Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: cable, chris claremont, fabian nicieza, John Siuntres, louise simonson, new mutants, rob liefeld, terrificon, Word Balloon, x-force
Louise Simonson Tells Us The Real Origin of Cable… As She Recalls It
Louise Simonson Tells Us The Real Origin of Cable… As She Recalls It. Rob Liefeld may have a different version…
Article Summary
- Louise Simonson shares the real origin of Cable, saying he began as New Mutants’ tough adult leader from the future.
- Simonson recalls pitching “Commander X” before Rob Liefeld’s design batch led Marvel to choose the character named Cable.
- She says Cable’s big-gun soldier look fit her military concept, while Liefeld pushed to keep the name Cable in place.
- Fabian Nicieza disputes Cable’s later Cyclops-baby twist, calling it an added complication driven by others at Marvel.
At Terrificon’s Uncanny X panel this past weekend, Louise Simonsonwalked fans through the creation of one of the more complicated characters in X-Men history, Cable, and made it clear the version everyone knows today is only half the story she originally intended. Sitting alongsideChris Claremont and Fabian Nicieza, moderator John Siuntres began saying, “Rob Liefeld being such the diminutive quiet flower that he is. We never hear about his end of the story, but maybe we have a great opportunity to talk to Louise and Fabian about creating Cable and Deadpool.”
Well, Cable, at least. Louise Simonson delivered a no-nonsense account of how the time-travelling warrior with the big guns first appeared in New Mutants. But she also had a warning. “Whenever you ask anybody any comic book questions about how something happened, it’s Rashomon. It’s like a movie where you get everybody’s different points of view. But I’ve talked to my friend [and former C-Men editor] Ann Nocenti about this, and Ann says, ‘people tell me this is sort of the way I remember it, but I don’t know if I’ve remembered it properly’. And we decided that in the long run, we just pick the most fun version, and that’s what we go with.”
Fabian Nicieza confirmed, “There’s a difference between how my editor hat remembers things versus how my writer hat remembers it. So writers and artists remember things differently. And editors claim to not remember anything because they never want to take a side.”
Louise Simonson broke it down.”So my version is that The New Mutants didn’t have an adult leader. The editor [Bob Harras] thought that they should have an adult leader. And I said, ‘Okay, but not a Professor Xavier who’s going to be worrying about them. I want a guy who has come from the future, who sees the terrible things happening, and Lord knows they’re happening right now. So he decides that these kids have got to be tough. He’s got to almost use them in a military sort of fashion to try to create a different future than the one that he came from.”
“So, that was my idea. I didn’t have a name for this guy. I think I called him Commander X as a placeholder. So Rob Liefeld, who was the artist at the time, sent in a batch of pictures. There were eight drawings of different characters. I think he thought one of the other characters would be chosen to be the leader. We liked the look of a character that he had called Cable, with the big guns and stuff. It just seemed appropriate for a military kind of guy. I guess they all had big guns; it was the eighties. He had the eye, he had little feet. Rob said, ‘Can he please be called Cable?’… I’m sure he said please because he’s a funny guy. ‘Can you please be called Cable because that’s what I wanted this guy to be called.’ He said whatever, fine. So that was how Cable came about.” I thought his design was really cool, particularly for the time and the era. Cable showed up, did his thing, and then, after I left, they actually made him Cyclops’s baby son all grown up in the future, which I thought was brilliant, and I wish I had thought of that”
Cable designs by Rob Liefeld
New Mutants #87 cover by Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane
Fabian Nicieza disagreed. “I hated that. That wasn’t even us coming up with that. That wasJim [Lee] and Whilce [Portacio] and Bob [Harras] bought into it, and then we got kind of stuck with it, although we didn’t want it. It automatically overcomplicates in a way for a character that’s already complicated, and it added further entanglements, cables, if you will, that really made it harder to define who he is and why he is.”
Louise Simonson added, “But I mean they did keep the theme of the guy coming from the future
Fabrian Nicieza replied “Yeah but I mean I saw the Terminator movie too. It was an era that was very much “moth to bright lights” and the moth flitted around and it was moths I should say plural because it was various writers, artists and an editor who really liked the next bright light and really fell out of love with the bright light that they had just liked the day ago. I think Chris and Louise will agree it’s not the most conducive way to work on a monthly comic.” And Fabian certainly wrote a lot of Cable (And Deadpool) to follow… more to come.
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