[Continuing my look at Joe Casey's run on Cable. New posts Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.]
The penultimate chapter of "The Nemesis Contract" reveals the motivations behind SHIELD's capture of Cable: a covert group within the agency wants to harvest Cable's techno-organic materials to integrate with some robots they built. Seems simple enough.
This issue is unique in its lack of Cable, Casey preferring to focus on those around him as he is unconscious and locked up on the SHIELD helicarrier. Irene uses her journalistic skills to uncover what happened to him, while Jack Truman discovers the real reason behind his mission and does his best to fuck with Quartermain and Dr. Belgrade. As does GW Bridge, who is approached by Irene wanting information.
A key part of this issue is that Casey gets rid of Cable's techno-organic subplot here by having Belgrade remove most of it while Blaquesmith uses telepathy to contact Cable and reveal that Cable still has his telekinesis, it's just been inactive because of the shock of losing his telepathy.
In the end, Truman frees Cable in the hopes of getting a rematch where Cable is at his best.
Storytelling-wise, Casey and Ladronn use the same layout twice for conveying information through SHIELD recordings. 24-panel pages (four across, six down) where the first and third panels on each tier are just text, while the second and fourth panels on each tier are just images. This is typical of Casey's work where he explores the relationship between words and pictures in comics, often separating them or using them in different ways to comment on one another.
Ladronn's art remains consistent with previous issues, so not much to add there.
All in all, this issue follows the previous two pretty faithfully in most ways and doesn't offer much in terms of discussion.
Next time, I'll conclude my look at "The Nemesis Contract."
Phoenix #5 annotations
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