Cable & X-Force Omnibus, Vol. 1 is the #55 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot.
Visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes.
What Is It? This is a shared volume between X-Force (1991) and their leader Cable (1993), whose titles were tightly intertwined in this period from March 1994 to February 1995.
While it’s usually not productive to assume Marvel will group related titles together in this way, they’ve already set the precedent with the forthcoming Deadpool & X-Force Omnibus beginning to collect Cable’s solo series.
Past Ranking: This year is the book’s debut placement in the ballot results.
Creators: Written by Fabian Nicieza (with Glenn Alan Herdling, Scott Lobdell, Larry Hama, and Jeph Loeb III) with pencils by Tony Daniel and inks by Kevin Conrad on X-Force (with Terry Dodson and Paul Pelletier) and army of artists on Cable and the crossover issues.
Probable Contents: Collects X-Force (1991) #32-43 & Annual 3 and Cable (1993) #9-20 along with crossovers into New Warriors #45-46, Excalibur #82, and X-Factor #106, and Wolverine #85.
This is a slim, unsurprising set of contents that cover just a year of storytelling. All of the contents have been previously collected across four volumes (as well as five issues from the Phalanx Covenant oversize hardcover). In fact, it would make a future Volume 2 a little simpler if this volume covered a bit more, but a major direction change in both titles after Age of Apocalypse makes that unlikely.
See the full map in Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 2: 1991 to 2001). Note that Cable #20 is part of the “Legion Quest” crossover, but has already been collected once without the direct crossover issues.
Can you read it right now? Yes! You need to pick up X-Force: Child’s Play, X-Force: Phalanx Covenant, Cable Classic, Volume 2, and Cable Classic, Volume 3. Find out more in the Guide to X-Force and Guide to Cable.
Unfortunately, Marvel Unlimited currently stops just short of this run in its coverage of X-Force (1991) and they only have a handful of the Cable (1993) issues.
The Details:
You could easily subtitle this period of X-Force and Cable “Family Matters,” as the runs of both books are deeply concerned with the connections between long-serving teammates in X-Force and generations of family in Cable.
X-Force begins this period with one of its more entertaining line-ups – Cannonball, Boomer, Richtor, Shatterstar, Warpath, and Siryn – plus frequent co-stars Cable and Domino.
It’s a truly delightful cast of characters, a trio of whom would later become mainstays in Peter David’s X-Factor, which plays out the theme of Richtor and Shatterstar’s unlikely friendship that developed in these issues.
This run begins with a four-issue “Child’s Play” crossover with New Warriors. We tend to have a modern view of crossovers as disconnected plays for increased sales, but that wasn’t necessarily the case with this Fabian Nicieza’s story. [Read more…] about Cable & X-Force Omnibus, Vol. 1 – The #55 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017
New Warriors was an early-90s creation of Marvel, who was witnessing the cresting popularity of New Mutants and realizing they never truly had their own analog to Teen Titans despite having plenty of young heroes to staff such a team. Tom DeFalco, then the writer/editor of Thor, decided it was a hole that needed filling and cobbled together a team to do just that in Thor #411-412 in 1989.
Unfortunately, “assembled to fight crime (but not really ever doing that” and “team as family” combine to make successful reboots a tough prospect. Multiple iterations of New Warriors try the “we stumbled onto a fight” approach and barely live out a year, while an “assembled by Night Thrasher” version lasted for two. The team is probably best known to modern readers for being the cause of Civil War (seriously)! The best return to form was from Christopher Yost in 2014, which found Justice and Speedball in mentor roles across a new team of young heroes that mirrored the original line-up. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch fire and lasted only the requisite year.
I got in from a walk with that toddler to a big surprise – Amazon has listed all of Marvel’s collections for the first two months of 2017! That includes a few huge surprises from the omnibus survey, plus a few other books I’ve been pining for.
A week into this countdown and accompanying annotation and we’ve finally reached the Top 20 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibuses from the 2016 Secret Ballot by Tigereyes.