This week in Cable: Spaceknights! Esme and Cable are in a touchy position as the Spaceknights demand time travel technology to save their people. How can they escape? Will Cable do as he promised and give them the technology? And will Esme and Cable snag a smooch?
This issue gives us some much-needed back story on the Spaceknights, laying out who they are and how they were made. The attention on the characters is good since they’ll likely be a threat in the future at some point. The group is also incredibly serious, which plays well off Cable’s looser way of figuring things out and playing it by ear. This issue is also doing the work to establish different timelines for Cable which will likely pay off later.
A lot of readers are going to love the relationship angle writer Gerry Duggan and artist Phil Noto are taking Cable in, who is very much a teenager. This issue builds on Cable’s relationship with Esme and we even get a nice moment for Emma to grumble under her breath. If you were to sum up Cable‘s relationship writing, it would be all about groundwork. Noto takes time to draw our eyes to the character’s emotions and reactions with each other. You feel the moment with them.
And there’s a big moment in this book indeed. The opening gets a slight payoff in how Cable solves his kidnapping problem. There’s also a clever time travel trick that you might not see coming, which separates this from how time travel is typically used. There’s a rather rousing action sequence that builds thanks to the tension of the threat at hand, a beat where characters realize what is truly going on, and then all-out action to close it out.
This book feels like something of a quick read, but it makes great use of its pages — it even has a Krakoa scene on the moon to tide fans over. The family element is possibly the most intriguing when it comes to Cable — for the most part, Cyclops has known Cable as an older man, not a kid — and Duggan delivers great family moments. From Jean asking her kid where he was, to Cyclops insisting he stay for dinner, it’s fun to see superheroes act like a normal family.
There is a lot of comic to enjoy in Cable #4, ranging from wrapping up the Spaceknights to teasing time travel tricks to romantic relationships flourishing and family life too. Cable is a series that’s very good at honing in on great characters who are thrust into uncomfortable circumstances.
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