Chapter I: Deliverance to New Dark Ages
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    Chapter I: Deliverance to New Dark Ages



    Section 1: The Fall of Apocalypse and Delegation of Nathan
    Section 2: Background for a Future Under Apocalypse
    Section 3: The Death of the Future Incarnation of Apocalypse
    Section 4: The Time Following the Abandonment of Nathan
    Section 5: The Golden Age and Decline of the Clan Chosen

    Gathered by a visionary teacher, Professor Charles Xavier, the X-Men are a group of mutants born with abilities far beyond the scope of everyday humanity. The X-Men fight to gain equality for their race and achieve peaceful coexistence between man and mutantkind.

    Their work mandated, during one early adventure, that they go into Earth’s orbit to battle a foe bent on eradicating all mutants using giant, mechanical killing machines called Sentinels. After the dust of this battle had settled, and on their journey back to Earth, Jean Grey, code-named Marvel Girl, was replaced by a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix. Holding the keys to all creation, the Phoenix is an entity of nigh-unlimited power. It placed Jean in a cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay to recuperate from injuries sustained upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. In the meantime, the entity joined the X-Men in Jean’s stead. Later still, after being seduced by the darker side of human nature and going mad, it was deposed on Earth’s moon.

    Elsewhere on Earth, a geneticist meddler by the calling of Mister Sinister was scheming to engineer the birth of a child by a clone of his making, which he constructed using Jean Grey’s DNA. The clone was called Madelyne Pryor. Sinister sent the clone to lull Scott Summers, code-named Cyclops, with the aim of conceiving a child. The baby that she bore they named Nathan.

    Cyclops and the true Jean Grey, revived from her cocoon in Jamaica Bay, cared for Nathan. Madelyne Prior disappeared, to later return as the demonic Goblin Queen. She kidnaped her own son for use in an arcane ritual, but was herself defeated by a theretofore unprecedented assemblage of mutant heroes. Nathan remained with his father, Scott Summers, and the template of his mother, Jean Grey.

    The arch-nemesis Apocalypse captured the boy again a few months later, and X-Factor, an offshoot of the original X-Men team, assembled on their foe’s lunar base to reclaim him. It is here that I propose to begin this chronology. For while the adventures involving the infant Nathan are pivotal and deserve extensive coverage here, it is perhaps more wise to begin with the battle with Apocalypse on the moon, as it commences two of the more prominent plot elements that define Cable as a character: his opposition to the immortal mutant Apocalypse, and his connexion to another time period.

    My decision to start with this debatably arbitrary point in Cable’s life is indicative of the trouble with putting together something called a “chronology” of a character that doesn’t always progress linearly through time. The option presents itself of choosing linear time itself as the benchmark for this project, or else of opting to adhere to Cable’s cross-time travelings, following him from place to place, period to period. I’ve settled for a combination of both, one which I hope is geared toward providing the most readable narrative.


    Section 1: The Fall of Apocalypse and Delegation of Nathan

    X-Factor, which consisted of the original X-Men, were accompanied by the entity known as Ship and Sgt. Charlotte Jones of the NYPD, a recurring supporting character of the X-Factor series. The Inhumans, a group of metahumans living on the moon, also joined them on their mission. Apocalypse had seized control of the Inhumans’ lunar refuge with the purpose of turning their people into an army of conquest, thus giving them incentive to throw in their lot with X-Factor as their best means of defense. Some among the Inhumans’ royal family Apocalypse transformed into his “Riders of the Storm,” who would later be known as the Dark Riders, a second-string group of warriors who would double-serve as his emissaries and bodyguard.

    By the time X-Factor could get close enough to reach Nathan in his holding-place on the moon, Apocalypse had infected him with a debilitating and potentially deadly techno-organic virus. Even as X-Factor engaged their enemy, this insidious disease ravaged Nathan’s body and maimed his flesh irreversibly. X-Factor succeeded in destroying Apocalypse, here for the first time in what would become an endless succession of “definitive victories.” Without the hindsight of Apocalypse’s superhuman longevity, the team was not out of place in assuming him dead. And apparently, despite Apocalypse’s mantra that “only the fit shall survive,” it seems that the fit can appreciate the value of playing dead every once in a while while they lick their wounds.

    Following the battle, a woman of the future, calling herself Askani, arrived to offer her help in saving Nathan’s dwindling life. She explained to X-Factor that the techno-organic virus would promptly kill him without the treatment that he could only receive in the future to which she belonged. Rather than gape at the sheer alacrity of this lunatic, the team assented and placed the boy in the Askani’s care. This rash decision was of course influenced by the severity of the situation and the lack of other viable options for giving ambulatory assistance to a child on the moon. In addition, Nathan’s parents were hardly in a position to do a better job of caring for the boy themselves. Nathan’s clone of a mother was dead, Jean Grey was not in a position to extend her motherly affection to a child that was only technically her own and which didn’t proceed from her womb, and Cyclops, despite his brilliant tactical leadership and care for his team, did not have anywhere close to a perfect track record with regard to embracing his familial responsibilities. What’s more, the top-selling X-MEN series was set to debut in a few months, and team-leader Cyclops was not permitted to be saddled with a child from a previous series.

    Thus Nathan, watched over and accompanied by the team’s sentient Ship, was given up to the Askani and hauled off to the future, to be promptly forgotten about by his caregivers in the present (X-FACTOR #67-68).

    While the implausability of the way in which this all played out was an obstacle from the start, the X-Men’s (X-Factor’s) disregard for poor Nathan would at least provide the impetus for the revenge scheme of the X-CUTIONER’S SONG crossover, the subject of Section 12.

    Section 2: Background for a Future Under Apocalypse

    The Askani delivered the infant Nathan to the construct known as Boak and an elderly, time-displaced relative of Scott Summers and Jean Grey. This woman—an aged Racher Summers—was the daughter of the two heroes in a different, again alternate, dimension. There she lived as a mutant hound, subjugated and used by her human oppressors to hunt down and kill other mutants. She later came to the present day, was possessed by the Phoenix force, and joined a group of European adventurers named Excalibur. She was thrown into the time-stream once again and came to reside in this future world now under discussion, 2000 years further down the road from the present day. Her migration from the 20th Century to the 40th is touched upon in Section 13. A recollection of how Rachel first founded the order of the Clan Askani is in order before the story of Nathan’s life in her war-torn world can continue.

    Rachel was shunted to this cruel future directly from her life on Muir Island in the later 20th Century. Once the confusion of her new surroundings subsided, she disguised herself to keep a low profile and to blend in with the oppressed peoples kept under warlord Apocalypse’s rule. While concealed from his notice, she befriended a young mutant that had a knack for building technological devises. His name was Blaquesmith.

    Meanwhile, in a place known as Crestcoast, Apocalypse toiled to create a new armor to house his body and consciousness. His councilor, a sadistic woman called Nero, administered his empire in his place while he was preoccupied. A mutant, Nero had the power to gain the mutant abilities of all those that she had killed over the years while under the service under her lord. As she served Apocalypse, sibling prelates Ch’Vayre and Luminesca served as her own direct emissaries. Apocalypse told Nero of the creation of three warriors he’d engineered to test the strength of human and mutant alike.

    In Antartica, a group of psi-talents known as the Order of Witnesses became aware of Phoenix’s prophesied arrival. They dispatched one of their own, Diogenes, to investigate. While Diogenes sought out Phoenix, Rachel, still disguised, infiltrated Apocalypse’s resurrection ceremony with the aid of her telepathy. She hoped to destroy him while incapacitated as a result of his “rebirth.” In this Rachel would be frustrated, however, because Apocalypse was not present at the event after all. All that Rachel managed to accomplish was blowing her own cover. Nero attacked her but, to her credit, Rachel overwhelmed her using the Phoenix force that was at her disposal. Although defeated, Nero survived to fight again.

    Diogenes approached Rachel and urged her to enlist the help of others in her quest for good. Over the next two years, Phoenix allied herself with warriors who would fight at her side. Her forces consisted of the young Blaquesmith, the warrior robot Ozana, a water-being called Qua, Lexii, the sole survivor of a cloned sisterhood destroyed by Apocalypse’s infinites, and the daring Malachi Hark. Together with Diogenes, they mounted a perpetual rebellion against their oppressors.

    Her band at one time investigated a village where Nero tested a deadly living virus against its inhabitants. She set a trap that claimed the lives of both Qua and Nero’s own Prelate Luminesca. Phoenix sacrificed her own life to lay waste to the virus. Not unusually for her, she rose from the ashes of death a few seconds thereafter.

    Nero next kidnaped Diogenes and his young companion from the Order prisoner. They were tortured, and Squy’rr, Diogenes’s companion, forfeited information to the enemy before he died. The Askani, as Rachel’s group was called, was forced to travel to Antarctica to defend the once secret Order of the Witnesses as it came under Nero’s attack. But they were too late in arriving. The witnesses were dead, save for a young girl named Sanctity and her sisters, who the Askani defended with their lives. Nero killed Malachi Hark and fought Phoenix once again. In a last-ditch effort, Rachel bestowed upon Nero the Phoenix force, which nearly engulfed her. Rachel mercifully attempted to take back the Phoenix force before it could inflict permanent damage on Nero, but it broke free of them both and departed for the skies above. Nero chose to die within the dome where the witnesses dwelled, which Rachel decided to detonate to keep its secrets from falling into the wrong hands. She went on to establish the Clan Askani against Apocalypse, and she awaited the preordained arrival of young Nathan, her brother, who arrived several decades later (X-MEN: PHOENIX #1-3).

    Commenting on this limited series, I don’t recall being particularly fond of it when it came out. For one thing, it contradicts the tone that Scott Lobdell and Gene Ha created for the 40th Century in THE ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX, the subject of the next section, which was in fact published years before PHOENIX. While an account of Rachel Summers’s lost years was long overdue, stretching way back as it did from her banishment into the time-stream as a teenager in EXCALIBUR to her appearance as the octagenarian Mother Askani, writer John Francis Moore did not draw extensively from this source material for his series.

    This assessment can be supported by the presence of blatant (at least for me) continuity errors, namely those surrounding the supporting characters Ch’Vayre and Sanctity. As established in CABLE years before, Ch’Vayre was born in the future and cared for by Sanctity, sent back in time by her to aid Cable (as related in Section 15), and was then captured by Apocalypse to be transformed over the course of two millennia into the aged henchman we find in THE ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX. Here, however, Moore presents Ch’Vayre as a young prelate serving Apocalypse alongside a sister in the 40th Century. While there is still time, theoretically, for Ch’Vayre to come under the sway of Sanctity after the events of this series and be sent back in time, the utter and unnecessary contrivance of such a scenario leads me to believe that Moore was simply unacquainted with Ch’Vayre’s backstory in the 20th Century.

    Next I turn to Sanctity, who has an equally confusing history. The character was first shown as an adult in the 40th Century in the ASKANI’SON limited series, the subject of Section 4. Writer Scott Lobdell later revealed her to be the time-displaced daughter of Bolivar Trask (as related in Section 8), who Rachel Summers brought to the 40th Century and inducted into her Clan Askani. In PHOENIX, Moore has Sanctity appear as a girl native to the future, having been brought up within Moore’s own Order of the Witnesses, a new concept that only muddles the already complex politics of the 40th Century.

    Without wanting to make claims about something with which I am not well acquainted, I am aware that Moore was previously the author of X-MEN 2099, a fairly long-lived series depicting another future a hundred years down the road. If I was more familiar with that work, I might suspect to find more of a parallel between the tone of this series with that of X-MEN 2099 than with THE ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX.


    Section 3: The Death of the Future Incarnation of Apocalypse

    Having laid the groundwork for this time period, I skip forward again to Nathan’s arrival therein. Almost as soon as Nathan arrived cradled in the arms of Askani, Apocalypse somehow became aware of his presence on his world. Apocalypse, who oppressed all in this dark future, was in need of a host. Apocalypse’s current body had almost burnt itself out, so he needed a newer, fresher body as his vessel. He needed Nathan.

    Nathan’s body, however, was in no ideal condition—neither for Apocalypse’s use, nor for anyone else’s. Even the Clan Askani, fearing that Nathan would soon die of the techno-virus, was forced to create a healthy clone to ensure that Nathan would grow to fulfill his given destiny to destroy Apocalypse. The clone would later be known as the Chaos-Bringer, Stryfe.

    Apocalypse attacked the Askanihold and managed to kidnap Stryfe, the unflawed clone. The Clan Askani was nearly wiped out during the attack, which struck harder than Nero’s had so many years before. The remaining Askani sacrificed themselves in a ritual of mass suicide to ensure that Nathan would not come to harm. They died fixed upon a machine that was constructed for the express purpose of transporting the lifeforces of Cyclops and Jean Grey to this future. Decimated beyond their capacity to care for him, the Askani traded their lives so that Nathan’s birthparents would care for him. The two did not travel to the future in body, however. Their minds alone were pulled through time and placed into two bodies cloned from DNA remains gathered from their descendants. Once anchored to these bodies, Cyclops and Jean Grey met with the Mother Askani, who described their predicament. Using the fading remnants of the Phoenix force, she invested in Scott and Jean the limited use of their familiar powers.

    Ch’Vayre, now one of Apocalypse’s minions, discovered Nathan. Cyclops, Jean, and Rachel attacked Ch’Vayre in tandem, and they managed to escape with the boy. Thus Scott and Jean, who assumed the names Slym and Redd, raised Nathan after all, having previously forfeited him to Askani in the present. Rachel Summers, having succeeded in achieving this reunion, perished.

    As Nathan matured under loving guidance, Ch’Vayre raised young Stryfe under the supervision of Apocalypse in preparation for the day when Apocalypse would possess his body. Stryfe grew to be a very powerful, formidable, and obscenely murderous child. Ch’Vayre secretly pitied Stryfe’s corrupted youth. Stryfe, however, was content in sin.

    Stryfe and Nathan were unaware that one another existed, and they grew apart as prince and a pauper. They both began to show signs of their great psi-abilities at about the same time, but otherwise their similarities were shallow and merely topical. Nathan’s mutant abilities were far inferior, as he needed to reserve using the greater part of them to hold in check the ravages of the techno-organic virus. Stryfe, having no such stumbling block, was a mutant with unlimited potential, and therefore a true prize Apocalypse deemed worthy to possess.

    Slym, Redd, and Nathan found a friend in the thing known as Prior Turrin. With Prior’s forces, they on one occasion discovered a lab used to research the Legacy Virus, a plague that will be explained in greater detail in Section 12. Apocalypse was planning to reengineer the mutant-killing virus so that it would affect only humans.

    Stryfe likely used information obtained from his dark lord’s lab to engineer the sample of the Legacy Virus which he unleashed upon mutantkind in the present day. Viewing time cyclically, it also follows that residual samples of the virus from the present may have possibly been used by Apocalypse in this future. So the virus may not have any point of origin at all.

    Remaining on the subject of time travel conundrums, Apocalypse claimed to have named the clone Stryfe after a worthy adversary he once encountered in the present. Little does he know that this boy will grow to become the selfsame time-traveling Stryfe that he encountered. So like the Legacy Virus, the origin-point of the choosing of the name Stryfe is also non-existent.

    The effects of the techno-virus soon became more than Nathan’s body could bear. Facing complete system failure, the psi-spirit of Rachel Summers granted him reprieve and imparted to him some lasting degree of control over the virus.

    When the day arrived on which Apocalypse would possess Stryfe, the Summers clan intervened to kill him with Ch’Vayre’s assistance. The deed was accomplished just in time. Slym and Redd faded before Nathan’s eyes, their bodies spent and their minds destined to return their bodies in the past (our present), moments before they ever left them. Nathan was once more left abandoned in the future to fend for himself (THE ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX #1-4).

    Despite appearances, Apocalypse survived this attack. The greatest irony about Apocalypse’s final moments is that they were not his last (CABLE #6).

    The ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX is at its heart a character-centric story that does not attempt to further Cable’s character beyond rectifying the abandonment subplot and addressing Nathan’s relationship with his parents. With this series Scott Lobdell fails to lay the larger groundwork for the enduring enmity between Cable and Apocalypse—the dualistic relationship which would eventually become synonymous with Cable’s character—by killing Apocalypse during Cable’s adolescence.

    Lobdell is not necessarily to blame for contradicting CABLE #6 and asserting the death of Apocalypse when he did. The inconsistency can be attributed to the genuine confusion regarding Cable’s motives for traveling to the current era, and the early-on creative uncertainty whether Apocalypse was even the primary cause that incited Cable to time travel in the first place. Before it was generally accepted that he was, it would not have been necessary to maintain Apocalypse as his primary adversary for the duration of his time in the future. This would explain the sense of ambiguity about whether Apocalypse endured throughout the New Canaanite regime or not.


    Section 4: The Time Following the Abandonment of Nathan

    With Apocalypse’s reign seemingly ended, a new evil arose to take his place. The Canaanites seized authority of a world still reeling over the throes of oppression. Unknown by most, the architect of this reinvigorated dystopia, Tribune Haight, was allied with Apocalypse, who continued to act as world ruler from the shadows (CABLE #6).

    The Canaanites arrested Nathan, now a teenager, along with his friend Tetherblood on the charge of badmouthing the regime. While imprisoned, Nathan was first befriended by Rachel’s old friend Blaquesmith. It was also there where Nathan was seized by a sudden illness which, at Blaquesmith’s investigation, proved to have been caused by Ship, who was only now emerging from his concealment within the boy’s chest cavity.

    The traumatic experience of being locked away inside a human being seemed to have profoundly altered the artificial alien life form, which now insisted on being called “Professor.” Nathan, the Professor, Blaquesmith, and Tetherblood together managed to escape from their imprisonment.

    Meanwhile, the Canaanites discovered that the Askani were not wholly extict, as was previously thought, and that their continued existence threatened to unloose their stranglehold on society. They set upon launching an expedition which would eradicate them once and for all. The Canaanite ‘Strator Umbridge was assigned to head up this campaign, and she began by locating the Clan Askani’s base so that her superior, Tribune Haight, could dispatch the forces to destroy them. The Askani, she discovered, were based in the legendary land of Ebonshire. Ebonshire was deemed by outsiders to be uninhabitable due to the vicious tendencies of its wildlife, but the Askani made this forgotten place their home. There they were led by the corrupt, self-aggrandizing, and insane Madame Sanctity, who secured a position of power by virtue of being the direct disciple of the Mother Askani.

    Stryfe and Ch’Vayre formed yet another party bent on restoring the empire that Apocalypse once held. They created from an abandoned machine an android Zero unit to assist them. Holed up within the ancient Sphinx, Stryfe descended ever deeper into madness. He attempted to re-animate the long-dead legions of Apocalypse. Stryfe lost patience with his self-appointed guardian, who pitied him, and eventually reconfigured Ch’Vayre’s mind to remain unswervingly loyal to him. Zero, analyzing the situation, revealed to his Stryfe that only one other mutant was capable of training him in the use of his burgeoning mutant power. This mutant was Madame Sanctity. Terrified at the thought, Ch’Vayre attempted to assassinate his ward to prevent him from rising to power. Stryfe, however, proved too formidable to be defeated by his elder guardian.

    ‘Strator Umbridge crash-landed at Ebonshire aboard the Gender Splay, a futuristic pirate ship. Nathan stumbled upon this ship upon his arrival, finding that the entire crew had been ravaged and killed by the vicious Daegon which stalked the wilderness. Only ‘Strator Umbridge had survived. Nathan crossed paths with a member of this species and nearly succumbed, if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of Aliya. The young Askani ended the battle while wielding a psimitar, a weapon that focuses its user’s psi-powers. Together Nathan and Aliya encountered and defeated another horde of Ebonshire wildlife, the Loci. It was at this time that Nathan enjoyed his first experience wielding the psimitar. Afterwards, the two of them carried the wounded ‘Strator Umbridge to Madame Sanctity within the Askani base. Nathan there petitioned Sanctity to teach him in the ways of the Askani. Sanctity refused, deferring Nathan’s training to Aliya. Sanctity revealed to Aliya that Nathan was in fact the fabled Askani’son.

    To Nathan’s discomfort, the inhabitants of Ebonshire adored him as a savior. While they fawned over him, a recuperating ‘Strator Umbridge transmitted the location of the Askani base to Tribune Haight and the New Canaanite forces via a navigational signal. Hiding among the Clan Canaanite forces which were headed for Ebonshire was Nathan’s friend Tetherblood, coming to lend assistance. Stryfe, Ch’Vayre, and Zero also converged on Ebonshire aboard the Canaanite ships, attaching their vessel to a ship’s outer hull.

    The Canaanites arrived and began their destructive attack on Ebonshire. ‘Strator Umbridge, still appearing to Nathan as a guest, attacked him and Aliya. Tetherblood appeared at the most urgent moment, killing her swiftly before she could do the same to Nathan and Aliya. While the battle raged on, Stryfe propositioned Madame Sanctity to join him, which she accepted. The battle turned against the Canaanites’ favor, and so Tribune Haight retreated from the paradise. Nathan intercepted him during his extrication to make it clear that while the Canaanite forces fought, so would Nathan, Aliya, Tetherblood, Blaquesmith, and others to oppose them as the rebel group called the Clan Chosen (ASKANI’SON #1-4).

    Section 5: The Golden Age and Decline of the Clan Chosen

    Years later, Stryfe’s own forces had increased. Opposing Nathan at every turn, he managed to kidnap Tetherblood and the Professor from Nathan’s growing clan. The enemy led them to believe that Tetherblood had betrayed them.

    Simultaneous to this deception, Stryfe launched a psionic attack on Nathan, leaving him comatose and near death. Aliya, realizing the urgency of the situation, traveled into the past—our present—to seek out the man called Cable, Nathan’s future self, and return with him to rescue his younger self. Aliya fulfilled her mission, returning with Cable and Domino, straight from the year 1995. They rallied to the Clan Chosen, who brought them back to their camp and up to speed. Cable’s prognosis was that he could only help Nathan with the assistance of the Professor, whom Stryfe possessed.

    The Clan Chosen launched an assault on Stryfe’s base camp. While the rest of the Clan Chosen battled Stryfe and his minions, Cable and Domino explored the camp in search of Tetherblood and the Professor. Before they could escape with Nathan’s allies, the real traitor to the Clan Chosen, a member named Korless, confessed to helping kidnap Nathan’s allies and opposed Cable and Domino.

    Cable, having freed the Professor, used him to bodyslide them back to the Clan Chosen’s camp. The Professor and Cable worked together to help restore Nathan to good health. The Professor then sent Cable and Domino back to the present time period. The Clan Chosen was reunited in its mission to build a better society (CABLE #25).

    Many years later, having made the passage from boyhood to manhood through time and frequent battle, Cable petitioned the Askani Council to meet the growing threat of the Alliance of Humanity and the resurgency of the ancient Skornn. He was joined by the warriors Lark, Sepulcher, and Adam Spectre (X-FORCE LIMITED SERIES #2).

    The Clan Chosen embarked on a mission to recover Captain America’s shield from the Canaanites. Cable carried it for years to uphold the ideal it represented, up until the techno-organic arm that held it was severed in war (CABLE & DEADPOOL #25).

    Cable’s forces held the mutates, grotesque savages spawned at Apocalypse’s mechagenics labs, at bay from accessing their teleportation matrix, which contained the secret locations of bases and safe houses the world over (CABLE & DEADPOOL #42).

    In one high stakes battle in the Grand Canyon, Nathan, Tetherblood, and other members of the Clan Chosen fought the Canaanites to keep them from pressing on toward their base camp. The camp was protected by Dawnsilk, another member of the Clan Chosen, and Nathan’s adopted son, Tyler. Aliya, who had by this time chosen the name Jenskot for herself, after the legendary Cyclops and Phoenix, was also present. Upon returning to his wife and child upon the successful completion of the battle, Nathan witnessed the explosion that destroyed it. Aliya was fatally injured, and she soon died in Nathan’s arms. Boak, another member of Nathan’s party, revealed that the attack on the base camp was made not by the Canaanites, but by Stryfe. He had killed his wife and taken Tyler, his son.

    The Clan Chosen faced Stryfe, in full metallic garb, in the abandoned Lake Michigan venting tunnels. Tyler, whose mind had been tampered with by the mutant Frisco, was with Stryfe and willing to die for him. Corrupted and truly insane, Tyler was dead in every way which mattered. He held Dawnsilk hostage and connected a neural-link to her brain. If Nathan attempted to bodyslide his forces out of the tunnels, her mind would suffer irreversible damage. Left with no other option, he retreated by bodyslide at the expense of Dawnsilk’s mind. Following the death of Aliya, Cable now lost his son and teammate to Stryfe (CABLE #1: pages 1-10 and 25-30 with ads).

    Cable soon traveled back to the past and established himself in the era of his birth. He made infrequent jaunts back to the future, but lacking a family to keep him anchored, his time was increasingly spent in the twentieth century. On the whole, he operated from there until his return to the future through the events of a cataclysmic clash with Stryfe on the moon. See Chapter III and Chapter IV for specifics and Section 11 in particular for details on the character Kane and his circumstance for residing in this time period.

    The human opposition group called the “Flatliners” attacked Kane and tracked him to the Clan Chosen, which then consisted of Tetherblood, Dawnsilk, Hope, Boak, and Eleven, who was part of the same series of androids as Zero. Cable appeared from his battle with Stryfe and helped end the scuffle. Almost as soon as Cable arrived, General Haight unveiled Sinsear, his new and modified Canaanite soldier. Haight planned to use him to kill Cable, who he understood to be in the twentieth century. Having past history with Cable, the man who became Sinsear was out for blood.

    The Clan Chosen organized an attack on the Canaanite’s time machine, called a “Tinex” machine. After Sinsear had passed through it, they infiltrated the Tinex and programmed it to send Kane and Cable back to the twentieth century, to Graymalkin’s time displacement core at the bottom of the ocean (CABLE #1-2).

    Convoluted time travel plots became the norm for Cable beginning in 1993 when Fabian Nicieza’s ongoing CABLE series launched on the heels of his two-part miniseries from the previous year and the revelation of Stryfe and Cable’s identities in the X-CUTIONER’S SONG cross-over.

    The web of back-and-forth excursions through the timestream became rather complex, but let’s see if we can’t recover some bare minimum of sense from these key issues, and determine for what reason Cable saw fit to arrive in the twentieth century in the first place. Despite the widely-held concurrence that his mission was to kill Apocalypse, this was not clear at the beginning, and thus these issues appear somewhat erratic in retrospect, never really cutting to the core of what we think of when we consider what makes Cable tick.

    We’ll first consider the state of affairs prior to CABLE #6, the issue that most probably lays the groundwork for the later Cable/Apocalypse dichotomy. If X-Editorial could have definitively said anything about Cable’s origin prior to this period, it was that he was the clone of Stryfe, who was by 1992 revealed to be Nathan Christopher Summers, who Apocalypse had abducted as a child in X-FACTOR. This placed greater import on Stryfe’s origin, and so in 1992 the better question would have been, “Why did Stryfe return to the twentieth century?” The answer, obvious after his major crossover, was to enact vengeance upon Cyclops and Jean Grey, who “abandoned” him to the Askani, and Apocalypse, who kidnapped him in the first place. Stryfe’s gripe with Apocalypse in the present did not aim at rectifying his situation, or else he would have opposed Apocalypse at a time before he captured his younger self. He wanted, not to alter the course of time, as would later be said of Cable, but simply to have his revenge.

    As for Cable, one might be tempted to infer that he arrived in the current era chasing after Stryfe. This might make sense, given that Stryfe had only recently killed his wife and corrupted his son in the future. Surely this would have provoked Cable to hunt down the Chaos-Bringer. Unfortunately for this theory, Cable was not aware that Stryfe was even in the present time period when he arrived. Much less did he have any inkling as to Stryfe’s true identity. See Section 9. Cable came after Stryfe with a vengeance when he did uncover his presence, but this was clearly not his motivation from the start. In fact, the convergence of both Cable and Stryfe to the same period in the late twentieth century appeared to be nothing more than a “happy coincidence.”

    In the course of searching for Stryfe, Cable discovered that Stryfe was investigating artifacts relating to Apocalypse. This, as far as I can tell, is the first time that the adult Cable interacted with a plot involving Apocalypse prior to the publication of CABLE #6. Reiterating what was just stated, it was originally conceived to be Stryfe who held the grudge against Apocalypse, not Cable.

    The last clue to Cable’s original motivation in time traveling relates to the subplot about Sam Guthrie’s status as an External. This plot point eventually petered out, as nothing ever came of it, but in 1992 an early flashback of Cable indicated that he was very interested in pursuing Cannonball under the assumption that he was someone he believed destined to become a “high-lord” mutant, whatever that could possibly mean. We must dismiss this possibility as well, since Cable had already returned and associated himself with the Six Pack before learning about Guthrie in X-FORCE #8. It is possible, though, that his broad interest in the Externals could have immediately preceded his decision to travel back in time.

    So I have no clue why Cable was such a diehard time traveler before reading CABLE #6. I will in a moment relate how this issue marked off a great change in the direction of Cable’s character. But first, I would like to call attention to an episode of X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES which might have had as much, if not greater an effect as the issue in question. Although, strictly speaking, this site is not concerned with “non-canonical” sources outside the main books, the television episodes entitled TIME FUGITIVES, which aired on December 11 and 18, 1993, perhaps shed some light on the direction that the character was about to take in his own ongoing series. These episodes begin with a scene reminiscent of that portrayed in CABLE #1. Instead of losing Jenskot and Tyler to Stryfe’s forces, though, Cable loses Tyler and the Clan Chosen to the timestream while battling Apocalypse. Cable comes to trace the source of the anomaly to an event related to a mutant virus in the present day. He travels back in time to correct the anomaly and preserve his future, facing the present version of Apocalypse in the process.

    The general similarities to what we currently think of as Cable’s mission should be apparent. But what the creators of the episodes seem to have done is conflate several different aspects of Cable’s history as it was understood in the comics back in 1993. They eliminated the character of Stryfe completely, a second “Cable” being unnecessarily complex for a kids’ TV show. They streamlined Cable’s back story, defining him as a character not previously associated with the present day, but confined to the fourth millennium. Although Stryfe was jettisoned, his enmity with Apocalypse was retained but transmitted to Cable, and Apocalypse came to replace Stryfe and the New Canaanite forces as the Clan Chosen’s singular opponent. (And, incidentally, the Legacy Virus was equated to some degree with the techno-organic virus.)

    The point is that this widely popular, streamlined version of Cable that was created for the animated series became something of a blueprint for the Marvel universe version after the fact. I do not possess too clear an understanding of the production dates for the books compared to the show to be certain, but I would suggest that the two media fed off of one another creatively, to an extent, within a relatively short period of time. The influence of the TERMINATOR films I won’t even begin to gauge.

    To return to the books, CABLE #6 was significant because it was the first issue to insinuate that Apocalypse was responsible, either indirectly or not, for the palpable evil which held Cable’s world under its spell. The entire FATHERS AND SONS story arc which ran through these early issues of CABLE was important, too, for reversing the revelations of X-CUTIONER’S SONG and establishing Stryfe as the clone and Cable as the original Nathan Summers. This served to make the “real” Cable’s origins more relevant following Stryfe’s “death,” giving creators a greater impetus to explore uncharted territory.

    THE ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX was the fruit of this interest. In 1994, Lobdell established that Apocalypse had been Cable’s opponent throughout his childhood in the future, not just as an infant in the present. The connection between these characters ran deeper than their chance encounter in the pages of X-FACTOR.

    Even though Apocalypse was retroactively made to be Cable’s arch nemesis, the problem remained that none of the plentiful references to Cable’s past had pointed to this newfound fact in the slightest. Although the idiom that Cable arrived to fight Apocalypse in the present era and to cancel out his war-torn future is a cheerful and inspiring mask for his mission here, it is largely unsupported by what we know of Cable’s early time hopping. Recent efforts by Nicieza in CABLE & DEADPOOL to depict Cable traveling back in time to stop Apocalypse have made some progress toward filling in the gap (while creating new complications), but not even these scenes show Cable’s original ventures to the current era to fulfill such a purpose.

    The other issues that I would briefly like to address are the methods of time travel and the abundant availability of time travel devices described above. We have the machine used by the Askani Order to send Askani to the present, the device used to pull the consciousnesses of Cyclops and Jean Grey to the future, the Professor, who possesses some inherent connection to a personal time travel machine, and the New Canaanite Tinex machine. Every faction has access to the timestream in some form at one point or another. The multiplicity of conveyances for temporal transportation debases the novelty of being able to reach into the past, when characters are able to initiate time travel by every means short of rubbing two sticks together. It makes plots needlessly complex when Cable’s friends and enemies can scatter their agents across the ages for Cable to come across months or years down the line of when they were sent. It also makes stories quite implausible, where each adversary appears from the timestream to do battle with his opponent rather than showing up just a couple years sooner to strangle him in his crib. The possibility of infanticide should make everyone a lot more paranoid than they’re made out to be. Also, it seems odd that when Cable journeys to and fro, he always reappears at a point later than he left for each time period he approaches. Just some thoughts. I don’t mean to overthink.


    Chapter II: The Rise of Apocalypse