AudioShocker

Project Basement deja vu with:

Cable by Chris Maverick

Please welcome Chris Maverick, multimedia artist and Cosmic Hellcats webcomiker, as he gives us our second Cable of PB v2:

So this is what I get for being lazy about my submission. Wayne also did a Cable pic for a character he hates and said much the same things as I was going to say. So in short, I agree with much of what he said about lack of concept and design but there's something more I want to say.

The reason I hate Cable so much is that he represents some of the things I most hate about comics. Lazy storybuilding and retconning. One of my favorite things about comics in general and the big two in specific is the concept of a shared sandbox. As much as I might like reading a story written by one person, be it William Shakespeare or Dave Sim, at the end of the day the adventures of Macbeth or Cerebus are ultimately written by one person and it is merely that one person's ideas that get represented.

Then you take a character like Spiderman or Superman and suddenly we have a situation where tens or hundreds of writers over the years have to continuously build upon a common myhthology. Extending it, in logical ways to create engaging stories in the present, remain consistent with the past and not handcuff creators of the future. Cable essentially throws the middle finger to that very concept.

Cable was created for one reason and one reason only. An artist with no real storytelling ability (and arguably very little artistic ability, but that's another story) essentially leveraged his popularity to be given free reign to do whatever he wanted to do. The problem was, when he got it, he had no idea what he wanted to do, so he drew a picture he thought was "COOL" and inserted it into the book and forced everyone to find someway to make it fit. So suddenly a character was around that had never been seen before, and to make him fit, he was suddenly written into EVERYONE'S backstory. Wolverine had known him for years. Captain America had known him for years. Chord, from New Warriors had known him for years. When we went to the future, it turns out that everyone in the future had known him for years. It just so happened that in 50 years of storytelling, none of us readers had ever happened to see him before.

Since his creator had no idea what to do with him (and on top of that, up and left the company like five minutes later anyway), other creators dealt with this by shoehorning him into every other characters backstories even further. Not only was 50 years of storytelling ruined in the name of present day stories that weren't really that good anyway, but the character became so entrenched in Marvel mythos in general (and X-book mythos in specific) that writers were forced to deal with him for every future story, a problem which persists with the character today. On top of this, he's so loosely defined, both in terms of personality and the specifics of what his powers even are, that he can never really be used in a story without contradicting the way someone else used him in another story.

[INSERT STANDARD "NICK LIKES LIEFELD" DISCLAIMER HERE.]

Next week... Jean Grey and Cyclops by Kaylie McDougal!