Time-Travel Challenge: Cable To The Mechano-Sarge

Yikes! I'm late again. Sorry guys, but I was exhausted last night (don't ask). I'll try to get a jump on next week's posts by working ahead this weekend. I really do want to get back to posting in the mornings.

Annnyway, here's my new challenge! My idea is to take a character emblematic of a certain era and redesign them as if they'd been created in some other decade. In this case, I took Mister 90's Excess himself, Cable, and recreated him as a Golden Age hero.



Excerpted from Don Thompson's essay, "OK, Axis, Here We Come!" in "All In Color For A Dime", published in 1970 on Triple-Reverse-Counter-Earth:

The oddest character published by Atlas during World War 2 was the Mechano-Sarge -- a time-traveling amputee with a crude robotic claw in place of his left arm. Born Nathan Summers, the Mechano-Sarge was an infant Londoner orphaned and critically injured in the Blitz. A mysterious, robed figure spirited the child off to Lemuria, an other-dimensional land "apart from the strife that wracks the mortal world." In Lemuria, the physical laws we know did not apply and the air was denser than water. The strange atmosphere worked to heal and toughen the lad's body into "a brawny mountain of a man with muscles like steel cables." His rescuer was a holy man, and along with the other mystics of Lemuria, he trained the orphaned boy to perfect his mind. This resulted in some ill-defined and arbitrary psychic powers that would change with the whims of whichever writer was assigned to the feature that month. Nathan Summers might have stayed in Lemuria forever, but he was a born scrapper with a wild, boisterous personality that left him ill-suited for a life of meditation. The Lemurian holy men outfitted the now-grown Nathan with a mechanical arm and sent him back home. Since time passed more quickly in Lemuria than it did in the mortal plane, he arrived only one month after he'd left it. Once there, he donned an impractically garish military uniform of his own design, christened himself the Mechano-Sarge, and plunged into the chaos of the second World war.

The Mechano-Sarge's adventures were brutal, gory affairs, typical of the comic book fare of that time. In one outing, his power of "Astral Vision" detected an Italian saboteur on the other side of a steel door, so he used his metal claw to punch right through it and crushed the "Italio-Nazi rat's" skull like a tin can. On other occasions, the Mechano-Sarge tore his foes in half, shoved live grenades down their throats, and twisted their broken bodies into the shapes of pretzels. In his most memorable outing, he mentally commanded Mount Fuji to erupt, destroying a munitions factory (and coincidentally killing countless non-combatants).

The Mechano-Sarge's feature disappeared from "Marvel Mystery Comics" exactly one year after the close of World War 2. In this final phase of his career, the London-born hero took up residence in the United States, and fought with markedly less violence and enthusiasm against racketeers and bank robbers. In his last two stories, he was reduced to a supporting character, while the focus was shifted to an obnoxious band of urchins calling themselves "Sarge's Battlin' Orphans."

For the Mechano-Sarge version of Cable, I made his "techno-organic" left arm an old-timey robot claw. I simplified the scarring around his right eye since that nonsense wouldn't have flown back in the 40's. And he's bare-chested because:
A. It shows off the robot arm and the metal plating on his chest better.
B. It worked for Uncle Sam.
C. I love to draw muscley shirtless guys. Hey, look! A nipple!

Although I strive for practicality in most cases, I made the costume's color scheme very bright, like a typical Golden Age hero's. The 40's simplification of the costume -- those artists sometimes had to draw a whole story in the space of a weekend -- is the reason why I didn't put laces on the boots. I wanted to put myself in the frame of mind of a penciler from that period.

Next week: more art! But I haven't decided exactly what yet.