As soon as you throw Cable into the mix, everything gets a lot more confused. Especially because that particular continuity headache is intrinsically linked with yet another, who is definitely going to be cropping up in the X-Men cinematic universe ASAFP. He appeared during the post-credits sequence of Days Of Future Past, raising pyramids whilst his four horsemen looked on, and his name's in the title of the final part of the First Class trilogy: Apocalypse. He was the principal villain in the nineties TV series but in the comic books En Sabah Nur (the first one, because he's the first mutant, see?) is mainly known for one particular classic storyline. And it's yet another one that saw the creation and ultimate undoing of a dark, dystopian possible future for the merry band of mutants, not unlike the one narrowly avoided in the last film... So, if Fox aren't going to go in a radically new direction with the character and instead stay true to the source material, there's every chance that we'll soon be seeing the Age Of Apocalypse on the big screen. In the comic book storyline this alternate future was created when Legion, the secret schizophrenic son of Charles Xavier, travelled back in time to kill Magneto before he could do any of that bad stuff with the Brotherhood Of Mutants. Wouldn't you know it, though, he mucked it up and ended up offing his dad instead, starting a cataclysmic chain of events which ended up with the villainous Apocalypse presiding over a world where all of humanity had been wiped out and most of the X-Men along with them. So either there is going to be a clean slate, or else the waters are going to get all the more muddied with different timelines, characters escaping from said timelines (like Cable), and other such nonsense. Fun!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
