It’s hard to imagine a time before Deadpool was a household name. A time when he hadn’t overburdened comic racks with over 80 ongoing series, miniseries, and one-shots, a time before Ryan Reynolds, a time before the possibility of film stardom was incredibly remote.
Okay, not *fully* before Ryan Reynolds.
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A time when he was billed under Cable.
But that was the case in 2004, at the launch of Cable & Deadpool – the correct title of the series collected in Deadpool & Cable Modern Era Epic Collection: Ballistic Bromance. At the time, Cable was the sure bet for the primary protagonist: he had been a hero for longer than Deadpool had been an anti-hero, had led a super team, and played a major role in several X-Men crossover events (his clone even set off one of the longest-running plot points of the ’90s X-Books, the Legacy Virus). From a narrative standpoint, Cable had much more going on than Deadpool.
Cable was an X-Men legacy character, for one, a pre-built savior figure with near-endless power potential and one of the most convoluted origins in all of comics. Deadpool, on the other hand, was a sometimes funny, perpetually obnoxious single-note character: the rambunctious bad boy trying to break good.
Neither character was on very firm standing in 2004, however. Constant creator turnover throughout their solo series’ left them without definition or direction. Supporting casts were continually cultivated and abandoned, and each successive storyline pushed the characters further away from their most interesting originating concepts. Their goals, ever-shifting, were either myriad or minimal depending on the whims of half-interested creators.
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At least part of the problem came from an editorial decision, two years prior to Cable & Deadpool, to rename the solo series (and team book, X-Force) to screw the characters’ creator Rob Liefeld out of residual payments. The resulting Agent X and Soldier X books not only shifted the tone and direction of the characters, Deadpool’s literally replaced him with a new character.
Writer Fabian Nicieza had a long history with both characters: he co-created Deadpool, and had been writing Cable almost as long as the character had been around. Some of the strongest early stories from both character’s catalogs, from 1993’s Deadpool: The Circle Chase to the opening arcs of Cable in 1994, were Nicieza’s work. It was a no-brainer for him to reestablish them in a new ongoing.
Cable & Deadpool does just that: it strips the characters down to their most basic concepts and places them on new foundations. Cable becomes a clear savior figure, Deadpool returns to his morally off-center heroic hopeful. Tying the characters together does wonders to temper their shortcomings: Cable is dragged from godhood to deal directly with Deadpool, who finds an aspirational focus for his heroic urges. Though the story accelerates to the impossibly cosmic with impossible speed – Cable does battle with the Silver Surfer by issue #10 – the book never loses its emotional center of frenemies alternating between conflict and affection.
And the battle is *epic*.
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A consistent, clean visual aesthetic, primarily by artist Patch Zircher, goes a long way in differentiating the book from the uneven ongoings that preceded it – the characters are presented with sharp, near-iconic designs that build on the work of their best artists.
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This isn’t to say that the book isn’t without its foibles. An occasional narrative beat may find itself without resolution, as with a “murder mystery” surrounding the assassination of an Osama Bin Laden stand-in, which imparts no consequences on the characters or Cable’s Utopian society. That Utopian society doesn’t quite pay off (at least in these 18 issues) despite having incredible dramatic potential. Deadpool has a distressing obsession with the Olsen twins, who had only just turned 18 in 2004. At its worst, there is some poorly-aged language and a questionably ironic look at Islamaphobia. Thankfully, nothing quite as damning as gags from Deadpool’s early solo book which felt far more distasteful.
Deadpool & Cable Modern Era Epic Collection: Ballistic Bromance overcomes whatever small stumbles it makes by the sheer redemptive virtue of cleaning up the characters. It re-centers them after half a decade of sloppy continuity and half-hearted plots, and it keeps the self-aware fourth-wall breaks to the most tolerable minimum. Not even the universe-hijacking of House of M can derail the book’s singular narrative focus.
Its worst crime is attempting to rewrite history by rearranging the title to put Deadpool first; the guy is already everywhere.
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