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rallamajoop(Because yes, Marvel are apparently doing that already, and they've decided Jeph Loeb is the guy to do it, and for all that I hate to contribute to the general aura of pessimism in the western comic fan community over every new development that gets announced, with the state of Loeb's work in recent years it is beyond me to picture this ending well.)
Ahem.
Well, it goes without saying that it would be a Cable & Deadpool series, doesn't it? Only that's not something that would be so easy to justify now, looking at the direction either character has been taken in since their big break-up. Not impossible, but short of ignoring everything that's been done with either of them since their break-up (tempting, but not exactly clever) you'd have to think carefully about what direction you'd approach it from in order to make it work.
Here's how my version would go.
Issue one, as far as the rest of the world knows, Cable's still dead, so we open on Deadpool, who's out doing his well-compensated establishment provocateur thing (or less well-compsensated, as the case may be) in his usual Deadpool fashion. The fine details of the job I will not pretend to have all figured out – this is scene-setting stuff, the writer's chance to establish the tone of the book and helpfully 'remind' the audience of any crucial facts about the leads' status quo that they may have 'forgotten' and which couldn't be covered on the recap page before the A-plot gets itself going. What you need to know is that this is a job that will put Deadpool on a collision course with one of those many mystical, magical (evil!) societies that so plague the Marvelverse, in the midst of a plot to use those mystical, magical (EVIL) powers to perform that most forbidden of magics – the one that starts with 'r' and ends with '-esurrection of the dead'. (And – since this is a Deadpool story, it will also involve, say, a worker's union for Employees of Mystical Cults, a loud debate about the value of high-visibility clothing for use in low-visibility rituals, and some evil clowns or something.) Whether Deadpool is there to help them, hinder them, or merely crash into one of their meetings by mistake is less than crucial when it's safe to say that whichever he starts with is almost guaranteed to differ from whichever he's doing by the end. What matters is that it will take the audience no particular effort to guess where the plot might be going with all this.
This is not how we get Cable back.
The truth is, the ritual was all one big fake-out. It doesn't work, or it does, but the target is someone completely different – probably some minor Marvel villain best characterised by being obscure, confused, and largely non-threatening. Deadpool cleans up the mess – or, more likely, spreads it around a bit in smaller pieces – and goes home, bitching loudly about the lousy standards for morally ambiguous cultists these days, the deplorable lack of scantily clad priestesses, etc.
And this is where someone in the next room of his apartment answers him back, then continues to banter with Wade briefly on topics of, eg, the mail, what's on TV tonight, who's turn it is to take out the garbage, etc. On the very last page, we reveal the other side of this conversation to be none other than Cable himself – alive, well, and apparently sleeping on Deadpool's couch. To set the scene a little better, let's say he's reading the paper and maybe looks like he hasn't shaved in a few days. There we would see fit to end the issue.
The fine details of second issue aren't quite so important at this juncture, but suffice to say that it will be clarified right off the bat that oh no, Wade has not just come home to Opposite Planet, and yes, they've been living under those arrangements for some time.
So that's our set up. Exactly how and why Cable's alive again and exactly what he's doing hiding out in Deadpool's apartment and sleeping on his couch are our enduring mysteries to be developed over the next dozen issues or so. Is that really him at all, or some impostor who's tricked Deadpool into buying his act? Is he even really there at all, or just a particularly convincing hallucination Deadpool's having? If he is an impostor, then who? And what on earth could be his motivation for all this? And if he is the real thing, why would he be keeping such a low profile? Is this really just a bit of a relaxing time out for him, or do the motivations of Mr Think-Ten-Steps-Ahead run somewhat deeper than that? For that matter, how much does Deadpool know? Did he bother to ask any of those questions when Cable showed up, or did he just take it as given that hey, sometimes old dead friends show up again needing a place to crash for the weekend, no big deal, right?
That's a lot of different angles to play with, and you'd want to start eliminating some of the more unlikely ones as early as issues 2 or 3, but the glory of starting with a mystery this open-ended is that for a very long time every answer you get will only raise more questions. They're not questions you'd want to answer too quickly – this is a concept of the myth-arc variety, the kind you'd develop in fragments in the background of a primarily episodic series (that does, of course, get gradually less episodic as you build towards the big reveal). It works as a Deadpool story because Deadpool is one of few characters genre-savy enough that it would be completely plausible for him to treat the return of a dead friend as no particular surprise. It works as a Cable story because even when we trust he's got our best interests at heart, Cable has never been the kind of character to tell the whole truth about what he's really up to, even to his closest allies. Obviously it would be the spiritual successor to Cable & Deadpool, but not one that should lean too heavily on plot points from the original, or even on those from either character's more recent solo work. Things like Providence and Hope will have to come up sooner or later, but they can be explained as you go.
(I do want to take a moment here to recognise that some of you have doubtless read that fic I wrote where a resurrected Cable ends up in much the same situation, because I should point out here that this is not that story. Obviously these are ideas that grew out of the same general scenario, but this version would have gotten them to that point by slightly different means, and even if Cable might cite similar reasons for what he's doing, you probably shouldn't believe them.)
For better or worse, this is one of those ideas that would really only work as a part of an ongoing story in a big, shared universe – Cable's return is eventually going to matter to a whole lot of people who aren't Deadpool, and whatever they're up to in their own titles can't be ignored. Or maybe that's just my excuse for how much this idea starts and ends at being a concept. If, thus far, I have given anyone the impression that I actually know half the answers to all those mysteries, then my bullshitting skills may be better than I give myself credit for. What I can tell you for sure is that there is nothing about the idea of Nate and Wade being forced to cohabitate that would not be awesome fun, and I'm not just talking about the inevitable debates over toilet seat: up or down? who gets the remote, or what happens when Cable makes the mistake of rearranging Deadpool's Golden Girls DVD collection. You'd be limited in how much you could do with Cable initially, while you've still got the question of whether Cable's just a very convincing hallucination on the table – you wouldn't want to show those cards too early by letting Cable interact with anyone else, or even get up to much while Deadpool's off screen – but that's one mystery that will be best put to rest relatively quickly, leaving you free to run the scenarios with Cable answering Deadpool's phone (“Hello, this is not Deadpool's answer machine. Deadpool's answer machine is presently occupied being a small smear of black residue that refuses to come out of the carpet. This is Deadpool's long-suffering roommate. Would you like to leave a message?”), being very polite to Wade's pleasant, elderly neighbour (and who maaaaaay or may not turn out to be a supervillain >.>) – and, eventually, when he's played shut-in long enough, making his dramatic entrance back onto the battlefield when we least expect it. But until then, we'll have plenty of time for the in-jokes about their old-married-couple status to reach the stage where neither even realise they're making them anymore, while they both pretend not to notice how they're picking up each other's habits.
So there endeth my pitch. Now I just have to wait for Marvel to call me, right? Right?
Ahem.
Well, it goes without saying that it would be a Cable & Deadpool series, doesn't it? Only that's not something that would be so easy to justify now, looking at the direction either character has been taken in since their big break-up. Not impossible, but short of ignoring everything that's been done with either of them since their break-up (tempting, but not exactly clever) you'd have to think carefully about what direction you'd approach it from in order to make it work.
Here's how my version would go.
Issue one, as far as the rest of the world knows, Cable's still dead, so we open on Deadpool, who's out doing his well-compensated establishment provocateur thing (or less well-compsensated, as the case may be) in his usual Deadpool fashion. The fine details of the job I will not pretend to have all figured out – this is scene-setting stuff, the writer's chance to establish the tone of the book and helpfully 'remind' the audience of any crucial facts about the leads' status quo that they may have 'forgotten' and which couldn't be covered on the recap page before the A-plot gets itself going. What you need to know is that this is a job that will put Deadpool on a collision course with one of those many mystical, magical (evil!) societies that so plague the Marvelverse, in the midst of a plot to use those mystical, magical (EVIL) powers to perform that most forbidden of magics – the one that starts with 'r' and ends with '-esurrection of the dead'. (And – since this is a Deadpool story, it will also involve, say, a worker's union for Employees of Mystical Cults, a loud debate about the value of high-visibility clothing for use in low-visibility rituals, and some evil clowns or something.) Whether Deadpool is there to help them, hinder them, or merely crash into one of their meetings by mistake is less than crucial when it's safe to say that whichever he starts with is almost guaranteed to differ from whichever he's doing by the end. What matters is that it will take the audience no particular effort to guess where the plot might be going with all this.
This is not how we get Cable back.
The truth is, the ritual was all one big fake-out. It doesn't work, or it does, but the target is someone completely different – probably some minor Marvel villain best characterised by being obscure, confused, and largely non-threatening. Deadpool cleans up the mess – or, more likely, spreads it around a bit in smaller pieces – and goes home, bitching loudly about the lousy standards for morally ambiguous cultists these days, the deplorable lack of scantily clad priestesses, etc.
And this is where someone in the next room of his apartment answers him back, then continues to banter with Wade briefly on topics of, eg, the mail, what's on TV tonight, who's turn it is to take out the garbage, etc. On the very last page, we reveal the other side of this conversation to be none other than Cable himself – alive, well, and apparently sleeping on Deadpool's couch. To set the scene a little better, let's say he's reading the paper and maybe looks like he hasn't shaved in a few days. There we would see fit to end the issue.
The fine details of second issue aren't quite so important at this juncture, but suffice to say that it will be clarified right off the bat that oh no, Wade has not just come home to Opposite Planet, and yes, they've been living under those arrangements for some time.
So that's our set up. Exactly how and why Cable's alive again and exactly what he's doing hiding out in Deadpool's apartment and sleeping on his couch are our enduring mysteries to be developed over the next dozen issues or so. Is that really him at all, or some impostor who's tricked Deadpool into buying his act? Is he even really there at all, or just a particularly convincing hallucination Deadpool's having? If he is an impostor, then who? And what on earth could be his motivation for all this? And if he is the real thing, why would he be keeping such a low profile? Is this really just a bit of a relaxing time out for him, or do the motivations of Mr Think-Ten-Steps-Ahead run somewhat deeper than that? For that matter, how much does Deadpool know? Did he bother to ask any of those questions when Cable showed up, or did he just take it as given that hey, sometimes old dead friends show up again needing a place to crash for the weekend, no big deal, right?
That's a lot of different angles to play with, and you'd want to start eliminating some of the more unlikely ones as early as issues 2 or 3, but the glory of starting with a mystery this open-ended is that for a very long time every answer you get will only raise more questions. They're not questions you'd want to answer too quickly – this is a concept of the myth-arc variety, the kind you'd develop in fragments in the background of a primarily episodic series (that does, of course, get gradually less episodic as you build towards the big reveal). It works as a Deadpool story because Deadpool is one of few characters genre-savy enough that it would be completely plausible for him to treat the return of a dead friend as no particular surprise. It works as a Cable story because even when we trust he's got our best interests at heart, Cable has never been the kind of character to tell the whole truth about what he's really up to, even to his closest allies. Obviously it would be the spiritual successor to Cable & Deadpool, but not one that should lean too heavily on plot points from the original, or even on those from either character's more recent solo work. Things like Providence and Hope will have to come up sooner or later, but they can be explained as you go.
(I do want to take a moment here to recognise that some of you have doubtless read that fic I wrote where a resurrected Cable ends up in much the same situation, because I should point out here that this is not that story. Obviously these are ideas that grew out of the same general scenario, but this version would have gotten them to that point by slightly different means, and even if Cable might cite similar reasons for what he's doing, you probably shouldn't believe them.)
For better or worse, this is one of those ideas that would really only work as a part of an ongoing story in a big, shared universe – Cable's return is eventually going to matter to a whole lot of people who aren't Deadpool, and whatever they're up to in their own titles can't be ignored. Or maybe that's just my excuse for how much this idea starts and ends at being a concept. If, thus far, I have given anyone the impression that I actually know half the answers to all those mysteries, then my bullshitting skills may be better than I give myself credit for. What I can tell you for sure is that there is nothing about the idea of Nate and Wade being forced to cohabitate that would not be awesome fun, and I'm not just talking about the inevitable debates over toilet seat: up or down? who gets the remote, or what happens when Cable makes the mistake of rearranging Deadpool's Golden Girls DVD collection. You'd be limited in how much you could do with Cable initially, while you've still got the question of whether Cable's just a very convincing hallucination on the table – you wouldn't want to show those cards too early by letting Cable interact with anyone else, or even get up to much while Deadpool's off screen – but that's one mystery that will be best put to rest relatively quickly, leaving you free to run the scenarios with Cable answering Deadpool's phone (“Hello, this is not Deadpool's answer machine. Deadpool's answer machine is presently occupied being a small smear of black residue that refuses to come out of the carpet. This is Deadpool's long-suffering roommate. Would you like to leave a message?”), being very polite to Wade's pleasant, elderly neighbour (and who maaaaaay or may not turn out to be a supervillain >.>) – and, eventually, when he's played shut-in long enough, making his dramatic entrance back onto the battlefield when we least expect it. But until then, we'll have plenty of time for the in-jokes about their old-married-couple status to reach the stage where neither even realise they're making them anymore, while they both pretend not to notice how they're picking up each other's habits.
So there endeth my pitch. Now I just have to wait for Marvel to call me, right? Right?