Classic Comics Cavalcade: The Most Complicated Family In ‘Cable: Past Fears’

There’s nothing that makes the holiday season more… complicated than family. So to celebrate, we decided to visit some classic stories featuring some of the most complicated families in comics. And who’s a better family to start with than the X-Men’s Summers clan!

Cable is one of the coolest characters in comics, especially by the standards of the 90’s. As he was fleshed out from being a mysterious soldier, he morphed from being “cool” to a fascinating and complex character. One of those new facets he gained was a family, but it was a very familiar family to any X-Men fan. 

A few years previously, longtime X-Men leader Scott Summers had to send his infant son with Madelyn Pryor into the future to save his life. Several years later, after some intricate X-Men shenanigans, Cyclops and his new wife Jean Grey traveled to the future to raise Nathan. In Cable: Past Fears, some of the gaps of those years were filled in by Lonnie Nadler, Zac Thompson, German Peralta, Jesus Aburtov and Travis Lanham, alongside a few other missing gaps of his life.

In Apocalypse’s future, Cable is still just a young boy trying to navigate his destiny with simply being a young boy. He’s grateful for Redd and Slym, his adoptive parents. Even with them though, he’s about to accidentally create his deadliest enemy. Over the years and through every incarnation, Cable finds himself facing this boyhood mistake, and only with the help of his family can he hope to defeat it.

I said it nicer a couple paragraphs ago, but Cable’s family is weird. His dad is a space pirate. His mom is a clone of his step mother. His parents were pulled from the past to raise him in the future. He has a brother from an alternate reality, a daughter he adopted to protect her from an insane former X-Man, a sister who may or may not ever actually come to exist and a found family that he called X-Force. In this story, all of them (except Rachel) have to help him fight a monster.

It seems like a straightforward sci-fi action plot. The further you get into the story, and the more you learn about Metus, the monster stalking him, you being to realize how important Cable trusting his family and friends is. In the end, he’s able to beat Metus not by punching it, but by trusting his daughter Hope to help him. It’s a great story as written by Thompson and Nadler, as it has that emotional depth all wrapped in what appears to be a greatest hits action story.

Peralta and Aburtov have a great working relationship. Peralta’s style is clean, but he’s able to lean into the detail needed here. Cable’s always had a body horror element with the techno-organic virus, and Peralta leans into that, making Metus and his effect on the virus grotesque and painful. He’s also able to convey the real emotion of Thompson and Nadler’s script though, which make every moment of the story land. Aburtov’s colors makes each new setting feel real and lived in, but with a time and place change each issue, we’re also able to see a real sense of place from the colors.

This is a story I feel a lot of readers missed, but it’s one seriously worth revisiting, especially as you handle complex feelings about your family this holiday season.