Welcome to the three hundredth and eighty-seventh in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. This week, was Cable at one time really meant to be an older version of Cannonball? Plus, what's the deal with the comic strip where the Winnie the Pooh characters are all jerks to each other? Finally, was Manhunter originally intended to be connected to the original character?

Click here for an archive of the previous three hundred and eighty-six.

Let's begin!

COMIC LEGEND: At one point, Cable was going to be an older version of Cannonball.

STATUS: True

A ways back (damn, actually three years ago), I did a whole column devoted just to straightening out various legends about the origin of Cable. One open question I left in that column was posed by a reader named Carl, who noted:

Gee, I’d always heard Cable was supposed be the future self of Cannonball.

I meant to ask Rob Liefeld about it then, but never got around to it until just recently. I asked Rob and he said that yes, Cable was indeed intended to be an older version of Cannonball.

In X-Force #7, Cannonball is seemingly killed...



This kicks off a flashback in X-Force #8 (with guest art by Mike Mignola!) about why Cable went back in time in the first place to hook up with the New Mutants. It was all about becoming the mentor to Cannonball...









In X-Force #9, Cannonball does, indeed, return to life.



His special healing power has never actually been erased from continuity, by the way.

So what Liefeld planned on doing was to reveal that due to a memory gap, Cable did not realize that Cannonball was actually himself as a young man, so he went back in time to mentor HIMSELF!

Rob noted "A character like Wolverine has had multiple false origins, mysteries, I felt the same could be done with Cable."

So there ya go, Carl!

Thanks a lot to Rob Liefeld for the information.

Check out some Entertainment Urban Legends Revealed!

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Did David Sarnoff Work a Telegraph Three Days Straight Covering the Titanic Sinking?

COMIC LEGEND: There was a Winnie the Pooh comic strip where the characters acted a lot more aggressively than most Winnie the Pooh fans are used to.

STATUS: True

My pal Justin Davis sent me a request the other day. Simply put, he wanted to know if this was a real comic strip or a joke using photoshop...



Oddly enough, it is a real strip. Writer Don Ferguson and artist Richard Moore did a syndicated Winnie the Pooh comic strip that ran from 1978 to 1988 (with reprints of the original strips running from then on. I believe some places still run the reruns).

The strip was noteworthy for how many of the plots involved the various A.A. Milne & E.H. Shepard characters just being jerks to each other.

Here are some more examples...









It is really quite surprising that Disney was cool with this take on their characters. It's actually pretty darn good stuff.

They really had a bit of an edge to them, even when they weren't being jerks to each other...





Thanks to Justin for the suggestion!

Check out some more Entertainment Urban Legends Revealed!

Did Clay Aiken Learn That He Lost American Idol Before The Results Were Revealed?

Did Season 8 of American Idol Have a Problem With a Phone Sex Company Owning Similar Phone Numbers to Their Show?

COMIC LEGEND: Manhunter was originally intended as an updated version of the Jack Kirby Manhunter

STATUS: False

In the third issue of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson's classic Manhunter series in Detective Comics #439, we are given an origin to Paul Kirk, Manhunter...









Seems pretty straightforward that Goodwin and Simonson were doing an update on Jack Kirby's Manhunter, right?

However, that was NOT the original intent of the series!

As Simonson explained in Modern Masters to Eric Nolen-Weathington and Roger Ash, Goodwin had come up with a brand-new character who had a healing factor and was a clone and they just decided to use the Manhunter name because it was a good one (and DC owned the name).

It was only AFTER they had begun the series that they decided that perhaps they SHOULD tie in this new character with the original Paul Kirk, Manhunter, and that became an important part of the series (as Simonson notes, with only eight pages to work with, it made opening up the back story a lot easier when they could just work in the established Kirk character).

Thanks to Eric Nolen-Weathington, Roger Ash and Walter Simonson for the information!

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

Here's my new book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? It came out this week! The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine's armor).



If you want to order a copy, ordering it here

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Also, be sure to check out my website, Urban Legends Revealed, where I look into urban legends about the worlds of entertainment and sports, which you can find here, at urbanlegendsrevealed.com.

Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends - half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...(click to enlarge)...



If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!