This is the only issue of Cable that I have in my collection.
Cable #34 (August 1996) by Jeph Loeb & Ian Churchill
Bought only because it was crossing over with an issue of Incredible Hulk, which I’d been reading since 1983. Not because I had any particular interest in the X-Men “Onslaught” storyline. Not because I had any particular need to see Hulk fight Cable. But just because “hmmmm…issue #444 of Hulk is going to feature the second half of the story, so I guess I’d better buy Cable #34 to get the first half.”
And that’s how crossovers like this are supposed to work. Get the fan who only reads this title to try out that title, and maybe enough a small portion of those who did buy that title will like what they read, and keep buying it.
As you may have surmised from the title of this post, I didn’t keep buying Cable, though the comic was okay enough, I guess. It promised Cable fighting the Hulk, and it delivered Cable fighting the Hulk. In fact, it delivered more than that, since the X-Men’s Storm popped up, too. And it did have the nice touch of Cable fighting some of the different incarnations of the Hulk (“The Professor,” Gray Hulk, Savage Hulk) which was fun. There were also a couple of pages setting up a fight with X-Men villain Apocalypse in a future Cable issue, which didn’t have anything to do with the Hulk and Cable beating the tar out of each other, so, eh, didn’t care.
But the “first half of the story” I bought this for was, essentially, Hulk going after Cable on the behalf of this Onslaught cat. I think I probably could have gone into the Hulk half of this story cold, and understood that the first half of the story involved a fight of some kind. Frankly, you can go into most superhero comics cold and assume a fight lead into whatever it is you’re reading.
Anyway, I don’t tend to do that sort of thing — buying an issue of a comic I don’t normally read for a crossover — any more. I barely even did it then, in the mid ’90s. In fact, if it was any character other than the Hulk, I may have passed. If I miss a chapter of a story along the way…well, heck, I’ve read enough comics, I can probably fill in the blanks for myself. (“Hmmm…bet they fought in that chapter I missed.”)
There are one-off crossovers that I’d meant to buy but never got around to picking up. Like that one issue of Micronauts that follows up on a story in Fantastic Four. And I’m not saying I’d never follow a character into another title for a crossover story…I’d follow Swamp Thing to just about any comic, not that it’s, you know, been much of a problem lately. (And yes, I know about his appearances in that new Ambush Bug mini.)
So, in conclusion: Cable #34 – completely unnecessary to following the ongoing Hulk storylines of the time, but it was a fun all-fight issue and sometimes that’s enough. Didn’t need it, but I’m glad I own it.