The New Mutants#87

The New Mutants #87

Mar 1990 · Marvel

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★ 1st appearance — Cable

About this Issue

New Mutants #87 is the issue that irrevocably changed the trajectory of Marvel's X-line at the dawn of the 1990s: it delivered the first full appearance of Cable, a heavily armed, cybernetically augmented soldier from the future who arrived on the page with enough visual force to render the book's existing identity almost unrecognizable within a year. Cable's entrance as an unsanctioned street-level operator hunting the Mutant Liberation Front was a deliberate pivot away from the school-for-mutants framework Chris Claremont had sustained for nearly a decade, and the character's popularity was so immediate that it collapsed the New Mutants title entirely into X-Force by issue #100—spawning one of the defining commercial phenomena of the speculator era. Beyond the single character, the issue also introduced the full MLF roster and their masked figurehead Stryfe, seeding a cluster of antagonists who would anchor X-Men crossover stories well into the mid-1990s. The cover itself became one of the most homaged images of the Copper Age, cementing the visual grammar of the '90s action hero in superhero comics.

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History

Editor Bob Harras drove the creation of Cable out of a practical editorial need: the New Mutants' sales had sagged for years, and Harras wanted a commanding new mentor figure who would stand in stark contrast to the idealistic Professor X. Writer Louise Simonson agreed a military leader made narrative sense, and Harras tasked the book's new artist, Rob Liefeld—who had only begun penciling with issue #86—to design the character from scratch; Liefeld's initial sketches drew deliberately on the muscular, scarred physicality of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator and Predator roles, and Harras is also credited with suggesting the character's distinctive bionic eye. Crucially, Cable was conceived as a wholly independent creation: neither Liefeld nor Simonson initially connected him to Nathan Summers, the infant son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor introduced years earlier by Claremont in Uncanny X-Men #201—that retroactive link was canonized by later writers in the early 1990s. The cover Liefeld penciled (with Todd McFarlane inking) has been widely identified as closely referencing the composition of Gil Kane and Dan Adkins's cover to Avengers #145 (1976), a genealogy the Marvel Database, multiple collector forums, and Bleeding Cool have all documented.

Trivia · 8 facts

First full appearance of Cable (Nathan Christopher Summers), co-created by writer Louise Simonson and artist/co-plotter Rob Liefeld; Marvel officially credits both as co-creators.
Cable's preceding appearance is limited to a single-panel, silhouetted 'next issue' teaser in New Mutants #86 (February 1990)—he has no in-story role in that issue.
Also contains the first full team appearance of the Mutant Liberation Front, including Stryfe, Wildside, Reaper, Forearm, Thumbelina, Strobe, Tempo, and Zero.
Interior story is titled 'A Show of Power!' (part 2 of 4); script by Louise Simonson, pencils by Rob Liefeld, inks by Bob Wiacek, colors by Mike Rockwitz, letters by Joe Rosen, edited by Bob Harras.
The cover was penciled by Rob Liefeld and inked by Todd McFarlane—an unusually high-profile pairing—and is widely recognized as an homage to (or close reference of) Gil Kane and Dan Adkins's cover to Avengers #145 (March 1976).
Danielle Moonstar (Mirage) departs the main cast in this issue, electing to remain in Asgard; Rusty Collins and Skids also leave the New Mutants, defecting to the MLF.
A second printing was issued shortly after the first; it uses the same cover art but with a distinctive gold metallic background instead of the original color scheme.
The story has been reprinted multiple times, including in Marvel Premiere Classic #55 (X-Force: Cable & the New Mutants, 2010), True Believers: Cable and New Mutants #1 (June 2017), and New Mutants Epic Collection Vol. 7: Cable (2020).