Avengers: X-Sanction #2(of 4):
Summary: Iron Man, realizing that Captain America and Falcon had vanished and weren't responding to his calls, follows Falcon's bird, Redwing, to Cable's secret freighter. As for Cable, he tells Captain America that he had only blasted him with a stun ray, and that was to keep Cap from killing himself in the torture chair Cable placed him in... Uh-huh... Cable rambles about how he didn't understand why the Avengers were after Our Lord and Savior Hope(because she's the be all and end all of the Marvel Universe!! The most important character EVER created!! The greatest!! The best!! But I digress...) and arms himself with some Stark tech from the future. Iron Man enters the freighter and discovers Cap and Falcon and is immediately attacked by Cable. The fight rapidly spills outside into the water, where Iron Man manages to analyze and neutralize the armor components Cable was using. Unfortunately, in doing so Cable is able to introduce a virus into Iron Man's armor which temporarily shuts it down, allowing Cable to defeat Iron Man. With Iron Man defeated, Cable puts him in a torture chair too! What the hell, was Magneto having a yard sale one day and Cable brought all of his torture chairs?! Before Cable can gloat at Iron Man, he is blasted in the back by the Red Hulk, who had swiped some of Cable's advanced weaponry upon entering Cable's freighter of fun. This issue ends with Cable hearing(or thinking he hears) Our Lord and Savior Hope imploring him to fight on while the Techno-Organic Virus begins to envelop him.
Thoughts: Okay, first things first... Yes, Cable is from the future. That is a given. As such, he's acquired a bunch of advanced technology, such as the futuristic Iron Man armor. Now, here's my problem. Tony Stark is one of the smartest characters in the entire Marvel Universe. Marvel itself has his intelligence listed at a 6(out of 7), which means Tony isn't just a genius, he's a SUPER-genius. That puts him on par with the Reed Richards', the Victor Von Dooms, the Hank Pyms of the Marvel Universe... In this issue? He was outsmarted by Cable. Cable, whose intelligence according to Marvel's official stats falls at a 3, which means he's slightly above average. So Cable outsmarting one of the smartest men in the Marvel Universe would be akin to me defeating one of the greatest chess grandmasters at a game of chess... In other words? It should NEVER happen. Besides that, I still don't get WHY I should be rooting for Cable here... I mean he's obviously the protagonist in this mini-series, but all he's done has been to act like a villain, all due to some vague, and thus far, completely bogus threat to Our Lord and Savior Hope... Would it be too much to TALK to the Avengers, since, you know, they've never been known to act villainously before? Besides all of those complaints? I actually enjoyed this issue! Go figure!! Seriously, if you overlook all of the stupid stuff that SHOULDN'T have happened, and pretended that Cable was a good guy and the Avengers were a bunch of nameless bad guys, this issue was a good read. The art was good, and the story moved along at a brisk pace. So oddly enough, while I hated the main points here, I liked this issue as a whole. One thing is for certain though, come the next issue I will be rooting HARD for the Red Hulk for the first time in my life!
Score: 6 1/2 out of 10.
Yeah sure, Cable is smarter than Tony Stark. And I'm the pope and the Queen of England all rolled into one.
while i agree with you
ReplyDeletethat thing of the virus being incoded with a language that dosent exist yet makes a pretty solid realistic explination as to why tony as (brilliant as he is)is unable to just write it out of his armors system like he would any other virus... just saying (damn thats somewhat intellegent wrting and coming from.... Jeph Leob OMG)
It irks me that somebody as smart as Tony would allow himself to get suckered into something that easily though. That's what bugged me. The way Cable won was really smart and sneaky, no doubt, but we are talking about Tony Stark... You'd think he would have taken the fact that Cable corrupted the tech into consideration and thus had a plan in case it DID happen. For me, Cable is being written TOO smart while the Avengers, thus far at least, have been written as inferior to Cable intellectually. It just seemed like a mighty big gaff for a guy as smart as Tony to leave himself open to.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a big long angry rant but i deleted it because i sounded like a pissy comic fan. I'll just say that cable picking off the avengers one by one in this manner is buffoonery at its finest in my opinion.
ReplyDelete-Falcon disappears, cap goes to search for him.. okay makes sense. Cap loses to cable as you put it "in the most ludicrous way" okay kind of lame, but i'll live. Now TWO avengers are missing and Tony's just like "Hey lemme go check whats up with our other two team members." After reading avengers for years and obviously solo stuff from each character.. I just feel like like the team would have known something was up... Idk i will keep reading and rooting for the avengers I just don't like the way this has been handled.Earth's mightiest are clearly earth's dumbest in this mini.
With all of that being said i actually liked how cable defeated iron man here with the askani thing, I just didn't like the "HEY team members are missing after that mysterious occurrence of lighting or whatever it was. Better go find em! by myself!!" Its like he is tying them up and waiting for the next idiotic one to just bumble on in saying "Hey where's the party!?"
ReplyDeleteGotta agree with Cap Von Trapp and young X-75 on this one. Stark has gotta be the most ingenius idiot I know in this series (it's meant to go in Cable's favor or it wouldn't be a story): 1) if Captain America is MIA, that's a red flag not to go into the trap by yourself, especially when you have a team called Avengers. 2) if Captain America was wooped, you may want to reconsider taking this guy one on one (I don't care if you are cocky Stark....not today!...for real). As for the Red Hulk and the blast...if Cable isn't unconscious, I believe that's gonna be a big mistake for the simple fact with the TO virus going complete...Cable isn't much of Nathan Summers. Meaning? Let's see....his physical strength will now be even more amplified with mad out of control TP as well as possible TK. WHAT WILL BE THE OUTCOME WHEN RED HULK GOES TOE-TO-TOE WITH A BEING 'NOW' POSSIBLY AS PHYSICALLY STRONG AS HE HIMSELF WITH EXTRA FIRE POWER, NOT TO MENTION LINKING WITH STARK'S TECH?! ANSWER: RED HULK RECEIVING A NICE THRASHING MOST DEFINITELY! If the Red Hulk has any chance, it will be because Cable looses control of his mentality, but that's 50/50 at best. What do you guys think: Could it be that Cable's attack on the Avengers infact is the reason the Avengers will begin to hunt Hope (to investigate what's so important or dangerous about her) when this mini is all said and done?
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, forgot to mention. That Askani language virus was a pretty tight idea. Gotta give it to Nathan with that one. That was awesome! There is no way Stark could have removed the virus because the language hasn't been created and won't be for a couple of thousand years. No record of language, no way to override the virus! Ha! It just didn't matter how intelligent Stark was. If Stark was really intelligent, he wouldn't have linked with his future armor, since TO infected Cable was wearing it. That alone was dumb! An old no-brainer!
ReplyDeleteYou should have gone with the angry rant, Cap! I've been writing them for four years now! :P You know, I wrote about how in Avengers Academy #24, the main storyline has a horror movie-esque feel to it, with the way the villain was collecting people. But after reading what you said and thinking about it, that description is WAY more apropos here! Seriously, it's like one of those terrible horror movies where the characters walk into the dark barn, and don't come back, which then leads to characters wandering around one by one, looking for the missing characters instead of, you know, joining forces or calling in back up!
ReplyDelete"Could it be that Cable's attack on the Avengers in fact is the reason the Avengers will begin to hunt Hope" I'm thinking exactly that, Radtrainer. If I had to guess I'd say that Our Lord and Savior Hope will know Cable is in trouble(due to her power of perfection), which will spur Lord Summers and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to attack the weakened(and idiotic) Avengers, taking Cable back to Crazy Mutie Island with them. I'd think Lord Summers taking Cable, who attacked the Avengers without provocation, would be enough to get the Avengers angry enough to consider attacking the Brotherhood, thus giving us the reason for the battle between the two teams... Although we do know that the Scarlet Witch also fits into that event somehow...
"If Stark was really intelligent, he wouldn't have linked with his future armor, since TO infected Cable was wearing it" <-- That right there! That's exactly what I was trying to say! It's not that the way Cable beat Tony was bad, it was actually really bright. It's the fact that Tony was suckered in the way he was! He's not THAT dumb!! Why would he link his armor to a mysterious armor from the future, that Cable could have been tampering with for who knows how long! Sure, Tony is arrogant, but he's NOT dumb! If he was this stupid, the Mandarin would have killed him AGES ago!
The only reply I personally can think of as regards your response and comments X75 is a simple and absolute: ALREADY! Nuff said. You know, I really hate how Marvel comes up with these "great entertainment" (italisized being sarcasm) ideas to justify a story development (as in AvX), specifically when the characters involved have to act waaaaayyyy out of character. That is seriously so retarded!! Come on Marvel, neither Captain America (especially his ridiculous portrayal in all the comics he's been featured in lately) nor Iron Man (at least the one's I know and read about in the past) would act so out of character. Stop letting your writers insult the merit of such well established comic book creation of character...PLEASE! THESE LAST FEW COMICS PUBLISHED LATELY HAVE BEEN JUST RIDICULOUS IN REGARDS CHARACTER TESTAMENT....SERIOUSLY STOP INSULTING COMIC FANS BELOVED CHARACTER...IT'S NOT COOL! - for everyone who feels what I'm saying on this issue
ReplyDeleteI will say this. Stark's answer to fighting another piece of his tech is to plug into it and shut it down. He has done it multiple times. In hindsight it seems like a bad way to go. This situation could have easily happened when Stark shut down Osborn's armor. So, I don't see it as that much out of character. If anything it shows arrogance that he thinks anything he makes he has full control over. Either way it isn't as bad as Cap trying to pull a shield out of the wall.
ReplyDeleteI guess that the problem with a series like this one is that you won't be able to please everybody... The X-Men/Cable fans will be pleased, while the Avengers fans? Not so much.
ReplyDelete"In hindsight it seems like a bad way to go." Agreed, Jermox. Tony is quite arrogant, but I'd still like to think he's smarter than that... But then again, maybe not...
Maybe that is the problem in trying to claim your character is one of the smartest characters in the universe. If you write him doing something stupid it looks out of character. If I have a suit of powered armor ran by some super-computer the last thing I would do is connect it to any piece of hardware that passes by. But, Stark does this constantly. I guess the best you can do is write it off as arrogance.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this'll be a learning experience for Tony... Now, if he does it AGAIN after this, then he's not arrogant, he's an idiot!
ReplyDelete