bumping old thread...

Ok, so I'm currently re-reading the Messiah Complex OHC and I do admit I like a lot of it: the story is very cohesive from issue to issue and works in a whole messload of X-characters without them feeling shoehorned in or glossed over. Also, the artwork throughout is really, really strong. Perhaps the coloring is a bit too mark and muddled at times (which seems to be a line-wide problem for Marvel) but these issues collect artists at the top of their game and each chapter looks great.

But there's one major thing that gets me so I can't recommend the book and I zero'ed in on it during my second reading last night. Everything is going pretty fine story-wise, events are building on top of eachother and the mystery is thickening, and then we get to the third to last page of chapter 6 (Uncanny 493). The mansion has just been decimated by sentinels who wolverine and cyclops find out were piloted by people infected with nano-sentinels. All of a sudden out of the blue, Wolverine says "you really think Cable'd go that far?" Wha-wha-whaat? Since when were they talking about Cable? When was Cable even mentioned in this or prior issues? Why would Wolverine immediately pin this on Cable? Cyclops follows up that Cable had access to nano-sentinel samples (big deal), he's a scientist (who isnt in the MU?) and "we have no idea what his agenda is here...we have to assume the worst." WTF? I dont know an ally's agenda this time so I assume he wants to kill us all? Really? And the hilarious part is to underscore this, the writer has wolverine say in the next panel "I guess so." and that ends the debate! "I guess so." = Let's go out and hunt Cable down like a dog...it's not like we have a long history with him and he was recently an x-men member and all...

And this is CYCLOPS saying all of this. CYCLOPS aka Cable's freaking FATHER! He puts a hit out on his son! And all because "he's a capable scientist...we have no idea of his agenda...we have to assume the worst". Cable carries a gun around too...does that mean Cyclops should link him to the Kennedy assassination? I mean, I just recently read through a bunch of late 90s x-men trades (x-men vs apocalypse etc) and they are chock full of cyclops/jean with Cable scenes where they show love and respect and talk a bunch about sending baby nathan to the future and the ramifications etc. Hell, it's Cyclops who sacrificies his life to save Cable at the end of The Twelve...but this is the guy who now, with only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence is going to put a hit out on Nathan? Really?

So this is where the book loses me. It made no sense the first time I read it, and it *really* doesnt make sense this time. I mean, how many hundreds of times has one of the x-men been mind controlled or similarly made to betray the team against their control, and the rest of the x-men recognize it and fight the real culprit instead? But no, this time it's "let's kill Cable" when they don't have any evidence or even motive he had any involvement. They might as well have picked a random team member's name out of a hat and said "wolverine - go kill."