Time Travel In Comics: Cable

Over the last year and a half one of my favorite comic books has been Cable (written by Duane Swierczynski) and the storyline has been very much centered around time travel.

To give a quick background, there was a mutant baby born who is supposed to be the hope for mutant kind – and Cable has been put in charge of protecting her...

Now Bishop (who comes from the future) recognizes that the baby girl as the mutant who will ultimately be responsible for the deaths of millions and the fact that in his time, mutants were kept in concentration camps. Therefore, he wants nothing more than to kill the baby – which would change his timeline and prevent himself and his family from suffering the way they will in the future/ the way they did in his past.

So in order to protect the baby, Cable jumps into the future with her. Bishop gets a hold of a time-traveling device and follows them. Cable’s time traveling device gets broken in a battle and will now only allow him to go forward.

So since Bishop is having a hard time finding Cable and the baby, he starts to make a trap for them. He goes forward in time and destroys certain places – for example, he destroys Australia, therefore he knows that Cable and the baby won’t be in Australia after that. And by destroying enough places, he can eventually narrow down where they actually can go in the future. And so the chase goes on from there with Cable and the baby jumping further and further into the future – with Bishop right behind them.

It’s great because we the readers are left trying to decide if Bishop is the bad guy or not. Because he IS trying to kill a baby, which of course is bad – but knowing what he knows the baby will eventually become and how she will change the world for the worse, you start to feel he is pretty justified in doing it.

So I find myself not knowing who to route for and just waiting for each next issue to come out to find out what is going to happen next.

I was not really a fan of either Cable or Bishop, but after reading this story, they are now both two of my favorite characters in the Marvel Universe. I highly recommend you buy this story. The first hardcover collection, Cable, Vol. 1: Messiah War is out right now, the second hardcover collection Cable Vol. 2: Waiting for The End of the World comes out in June, and the third Cable Vol. 3: X-Men, Cable, & Bishop comes out in July.