Cable’s Out: Avengers: X-Sanction #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Also rage, but mostly spoilers. Look at it this way: it’ll save you four bucks.

God damn you for making me do this, Jeph Loeb. I defended you after Heroes hit the skids. I didn’t scream at you for Ultimates volume three. you brought Jason Todd back from the dead and I didn’t insist you take his place (Yeah, I know it was actually Clayface impersonating Jason in Hush, but you planted the filthy idea in Judd Winick’s head). I tried, man.

But Avengers: X-Sanction is so wretchedly and abysmally bad it boggles my mind. For a time travel story it is heartbreakingly tiny in scope. The storytelling is flawed and full of holes, and required every character involved to act like a complete fucking idiot. As an event, it makes me miss Fear Itself, which is like being nostalgic for a canker sore.

Let’s start with the cliffhanger from the first issue: Cable, holding his pistol against Captain America’s left temple, ending with a giant BLAM sound effect. Now, we all knew that Cap wouldn’t be killed, but the explanation given by Cable is that he “stun-gunned” Cap. Now, I went back to the first issue and checked, and Cable used the same gun that Cap used to try and kill Cable in that issue. The same, presumably lethal gun. That is clearly a revolver of some type and not electric in any way, shape or form. Maybe Cable was shooting blanks, that’ll just stun you. Ask Jon-Erik Hexum.

Let’s move on to the other first issue problem, that required Captain America to chase after the kidnapped Falcon without alerting any of the other Avengers on scene to quell the Lethal Legion prison break. According to Red Hulk, it’s because Cap and The Falcon took off after Whirlwind. Wait, what? Let me go back to issue one and… okay, I’ll cop to missing this. On issue one’s first double-page spread, where the word balloons start at the top center of page one, then down center of page one, then dead midpage on page two… waaaay at the bottom right, you can see a tiny little Whirlwind running away down the street. Sure, in retrospect, Cap’s shield is heading toward Whirlwind, but the final word balloon draws the eye away from the shield’s path up the page, so that itsy bitsy Whirlwind is easy to miss.

(See? This book is so Goddamned infuriating that I need to go back and shit on the first issue some more.)

So anyhoo, Iron Man notices that Cap and Falcon are missing, so he too follows Redwing (That bird is a dick!) to the same damn freighter, gets no response from Cap, flat out says, “If this doesn’t spell ‘trap’ with a capital ‘T'”… And yet he doesn’t go back and get any of the other Avengers to help out. Even though whatever is on the freighter has already apparently taken out Captain fucking America. So apparently Iron Man is so fucking dumb he could be killed by Chucky.

So of course Cable attacks. Now the good news is that Cable derives much of his strength from a virus that has infected his body with machinery, and he’s using a form of Iron Man’s battle armor, and Iron Man demonstrated on page three of this issue that he can project a directional electromagnetic pulse that deactivates all machinery! So Iron Man, being a certified genius, tries to defeat Cable by punching him.

As the story plays out, we get a little more detail about what Cable is up to. Sometime in the future, he’s told that his daughter Hope is killed because of some action that The Avengers take, and that he only has twenty-fours to live. So his master plan is to assemble everything he needs to defeat each individual Avenger – Magneto’s inhibitor chairs, a Weapon X stasis tube, a future version of Iron Man’s armor, and a location to act as a home base. Now… let’s stop and think about this: Cable is told he has one day to live. And yes, he can travel through time to collect all this crap, but… even as he travels, his own personal twenty-four hours keeps on ticking. Which means he collects all this shit and makes his master plan all in one day. Less actually, because he’s not currently, you know, dead. Personally, if I need to change a light bulb, I can’t get to and from Home Depot in less than one hour… and I’ll sit in the Goddamned dark if the bulb goes when I have a cold, let alone a fatal virus that’ll go terminal by this time tomorrow.

Cool Story, Rob!

Worst of all, this “epic” time travel story? So far, it takes places entirely on one city block and on a boat. Sure, there are a couple of “timeslides” that show the future, but they take place in abstract, undisclosed locations… meaning that this science fiction saga takes place in fewer locations than Reservoir Dogs. It’s hard to lose yourself in the spectacle when you realize that it could be produced in a liberal arts college’s black box theater space.

Ed McGuinness’s art is fine, provided you like his somewhat cartoony style – a style that’s ramped up to eleven now that he’s drawing Hope as a child, who’s drawn a Sailor Moon skirt and a tentacle away from making buying it worth a dime in a federal lockup. But as good as McGuinness’s art is, particularly in the splash pages, it’s in service of an unholy mess.

I will stick with this book only to keep up with the plot leading into Avengers Vs. X-Men in a few months. But unless it somehow turns around to at least being readable, this will prove to be Jeph Loeb’s most spectacular misfire. And quite an accomplishment from the man who wrote Teen Wolf Too.