Get Ready

With next week being the review of Second Coming (insert anxious gasp here), I felt that it would be appropriate to review the series Cable.
Cable is one of the X-men titles that spawned off the Messiah Complex arc (the first in the trilogy of arcs that Second Coming concludes). The series follows Cable (obviously) as he carries the baby mutant Hope further into the future to raise her away from all the bad things happening to the mutants in the present. Sadly, the renegade Bishop (a mutant cop from the future who was put in a concentration camp after Hope killed a million people in six minutes (did I forget to mention Hope can be good or evil?) in one version of her future) and is constantly trying to kill her.
For starters, it is good to finally see Cable down for the count more times than not considering he is considered one of the more powerful X-Men characters. I felt that his constant sacrifice to protect Hope really fleshed out his character after it has become so watered down over the past years. I’m pleased, yet feel guilty for saying so, that I was often unsure if Cable would survive some of the arcs, which goes to say something about the writing.
My favorite aspect of the series though was obviously watching the character Hope grow up over the 25 issues from a baby to an adult. Each time they jumped further into the future, the series would often skip a few years until by the end, Cable and Hope are both much older the when the series started, and Hope has learned quite a bit about how to survive (her first act of war was when she was a toddler and she stabbed the cockroach President of the United States in the face).
My biggest issue with the series is that each time it skips forward, the audience is introduced to a new post apocalyptic setting resulting from either Bishop, Stryfe, or war that makes each time they time travel worse and worse. As a result, we never really become attached to any specific setting and often we are lost to what is happening around Cable and Hope. This causes the series to be a more character driven piece, but we lose some of the tension as a result of lack of setting.
This is somewhat played at near the end when they return home and begin jumping back through all the places they’ve visited over the series. It’s funny to see Hope’s reaction as she meets parental figures she never knew, attempts to drive despite never seeing a car before, and also as she learns to swear, much to Cable’s disapproval.
I really did feel like they ignored the whole mutant messiah or antichrist aspect for Hope over the series, baring it down to Bishop hunting her because he’s from the future she was evil, and Cable protecting her since he’s from the good one. We do see a little bit of Hope’s dark side emerge from time to time as she ruthlessly survives the wastelands and when she finally stands up to Bishop and brutally defeats him, but this never really shows her potential for evil which her whole character was created for.