Cable for Dummies

Yepyep
Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
in MPQ General Discussion
And no, I'm not talking about Time Warner or Spectrum or Cablevision etc. because they make dummies out of all of us dumb enough to subscribe...

Anyway, the Marvel character -- who is the guy? I'm not a huge comics person compared to a lot of you (though I'd probably qualify as one compared to the general population!), so I don't know anything about Cable. I read up on him a bit on Wikipedia. But it seems he's a pretty significant fan favorite.

Would any of you be willing to write up some basic info about him, please? Why is he unusually popular, what are his powers, is his art especially cool, etc.? Does he have any significant relationships in the MCU to take note of? Other data you find meaningful?

Thanks very much! This seems like it would be useful in other cases, too -- kind of a rundown on characters for those of us who don't know but would like to.
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  • Shintok17
    Shintok17 Posts: 620 Critical Contributor
    Google.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    Shintok17 said:
    Google.
    Of course -- like I said, though, I have done some research.

    But that is nothing compared to what a "true believer" can say about a beloved character. I was hoping to make clear that there is an audience for anybody interested in holding forth on a favorite subject. Furthermore, the comics rabbithole is very, very deep and, being kind of an old(er) guy, I could really use a tour guide...
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    Twysta said:
    Try this.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddGOyTxfGSY
    This was great, thanks!
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Also perfect, thanks! Fits my short(ish) attention span, too.
  • Kahmon
    Kahmon Posts: 625 Critical Contributor
    And go see Deadpool 2.
  • Banquetto
    Banquetto Posts: 29 Just Dropped In
    edited October 2018
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Haha, good (and entertaining!) summary.
    The one thing I'd add is that when Cable was first created and introduced into the comics, nobody had thought up any of this.
    He was just "big guy with big guns" who would lead the New Mutants, and be a gung-ho action-oriented counterpoint to Charles Xavier's more thoughtful leadership of the X-Men. He was "Commander X" to Charles' "Professor X".
    Everything about him being Scott Summers' kid was dreamed up later. :)
  • Daredevil217
    Daredevil217 Posts: 3,965 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2018
    Whenever I think of Cable the first thing that pops into my head is the amazing 50 issue “Cable and Deadpool” comic series. Nathan plays the perfect “straight man” to Deadpool. Brilliant series with some over the top storylines. 
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    edited October 2018
    @Banquetto (awesome name, btw), that's exactly what I was hoping for. @Daredevil217, same.

    For example, I'm a Doc Strange fanboy. Didn't know nothing about anything, until one day I got my hands on a soft back collection of his whole first series. It was incredible! Nightmare, Mindless Ones, but especially the DREAD DORMAMMU. That tinykitty was freaking crucial. I still read those, in love forever with that incredible art and stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. I now have this fancy, hardcover collection for old(er) guys like me...

    Hmm, trying to put an image of my book... Having trouble. Edited again: I don't know how to send an image. It's here: https://ibb.co/k6MDRL

    And this, alone, would have hooked me: https://ibb.co/eZhWD0

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Banquetto said:
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Haha, good (and entertaining!) summary.
    The one thing I'd add is that when Cable was first created and introduced into the comics, nobody had thought up any of this.
    He was just "big guy with big guns" who would lead the New Mutants, and be a gung-ho action-oriented counterpoint to Charles Xavier's more thoughtful leadership of the X-Men. He was "Commander X" to Charles' "Professor X".
    Everything about him being Scott Summers' kid was dreamed up later. :)
    The basic proof of that can be found in Uncanny X-Men Annual 14 - Cable and baby Christopher Nathan Summers in the same comic book and not the slightest inclination that the two were linked. Considering the whole story is about time travel (a continuation of Days of Future Past) it is pretty obvious that the writers at that time had no designs on Cable being Cyclops son (in fact they dangle a carrot that perhaps in the FUTURE Cable becomes Ahab, the Master of Hounds, clearly suggesting that Cable is a man from the existing timeline!)

    The funny thing about all this is that it ended up going full circle.

    At the time Rob Liefeld introduced the character who would become Cable in to the New Mutants, it became clear that he was pushing the title in a different direction than the current writer Louise Simonson intended - Simonson became so upset by Liefeld's ignoring plot points and just wanting to draw pin-up pages that she argued with the editor Bob Harras but he sided with the artist and so she quit the book. She also quit X-Factor and handed it over to her friend Chris Claremont to finish the title which was going to be cancelled so that the new X-Men title could be launched. Given carte-blanche by Simonsen to finish her story arc however he liked, it was Claremont who sought to undo Cyclop's having a baby so he would get a clear run with him in the new X-Men series without the added baggage - thus baby Nathan Summers was sent off to the future intended never to be seen again...


    Claremont would have got away with it too if not for those meddling kids then getting booted off the X-titles himself and thus losing control of the X-Men's destiny...Ooops.
  • Shintok17
    Shintok17 Posts: 620 Critical Contributor
    Go to the "Comics Explained" channel on Youtube. Search there for Cable. He has a couple of good videos on Cable's origins and stories that he is a part of. 
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 954 Critical Contributor
    edited October 2018
    DAZ0273 said:
    Banquetto said:
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Haha, good (and entertaining!) summary.
    The one thing I'd add is that when Cable was first created and introduced into the comics, nobody had thought up any of this.
    He was just "big guy with big guns" who would lead the New Mutants, and be a gung-ho action-oriented counterpoint to Charles Xavier's more thoughtful leadership of the X-Men. He was "Commander X" to Charles' "Professor X".
    Everything about him being Scott Summers' kid was dreamed up later. :)
    The basic proof of that can be found in Uncanny X-Men Annual 14 - Cable and baby Christopher Nathan Summers in the same comic book and not the slightest inclination that the two were linked. 

    ...
    I'm totally fine with this, myself; I think it's fun -- but it is part of what makes it so hard to learn up fast on comics backstories. If nothing else, comics are soap operas and wowzers the stories get convoluted.

    Thinking critically, there are definite similarities between the MCU and Tolstoy's big books, like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The language and syntactic structure aren't especially complex, so they're pretty easy to read, and the "chapters" are short so you can make regular progress in short bursts over a long period of time. BUT there are scores, maybe even hundreds, of well-delineated characters acting out complex, epic histories and manifesting, along the way as humans will, an incredibly intricate social context with a freaking Persian carpet of interweaving threads of relationships and backstories. Beautiful, intriguing, and daunting...
  • Dragon_Nexus
    Dragon_Nexus Posts: 3,701 Chairperson of the Boards
    Banquetto said:
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Haha, good (and entertaining!) summary.
    The one thing I'd add is that when Cable was first created and introduced into the comics, nobody had thought up any of this.
    He was just "big guy with big guns" who would lead the New Mutants, and be a gung-ho action-oriented counterpoint to Charles Xavier's more thoughtful leadership of the X-Men. He was "Commander X" to Charles' "Professor X".
    Everything about him being Scott Summers' kid was dreamed up later. :)
    Same thing with Deadpool. Rob Liefeld might have designed the characters, but it was subsiquent writers that made them into characters we gave a damn about.

    Before then they were just yet another Rob Liefeld muscular guy with no feet, tons of pouches, huge guns/swords/guns and swords and probably narrow or white eyes.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Yepyep said:
    DAZ0273 said:
    Banquetto said:
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    http://comicsalliance.com/cable-comics-marvel-history/
    Haha, good (and entertaining!) summary.
    The one thing I'd add is that when Cable was first created and introduced into the comics, nobody had thought up any of this.
    He was just "big guy with big guns" who would lead the New Mutants, and be a gung-ho action-oriented counterpoint to Charles Xavier's more thoughtful leadership of the X-Men. He was "Commander X" to Charles' "Professor X".
    Everything about him being Scott Summers' kid was dreamed up later. :)
    The basic proof of that can be found in Uncanny X-Men Annual 14 - Cable and baby Christopher Nathan Summers in the same comic book and not the slightest inclination that the two were linked. 

    ...
    I'm totally fine with this, myself; I think it's fun -- but it is part of what makes it so hard to learn up fast on comics backstories. If nothing else, comics are soap operas and wowzers the stories get convoluted.

    Thinking critically, there are definite similarities between the MCU and Tolstoy's big books, like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The language and syntactic structure aren't especially complex, so they're pretty easy to read, and the "chapters" are short so you can make regular progress in short bursts over a long period of time. BUT there are scores, maybe even hundreds, of well-delineated characters acting out complex, epic histories and manifesting, along the way as humans will, an incredibly intricate social context with a freaking Persian carpet of interweaving threads of relationships and backstories. Beautiful, intriguing, and daunting...
    Yeah, the inconsistencies in X-Men alone would make any purist head explode! Of course it was Claremont who saddled Cyclops with a baby son in the first place and he has often been on record as saying that he felt that and his marriage "blunted his edge" so it must have been extra galling that his solution to it ended up in resulting in Cyclops having a son who was now older than he was with a philosophy the exact opposite of what Cyclops was taught by Xavier! Poor Scott!
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Dormammu said:
    Poor Rob. The visuals of these characters (Deadpool, Cable) have stood the test of time after being created in an era of time many comic publishers would like to forget. Rob L. had a lot more to do with Cable than people give him credit for. No, he wasn't the writer for New Mutants and no, he didn't come up with the idea for Cable's back story, but Rob did have input into Cable's personality and leadership style that was then written into the book. The artist has a huge impact, in a visual medium like comic books, on the ways characters come across and the personalities they develop.

    A lot of the popular artists to come out of the 90s came up with character ideas well beyond what the costume looked like and passed those ideas to the writer. These things (when done right) are a hand-in-hand collaboration between writer and penciler. Their dissatisfaction of the credit they received was one of the reasons (among many) they all jumped ship and formed Image.

    I don't like it when an artist's impact on character creation is devalued because they didn't have anything to do with what was written into the character years later, especially when the artist has no control over said character (which is always the case at Marvel). To me, that's like saying John Romita Sr. didn't help create Luke Cage because of all the blaxploitation history of the character was retconned years later. No, Romita helped create Power Man just like Leifeld helped create Cable.
    Rob definitely has a claim on shaping Cable's personality. He was the one that insisted that the character be called Cable after he was originally referred to as "Commander X" in his first appearance and Rob was the one who pushed Cable and the New Mutants in the direction they went - he lobbied for the book to be relaunched because the New Mutants were not very "new" any more and it didn't make sense to him to refer to them in such a way.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2018
    I was reading X-Force from #1 back in the day, and Cable was definitely From The Future by that time, though it seemed like they were just angling for a Wolverine mystery box in those days. Of course we had the introduction of Bishop around then too, who had come to the past John Conner style to prevent whoever killed the X-Men in the future from doing it in the past. It was intimated at the time it was Gambit, but I think I fell off of comics before all that got resolved. So people from the future who had Agendas We Weren't Privvy To were sort of en vogue at the time. Also then we got that Stryfe storyline, and maybe they were brothers or clones or something? I definitely didn't get to the end of that. #ComicsEverybody

    One of my favorite time wasting things to do is got to mainstream wikipedia and look up articles about any comic character who has been around for more than 10 years. It always leads off with a very clear, sensical description of their origin, then quickly devolves into "and then this happened, and that happened, but somebody else was there, and suddenly the entire galaxy was a zombie, but then everything got reset and it  was fine" all jumbled together. Try it, it's fun. 

    For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Rider
  • Dormammu
    Dormammu Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Comic book history is so convoluted. It's the nature of the business.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    I just want to take a moment and bask in the glory of this sentence, lifted verbatim from that ghost rider wiki page: 
    "After his sister was injured by ninja gangsters, Ketch came in contact with a motorcycle that had somehow been mystically enchanted to contain the essence of a Spirit of Vengeance."

    now THAT is good comics.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    I was reading X-Force from #1 back in the day, and Cable was definitely From The Future by that time, though it seemed like they were just angling for a Wolverine mystery box in those days. Of course we had the introduction of Bishop around then too, who had come to the past John Conner style to prevent whoever killed the X-Men in the future from doing it in the past. It was intimated at the time it was Gambit, but I think I fell off of comics before all that got resolved. So people from the future who had Agendas We Weren't Privvy To were sort of en vogue at the time. Also then we got that Stryfe storyline, and maybe they were brothers or clones or something? I definitely didn't get to the end of that. #ComicsEverybody

    One of my favorite time wasting things to do is got to mainstream wikipedia and look up articles about any comic character who has been around for more than 10 years. It always leads off with a very clear, sensical description of their origin, then quickly devolves into "and then this happened, and that happened, but somebody else was there, and suddenly the entire galaxy was a zombie, but then everything got reset and it  was fine" all jumbled together. Try it, it's fun. 

    For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Rider

    Late 80’s guide to Cable:

    1.)    Let’s introduce a new character to be a leader for the New Mutants. Now what will he be like?

    2.)    Did you read Dark Knight Returns? Wasn’t it so grim! Hey – new guy - is he grim? How do we know? Uhm…Batman isn’t an X-Man is he? I know: Use Wolverine as a benchmark.

    3.)    Is he mysterious? Check! As mysterious as Wolverine? Yup! Although, y’know he is kind’a big, has a metal arm and a glowy eye…you would figure somebody has met this guy before right?

    4.)    Wolverine! Does he know him, presumably, mysteriously so? Yes.

    5.)    How does Wolverine know him? It’s a mystery. So how come Wolverine never mentioned this guy to Prof X before?

    6.)    Shall we just have them fight anyway?

    7.)    Done.


    Oh and the Bishop/Gambit thing ended up being Onslaught...boy was that a mess.

    Stryfe was a clone I think. Or maybe a robot. Who knows.




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