Every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without explaining that the previous story was retconned away. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

This one is a bit different, as you could argue it belong more in Abandoned an' Forsaked or something else entirely, but this is about the very clever recent Deadpool and Cable mini-series by Fabian Nicieza and Reilly Brown called Split Second, where Nicieza establishes how Deadpool and Cable REALLY first met. I got a real kick out of what Nicieza came up with...

Deadpool debuted in New Mutants #98 by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza, where he seemingly met Cable for the first time...

Okay, so that's that.

Now twenty-five years later, in the mini-series Cable and Deadpool: Split Second by Nicieza and Reilly Brown, after some various hijinx, the upshot is that Deadpool has been tasked with eliminating Cable from the timeline to stop him from doing some bad stuff...

But instead, Deadpool ends up saving Cable's life during Cable's late twenties...

and then again in Cable's early twenties...

This has the result of healing the timeline just as well as killing Cable would have...

HOW, though?

Go to the next page to find out...

Deadpool then thinks back to that first meeting with Cable...

Notice how Cable says "And you have." Presumably it was because of "Mr. Tolliver hired me to find you," while he was ACTUALLY responding to, "Pleased to meet you."

This, of course, leads to Deadpool realizing that that is why Cable has put up with him over the years (even in that New Mutants #98 appearance, they could have killed Deadpool, but they just send him back to Mr. Tolliver in a box)...

In the end of Split Second, by saving Cable so much, Deadpool ends up getting a mentally unstable Cable (whose brain is all messed up with time irregularities) to trust him enough to fix him and the timeline is saved.

Very clever stuff by Nicieza. Now is that a retcon? Or not? I really don't know what you call it, so I figure I'll put it here.