The Superhero as Avatar VII: Cable and the 1990s

Given the poor esteem in which many comics fans and medium critics hold Rob Liefeld, a comics celebrity somewhat past the height of the fame he achieved as an architect of the "new comics" explosion of the early and mid-nineties, it may evoke some controversy to suggest that he created the representative superhero of the 1990s.

However anyone may feel about it, we can expect that when people begin looking back on the nineties as a time past, they will see such characters as Cable and, frequently, say to themselves, "How utterly nineties."

Though Vertigo-themed characters and stories may deserve a place as the Avatar(s) of the 1990s, such material seems poised to spawn an enduring style that, if it began in one decade, helped set the standard for at least one decade that followed. Indeed, should superhero comics sicken to the point of general extinction, something like a Vertigo hero may prove to hold out beyond the entire stable of spandexed anachronisms from old-school superhero comics.

Bells and Whistles and Gimmicks, Oh My

Making such a claim compels one to defend it. To begin with, Cable, especially in his initial design, sported a rich ensemble filled to capacity with period ornaments - enormous epaulets, superfluous straps, large hand held artillery, cybernetic prostheses, inexplicable sumo coiffures, and all that - and, in the beginning, enjoyed a character design devoid of conceptual material. In short, Cable first appeared very much as a costume without a character.

This fits Cable perfectly into the idioms (or cliches) of the "new comics" of the 1990s. Character designs of the "new comics" school of the early and mid 1990s often worked from a formula. The aforementioned big guns, big epaulets, scars, cybernetics, and a take-no-prisoners attitude defined an entire disposable and interchangeable generation of superheroes; their inclusion in the design of Kingdom Come's Magog, the obnoxious failed pretender to Superman's role, implicated and parodied the new comics in a way that media-savvy readers would recognize.

That Cable appeared in comics without much of a concept and definitely without an origin reflects bad planning and bad editing more than design, since Liefeld, as the story tells, offered Marvel a set of sketches as possible characters, got an OK from his higher-ups, and dropped Cable into X-Force without any explanation. The conceptual side of the character design came later, accumulated piecemeal, a revelation at a time, in the various titles that have included the character.

Many talents might refuse to use an undesigned character in a central role, for fairly sound aesthetic reasons. But we should hold off on accusing Liefeld of bad design for elements he did not design. He fed Marvel a raw doodle, and we can't expect raw doodles to have much depth.

Strangely enough, Cable's initial shallowness - which we can consider a defining trait of a disposable generation of superheroes he had the fortune to outlive - provided a variety of writers with an opportunity to render the character deeper and more complex. In fact, beginning with a character who carried a big gun and practiced preemptive counterterrorism, Marvel managed to turn a shallow simplicity into something approaching incomprehensibility. Cable therefore visited more than one of the poles that defined comics of the 1990s.

A Blatant Act of Convolutio

Faced with an embryonic character, editors and writers enjoy a few options. They can a) ignore and forget the character (on option that, if exercised more often, might have prevented the unnecessary proliferation of disposable superheroes by the major comics publishers); they can b) find some pretext to kill the character off in order to provide a cheap and gimmicky moment of melodrama (a less aesthetically sound approach that still offers many of the benefits of the previously-mentioned strategy); or c) they can take the high road and try to make something of what they have.

For Cable, Marvel took the high road. Liefeld's visual design suggests that he intended the character as a cyborg - one can deduce this from the mechanical arm and the glowing eye - but Marvel decided to pursue the more interesting premise that a "techno-virus" had infected him and threatened to convert the remaining flesh of his body into machinery.

Marvel created Cable, after he started appearing in comics, by explaining his various features in a cascade that Liefeld, whose comics instincts seem more and more to belong in an old school and not a new, didn't plan and probably couldn't have intended. Marvel explained Cable, including the technoviral pseudocybernetic organs, by attaching him to the history of the time-traveling Summers family.

This dynasty began in 1963 with the orphan Scott Summers, the Cyclops of X-Men. Summers discovered a younger brother in 1969; he acquired a space-traveling father at the turn of the eighties; and later Scott Summers would travel to the future with Jean Grey, where that comics couple, using assumed names, would spawn a dynasty of time-traveling offspring.

Cable retroactively became a son of Cyclops and Phoenix, but not the son, because the X-books have dabbled in "alternate-future" stories since the seminal "Tales of Future Past" became the seed concept for an overused conceit of possible futures. From various of these tales came characters like Cable, one or more Cable siblings/clones/doppelgangers, Rachel Summers (another possible child of Cyclops and Phoenix, though from an alternate near-future), and possibly others.

In Cable's case, his mysterious origins have much to do with the notion of the techno-virus that he barely contains by means of his psychic mutant powers. His parents, knowing that no treatment for his condition existed in their time, left the child in a future era where the syndrome seemed less likely to consume him altogether. After they left him, they seemed to have forgotten about him.

The recurring themes of Marvel's most commercial franchise, the much-maligned stable of X-books, intersect in Cable's person. These character definitions made Cable central, rather than peripheral, to the dominant elements of Marvel Comics in the 1990s. These connections ran both broad and deep, since they also joined him to a tradition of overused alternate-future tales that began at the turn of the 1980s. Thus entangled in the Byzantine Claremont-mythos of the impossible Summers family, Cable began to straddle the decade he occupied.

Ladronn and Retro Chic

Cable, then, planted one foot in the beginning of the nineties. Later treatment of the character would place his other foot in the comics that ended the decade. He came to receive treatments in the late years of the 1990s that included and straddle many of the defining themes of that decade. If he began as the exemplar of a single moment of definable comics excess, he came to represent more and more.

Somehow Cable came to connect to end-of-the-decade themes which centered on sixties comics nostalgia. By 1999, Jose Ladronn had inherited the art tasks of Cable's title. The presence of this esteemed artist did much to give the character and the title credibility among otherwise hostile readers (though Marvel seemed to squander this redemption by bringing Liefeld back to the book as its regular artist, a move that turned out no more than a short-term fill-in).

Ladronn's treatment of Cable used a style that reflects Kirby (and traces of Barry Windsor-Smith's interpretation of Kirby) combined with certain particulars of line that implicate the influence of Jacques Giraud/Moebius. Fans received this approach so well that Ladronn sometimes gets gigs on Kirby concepts - including assignments on Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and Inhumans projects - based on his ability to evoke a virile Kirby feel.

While this pointed Cable to the sixties, another decade altogether, a potent strain of late-1990s comics specialized in just such retro themes. In 1999, comics readers would have in recent memory such pieces as X-Men: The Hidden Years, Brave and the Bold, World's Finest, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Avengers: DOmination Factor, Fantastic Four: Domination Factor, Avengers Forever, Avengers 1.5, JLA: Year One, and a number of Essentials volumes to point them back to the well-viewed comics of the 1960s. Therefore, by appropriating from the sixties, Cable planted its eponymous character's other foot firmly in the 1990s.

Touching All Bases

Overall, Cable visits too many well-defined territories of nineties comics, including Claremontism, Liefeldism, and neoKirbyism (a la Ladronn), to escape an iconic role.

We might ask, with some justice, "Does Cable provide a seminal character that inspired later creators to produce sound and derivative works?" Truth compels us to answer "no," but that characteristic attaches to an entire generation of disposable (and, mostly, departed) creations from the 1990s. If he, in some ways, represented a dated dead-end (however excellent the periods of execution that allowed him to travel into such a cul-de-sac), this further plants him in his age.

Similarly, we could ask if the character represents the best a decade had to offer, and we might, again, arguably, say "no," even though the character did enjoy worthwhile moments, but this also touches a key point. The future may see the 1990s as a decade that produced few, if any, classic creations. If so, a timeless creation would represent a deviation from the norm, not an example that verifies it.