In every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively retconning away the previous story. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
Today, I look to see how Cable went back to his classic techno-organic set-up after finally getting past it all!
For most people with some familiarity with the character of Cable, you probably recall that the character first showed up looking like a cyborg, complete with a robotic arm and a bionic eye. However, by the time that New Mutants was relaunched as X-Force, we eventually learned that while he looked like a cyborg, in reality he was infected with a techno-organic virus that he was keeping under control using his telekinetic powers...
That, naturally, became a recurring theme over the years - "Will he be unable to keep his techno-organic virus from taking over his whole body?" It was an on-again/off-again plot point for many years. One notable example came during Onslaught, where the virus went nuts and almost killed him before he was able to get it back under control...
In Avengers: X-Sanction #1 (by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness), Cable showed up (after seemingly being killed at the end of the crossover "Second Coming") with the Techno-Organic virus now spreading to more and more of his body...
While traveling through time, Cable had gotten a glimpse of the then upcoming Avengers vs. X-Men war, and he wanted to take the Avengers out before anything happened to protect his adopted daughter, Hope.
By the time the final issue came out, his body was pretty much all cyborg as he seemed to succeed in taking the Avengers down.
At the end of the story, though, Hope instead used her vast powers to find a way to effectively burn the virus out of Cable's body, and so he returned to a purely human body...
Without the virus, though, he also no longer had a bionic eye or a robotic arm. His human arm was pretty much useless, so in the series that followed Avengers vs. X-Men (as Cable sort of spent the main event dealing with the effects of his cure, which almost left him in a total coma), Cable and X-Force (by Dennis Hopeless and Salvador Larroca), Cable now had an eyepatch instead of a bionic eye and he added Forge (with Cable using his now enhanced telepathic abilities to cure Forge of the madness that turned Forge evil) to the team and had Forge build him a new robotic arm to supplement his weak human arm...
That series continued for 17 issues and then that led into a sequel series that was a merger of Cable's X-Force team and Psylocke's X-Force team (yes, for a while there, there were rival X-Force series) and Cable continued to rock the eyepatch look for the rest of that series...
Along the way, Cable's powers also became more about precognition than anything else.
When that series ended, though, Marvel decided to put things "right"...
Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Return to classic Cable!']
In the miniseries, Cable/Deadpool: Split Second by Fabian Nicieza and Reilly Brown, Cable and Deadpool travel through time fixing problems caused by a future version of Deadpool. However, in the process, Cable becomes sort of unstable, time-wise.
Deadpool figures out a way to save him by merging him with different Cables from different time periods, including one with the classic Cable design...
And sure enough, when they were all completely merged together, healing Cable in the process, he returned to his classic set-up, with the techno-organic virus and everything (plus a return to his classic telekinesis and telepathy and no precognition)...
The comic book cleverly even refers to it as an editorial restart.
Either way, it was a very clever way of handling things by Nicieza.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!