Scanned Thoughts: Cable and X-Force #14

How many awesome stories area result of teenage girls who have serious daddy issues? By that same token, how many shitty stories come from teenage girls who have serious daddy issues? Most of the time, these girls are easy prey for douche-bags who show them as much respect as they show the semen encrusted sock they keep in a box with their porno stash. In comics, these girls can either be a fanboy's wet dream or an annoying bitch that deserves way more respect than any sock. Hope fucking Summers has long past sealed her fate as an annoying little cunt who has as many redeeming features as Ryan Seacrest has talent. Yet she's still bitching and moaning in the pages of Cable and X-Force. So far that hasn't kept the book from being awesome, but how much longer can it hold out? Keep some blood pressure medication handy because I'm about to review Cable and X-Force #14 and it may be one of the only instances where teenage girls with daddy issues don't give me a boner.

So far, Hope fucking Summers made it all the way to the future to find out from her future self that she’s the one who fucked up Cable’s mind and fucked up the future. Now she has to work with her future self to unfuck it. It may sound more confusing than the plot of Godfather 3 after smoking a few too many joints, but it’s actually pretty basic. Both her older self and Blaquesmith equip her with a weapon and a jet pack to help her fix what her future self would fuck up. She tries to come off as sympathetic in her inner musings, but at this point there’s as much sympathy for Hope fucking Summers as there is for Miley Cyrus. Her returning to the past to fix her own mistakes is probably the best anyone can hope for with a whiney little bitch like her.

But I haven’t stuck with Cable and X-Force because I like being reminded of how much I hate Hope fucking Summers. I read it because it offers the possibility of many awesome concepts, like X-Force fighting the Uncanny Avengers. It already led to Havok being punched in the jaw in the first arc. And as satisfying as that was, it left me wanting more. And in a recent issue, X-Force decided to make a daring rescue attempt for Cable, who the Uncanny Avengers captured for some of the excessive vandalism his team was responsible for in the first arc. And since it involved blowing up a fast food joint in a world where fat-asses have a lot of influence, that just couldn’t go unpunished.

Despite having to read too much about Hope fucking Summers, it’s still a very satisfying fight. It’s not a very fair fight though and that’s to be expected. The Uncanny Avengers have fought the fucking Red Skull and the Apocalypse Twins. X-Force is strong, but they are pitifully overmatched by the likes of Thor, Captain America, Rogue, and the Scarlett Witch. At times it makes the fights seem less-than-epic, but some fights shouldn’t be epic. In the same way a fight between a lion and a squirrel is nothing to put on pay-per-view, a fight between the Uncanny Avengers and X-Force is not a battle that anyone should expect to be too drawn out. That’s part of what makes it both satisfying and believable.

And the one person who is supposed to be responsible for convincing X-Force to surrender peacefully isn’t even partaking in the fight. Havok, who is still new to this whole leadership deal, is stuck sitting on the fence and looking more indecisive than George W. Bush at a hotdog stand. Wolverine, who is just calmly drinking a beer with no desire to fuck up the lawn of the Avengers Mansion, comes off as the smartest guy on the team for once. He tells Havok that he has to make a decision on what to do with Cable. Sure, he’s a wanted terrorists, but now he knows he had a damn good reason for doing what he did. He has to decide how he wants to deal with it.

Lucky for Havok, he doesn’t end up having to make his choice immediately. Before he can confront Cable, that elaborate mind-fuck that Hope fucking Summers did to him finally overwhelms his mind and he starts going Carrie White. And Havok might as well have been the one to pour pigs blood all over his prom dress. I want to have some sympathy for Havok since he couldn’t possibly know how much Hope fucking Summers would fuck up Cable’s mind. But I’m too sober and too logical to give him the courtesy. Until he makes a decision that Cyclops wouldn’t have made with much more conviction, he’ll still be that guy that deserved the punch to the jaw he got earlier in this series.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that X-Force had to go up against Earth’s mightiest heroes and X-men, news choppers pick up on the fight. It’s a nice touch that doesn’t often happen in the pages of a comic book. When a bunch of superheroes slug it out on the front lawn of a mansion, that’s not just newsworthy. That’s the kind of shit that Don King would try to sponsor. It also gives a nice reminder that X-Force is still wanted. The Uncanny Avengers are the heroes and they’re the fugitives that blew up a fucking fast food factory. They can’t expect anybody to be rooting for them. It’s an important distinction that every X-Force comic needs to make and this scene does it nicely while continuing to show that X-Force is more overmatched than Betty White in a boxing match with Mike Tyson.

It would have been a fairly predictable match anyways. The stakes only change when Hope fucking Summer finally joins the party, armed with her new jetpack. She basically skips the battle between the Uncanny Avengers and X-Force because fuck X-Force. She couldn’t give a nanogram of shit about anybody who ever helped her if it kept her from confronting her serious daddy issues. But Wolverine, who is still the smart one avoiding the clash while drinking a beer, stops her just long enough for her to explain herself. He just wants a simple reason why he shouldn’t stab her, which is something he has tried to do in the past on more than one occasion. She just tells him that a lot of people will die if she doesn’t get to Cable. That alone isn’t very convincing, but when the mansion starts shaking that seems to do the trick. So with his beer still in hand, Wolverine lets her through, thereby making him the only character in this comic who didn’t fuck up on some level.

The whiney little bitch and unapologetic rip-off character arrives just in time to see Cable’s mind going batshit and she has nobody but her future self to blame. I suppose this could be a metaphor or something about messed up teenage girls that try to resolve their daddy issues and only end up making shit worse in the long run. But it’s Hope fucking Summers. She only seems to make everything worse no matter what she does or where she goes. So I’m not going to lump her together with the teenage girls out there who have real daddy issues. They deserve better while this little bitch doesn’t even deserve a stripper pole at a Mexican brothel.

Again, she tries to come off as sympathetic in her inner monologues. I’m glad they’re actually there because if she just did the shit she was doing without any insight into her thought, drunks like me would just assume she’s doing this because she’s a bitch. I get that Marvel is trying to keep her from becoming too irrelevant now that she’s no longer the mutant messiah and she has basically done what she was supposed to do. But there’s just no redeeming this whiney little bitch at this point.

What she does undo the shit her future self started isn’t going to make her seem any less whiney though. In a quick flashback, Blaquesmith reveals that the fancy battle ax he and her future self gave her is a specially designed tool that takes the excessive psionic energy from Cable’s brain and channels away from activity that involves putting him in chronic pain and destroying mansions. But like buying a cheap Iphone over Ebay, there’s always a catch. In order for it to work, she has to stab him in the fucking forehead. Because it just wouldn’t be in character for Hope fucking Summers to do something that doesn’t look like a dick move on some levels. Granted, it works. It effectively stops Cable’s outburst while unleashing a psionic wave that disrupts the battle between X-Force and the Uncanny Avengers. It doesn’t make it any less a dick move.

The reunion between Cable and Hope isn’t something that would fit into a Hallmark card. In fact, it’s pretty damn underwhelming. There’s no hug. There are few emotions. Granted, these are two battle-hardened soldiers. But Hope fucking Summers has a history of getting so damn emotional about Cable. Yet when she confronts him, she does it with the same attitude that I have when I meet up with my pot dealer. It could have been a big moment, but instead it’s just a scene where they catch their breath. That’s understandable to a point, but since there’s no hint about how this affected the battle going on outside or what it means for Cable’s visions, it’s still lacking.

The last issue to resolve is Havok. He still has to make a decision on what to do with Cable and his team. He could continue being a total dick and have him arrested along with the rest of X-Force, but after seeing what Cable showed him in the previous issue, he’s willing to be a bit more understanding. Captain America probably wouldn’t approve and neither would any DEA agent in the fine states of Colorado and Washington, but it’s his decision and he decides to take a chance. That means not arresting Cable and letting X-Force operate in a way that just doesn’t look good around news choppers. It actually is a decision that Cyclops would probably make, but Havok just seems nicer about it. I still think he’s a douche, but he effectively frees X-Force to keep doing what they’re doing. And now that Cable’s brain isn’t having a Chernobyl style meltdown anymore, they can do what they need to do. It’s satisfying while still missing a few minor details. But since they’re minor, it’s nothing that can’t be overlooked with a few extra joints and a line of blow.

This issue and this arc failed to make Hope fucking Summers any less a puissant little cunt. However, this issue did succeed in one key area. It effectively tied up nearly every loose end while establishing Cable’s new team as the kind of X-men squad that’s willing to get dirtier than the septic tank that feeds into Congress. It wasn’t as clean or detailed as it could have been, but it got the job done and was pretty damn awesome in the process. Hope fucking Summers is still going to be an insufferable bitch, but at the very least this issue didn’t give too many additional reasons to hate her. For that, I give Cable and X-Force #14 an 8 out of 10. So a bratty teenage girl abandons everyone that ever tried to help her, mind-fucked her own adopted father, and still gets rewarded with ice cream? That right there, my friends, is how teenage girls become grown up bitches. Nuff said!