virus that plagues his body, arrives to find a now adolescent Hope living in hiding, protected by a boy she's fallen in love with. Horrified at this, Cable steals a rocket built by the inhabitants of the city (their last hope for escaping the dying Earth and preserving the human race) and flies off into space. I realize Bishop and Cable believe that none of this will count if Hope dies/lives to become mutant messiah and I hope one of them is right, because otherwise these two assholes are going to have a lot to answer for.

CABLE #8

Any fears I may have had that this book had regained its senses are thankfully put to rest here. Under psychic torture, Bishop gives up the details of his plan: he's been running around in the future detonating nuclear weapons all over the world, killing millions and making large chunks of the planet uninhabitable, so that Cable has less room to hide. To his mind this doesn't constitute genocide, because killing the kid will invalidate the timeline and everything will just start over. Well, sure, of course. Beast strongly objects to the advanced interrogation techniques used here, and I can totally see where he's coming from -- I believe the Geneva Conventions should be adhered to and Guantanamo closed -- but come on Hank, the guy tried to shoot a baby with a goddamn bazooka.

Now that Bishop has successfully reduced much of the future Earth to a smoldering cinder, Cable finds himself under attack by a band of marauders who survived the nuclear holocaust by, quite ingeniously, splicing their DNA and turning themselves into human cockroaches. Having literally buried his guns in the ground (a very nice symbolic gesture, if perhaps a touch naive) Cable is forced to hack these roach men apart with a chainsaw, which is certainly not a scene I ever expected to see here, but this comic is nothing if not full of surprises.

oh good, another issue of fucking Cable

CABLE #7

The cover of this comic book is inexcusably terrible. It looks like it was stolen from a 16-year-old's deviantArt page. That aside, this issue takes a step back from the precipice of Total Fucking Insanity that this book had been teetering upon. Two years have passed in the future, and Cable has married and settled into quiet domesticity, raising the still-unnamed kid in a farming community. There's some good stuff here, like Cable wondering whether Little Girl's tantrums are a product of her violent early life or just a normal kid thing. There is also a profoundly stupid scene of Cable's wife sleeping comfortably with her head nuzzled against his giant metal robot arm.

Meanwhile, Bishop visits the present and promptly gets his arm slashed off by Wolverine. Scott and Emma take turns interrogating him, until he finally gives up his plan: having failed to kill the baby, Bishop says the hell with it and decides he's just going to obliterate the entire space-time continuum, which strikes me as overreactive but strategically sound.

COMIX I READ LAST WEEK

DAREDEVIL #111

Lady Bullseye is, I guess, an okay (if not desperately original) character idea, but that costume is a god damn mess. As a child, Lady Bullseye was inadvertently rescued from slavery by Gentleman Bullseye, and soon after she discovered that she was born, like all Japanese people, with the instinctive ability to kill with her bare hands. Now she has turned her talents towards killing Daredevil's allies, probably in some harebrained scheme to make Bullseye fall in love with her. I guess that's women for you.

Meanwhile, Matt goes to bed with Dakota North, the supermodel-turned-private detective (a totally plausible career change). This in spite of the fact that his blind wife is locked away in an insane asylum, stemming from recent events that he's indirectly responsible for. What a dick!


CAPTAIN AMERICA #42

Here we see the new Captain America finally unravel the plot that killed Steve Rogers and nearly sent the country spiraling into anarchy, a conspiracy made up of:

The Red Skull
the mad Captain America from the '50s
an evil businessman
an evil politician
an evil psychiatrist
an evil scientist who exists as a giant green face projected onto a TV with legs

and so on. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what happened in this issue, and I've read it twice. The plot involves a number of betrayals and several people switching their brains into the bodies of other people and I'm sure someone will make sense of this but that person is not me. What's notable here is that Brubaker is able to make the new Captain seem like something fresh, despite Bucky being every bit the relic that Steve Rogers was. This is a good comic book!


KING-SIZE CABLE SPECTACULAR

This is the most preposterous series I have ever read. The premise: two years after the Decimation that wiped out all but 198 mutants, a mutant child has been born. A melee ensues, and finally the X-Men are able to secure the baby from the various factions who seek to control her. The fate of mutantkind could hinge on the survival of this child, and Cyclops makes the only reasonable decision to ensure her safety: he hands her over to his estranged son, the paramilitant zealot from the future, who straps her to his chest and takes her to a post-apocalyptic New York where gun-toting lunatics are constantly trying to kill them both.


Look at the size of that gun! He is constantly firing that thing off, inches from the head of a damn little baby! He might as well forgo the gun and just fucking throw her at people. I know we are talking about a comic book, but this strikes me as untenably insane. I didn't actually read this latest issue, but if it's anything like the previous seven, it went something like this:

BISHOP: HAND OVER THE GIRL, CABLE!
CABLE: NEVER!!!!!

and then they shoot at each other for 45 pages.