Marvel Comics' Cable is a time-traveling mutant soldier from the future, which means his history is, ad you might suspect, long and complex. Over the years, he's been a team leader, friend and family member to various X-Men, but in his current series, he's acting as a one man temporal law enforcer. There's a good reason for that, and this spring we'll learn why Cable ultimately tends to distance himself from others as the new creative team of writers Zac Thompson & Lonnie Nadler and artist German Peralta introduce a new techno organic villain and take readers on a trip backwards in time through the title character's history.

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Their story kicks off in March's Cable #155, and the events of it will bring Cable's estranged daughter, Hope Summers, back into his life. What other family members will play roles in the story, though, and which other Marvel characters will Cable cross paths with as the tale unfolds?

CBR: Cable has been many different things over the years including a freedom fighter, mercenary, mutant team leader and member, leader of his own nation, and his most recent role is that of a temporal law enforcement officer. So what's your sense of the character when you pick up him in issue #155?

Lonnie Nadler: A lot of the X-Men, and Cable especially, have played various roles over the course of their careers. So one of the best ways to keep these characters interesting is to treat them differently as they evolve, and the one thing we're able to do with this arc is essentially we're able to play with all these different versions of Cable. Because we're starting in the present with this sort of time cop, lone wolf figure that he's become. Then from there we're going back to the past where we'll see him be a mercenary, a team leader, a father, and all those sorts of things.

We feel pretty lucky that we didn't get boxed into any one version of Cable. We get to sort of stretch our wings and play with all the different versions of him that we've liked across the years

The most recent Cable stories have sprung from temporal crises. From what I've read though it sounds like your story starts with more of a personal crisis for your title character.

Zac Thompson: That's correct. We were given the ability to take the things we love about Cable and explore them in this new arc. One of the things that we thought was really interesting about Cable at this point in his timeline is that he is this lone wolf character. That prompted Lonnie and I to take a look at the familial relationships he's had over the long course of his career in comics. So we want to explore how Cable relates to other people. One of the way's were doing that is by introducing new antagonist that preys on familial relationships.

So this is very much about Cable's relationships and why he's shut away all the people he holds close. It's kind of explaining why he is currently a lone wolf.

Nadler: Because he's a character who can travel through time you can sort of slip away and let the plot drive things, but Zac and I wanted to really explore what makes Cable tick. What are the things he's scared of? What are the things that would make him stop what he's doing as this sort of time cop and come back and be more grounded in reality and sort of avoid the pitfalls that come with time travel?

We're interested in character based and driven stories. That's why we went down this road.

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One of the elements that makes this story extremely personal for Cable is it brings him face to face with his estranged daughter, Hope Summers. What can you tell us about the dynamic between them when they first meet up?

Thompson: We're picking up from the last time they really spent some screen time together in comics, which was at the end of Simon Spurrier's X-Force where she fired Cable from the team. So we're kind of picking up that beef that they had with one another, but in a way Cable kind of just left. He hasn't really been any sort of figure to her in the last couple of years, and we really want to explore what that's done to Hope and to him.

We think one of Cable's greatest strengths is his relationship to other people. I think a lot of this arc is him realizing that his greatest strength of all is his relationship with Hope.

Nadler: Yeah, if you read The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix you saw that Cable was raised by Cyclops and Jean Grey. At the end of that he was sort of torn away from them. So he had this family that he loved, but he never got to experience that much of it. So a lot of this story is him figuring out for himself what family means to him.

Speaking of family and Cyclops, Cable's relationship with his father hasn't been explored much in recent years. In current continuity the adult Cyclops is dead, but there's a teenage version of his dad from the past running around, which I think could lead to some interesting scenes. Do you plan on touching on Cable's relationship with Cyclops in this story?

Nadler: Yeah, like we said, family is a big part of this arc. Especially fears having to do with lineage and what you might become. So we don't want to give away too much, but there's definitely going to be a lot of characters from throughout the course of his life that come back.

And, yes, like you said, no one has really dealt with his feelings about Cyclops' death. That's something that will definitely be explored in certain ways, but we are not resurrecting Cyclops.

Thompson: We're trying basically to come at it from an angle that people are not expecting and explore some relationships that people have maybe forgotten about along the way.

We want to show that Cable isn't this typical loner that people think he is right now. He's had all these people in his life including Cyclops, Jean Grey, and a couple other . . . weirder faces.

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So this is a story that will feature both big name guest stars and some lesser known fan favorites as well?

Nadler: Yes, there certainly will be characters that most X-readers these days would know. They just might not expect to see them or expect to see a character in a certain way. We definitely pushed for some of our favorites.

Thompson: There's one character in particular in our third issue that people haven't seen in a long time and we're so thrilled that we're getting to write this character. You haven't seen this character in this way for awhile. So we're super psyched to be able to write that.

What can you tell us about the flashback elements of your story and how time unfolds? Will this be a Memento style story where the reader gets more clues as they move backwards in time?

Thompson: The arc starts in present day. The entire first issue takes place in the present and so will the end of the last issue. So every issue is going to go back to another generation of Cable's history. And you're going to see that when it comes to the thing he's dealing with in the first issue he hasn't been truthful a lot of the times in the past. We're burying this new villain we created for Cable in his continuity.

Nadler: Yeah, so it's not so much about him traveling back in time. It's more a matter of seeing this threat come up in the present and how hard it is for him to deal with. From there, we go back through time to see how things got to be so bad and how he let things slide for this long.

There's definitely a Memento style storyline where it starts in the present and goes backwards through time. Once the arc is done we'd love for people to be able to read it both forwards and backwards. That's a tough feat, but we're trying to do something experimental and creative like that as much as we can

Part of this was picking the genres that Zac and I work well in. There's a lot of horror and body horror elements in this book, which not a lot has been done with in the X-Men universe and especially not with Cable. So we're really excited to bring those elements out and play with them.

Then each issue sort of has its own crossover with that. So the first one is sort of like family drama mixed with horror. The next issue will be a sort of road story. If you're thinking Cormac McCarthy's The Road you've got the right idea. [Laughs] So it's that mixed with this techno organic threat that's chasing Cable while he's trying to keep his daughter safe during the “Messiah War” era. So we're bringing a lot of genres into it, but it's mostly a weird horror story. That's what we're most excited about.

Thompson: Yeah, Lonnie and I really love body horror. It's a genre that was created extensively by David Cronenberg. He's a Canadian filmmaker that we're obsessed with. Some of our creator-owned stuff delves into body horror quite heavily. So we wanted to bring those influences into Cable in a subtle way that we can explore the things that we're really passionate about and do genre mash ups with superheroes that maybe people haven't seen before.

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The new antagonist you created for this story sounds like a relentless nemesis that hounds Cable across time. What else can you tell us about this character?

Nadler: Our antagonist is basically a shapeshifting techno organic that has been following Cable for a really long time throughout his life. The reason we wanted to make him shapeshifting and techno organic is one, because this story is about family our villain is going to take forms that haunt Cable in various ways. And two, one of the things that we think is particularly interesting about Cable is his techno organic virus.

It's something that's horrific and it's part of him. It's also something that he has to keep his mind on to control. So this villain is a literal representation of what that did to him.

You're working with artist German Peralta on Cable. His most recent Marvel work was the end of Jeff Lemire's run on Thanos. What I loved about his work there was his character acting and the way he drew such larger than life characters like the titular Mad Titan.

Nadler: When we heard that German was going to draw this book we sort of went crazy because he's someone we've been admiring for a long time. We loved his work on Thanos, Man-Thing, and Moon Knight. He draws superhero comics really well, but in an unconventional way. And like you said, his acting is great.

He's also able to capture things like horror and different genres super well. Plus, he's super fast. So he's just been a dream to work with.

Thompson: Yeah, he really elevates the things we hand him in a really interesting way. He's got a great eye for sequential storytelling. He'll add little flourishes in that really make the pages fluid and dynamic. We honestly couldn't be more thrilled to do this arc with German. It's a dream come true.