In the Italian football season 1970-71, Roberto Casone was a midfielder playing in the famous team of AC Milan. I doubt anyone remember this name (even in Italy), but in that year he had become a sort of nightmare for me! In fact, Casone was by far the rarest picture card of the well known Panini album of cards: untraceable, rare, incredibly hard to find, and at the end of the season I had never been able to even see it! I retrieved that card just the following year, when the championship was restarted and the album, of course, had changed. Furthermore, the design of that figure was very original: the Milan player was in a full-length photograph, probably taken at the Meazza Stadium (known, at that time as the San Siro stadium) and the picture showed the snow at the edges of the playing field. The snow... which I had never seen! In my eyes the Cable Retro appears, more or less, as the Casone of the Bowen catalogue: original, impressive, fascinating, one of the beautiful and rarest statues in the field, and for which, in the rare appearances on the international ebay network, you can see requests and offers really out of any logic. The character is quite unrelated to my dated reading of Comics and the Silver Age of Marvel (the first appearance dates back to 1990), but since when I got to know him (thanks to a monothematic volume dedicated to the famous mutant saga Messiah Complex) I was literally enchanted by his magnetic appeal. Sculpted by the Khucharek brothers, the statue was released in 2010 with a very limited edition size (250 samples only), explicitly destined to the American Collector's Club. It maintains, de facto, the same sculpt of the less rare Modern version (800 pieces), but differs from it for clothing, coloring, and, above all, the base. This original mutant of the future (the son of Cyclops, the charismatic leader of the X-Men) is portrayed in a museum pose like a true hunter, triumphantly standing on the battered ruins of a sentinel. The sculpt is nothing short of excellent: the figure, tall and slender, is characterized by a well defined musculature in the few visible parts of the body (arms and legs), while the rest is literally covered with a myriad of details of great effect: military pockets scattered everywhere, holsters, pistols, daggers, high boots with shin guards and padded knee pads and a sturdy metallic shawl equipped with giant bullets on the left, presumably related to automatic guns that the hero holds with an unbelievable aplomb! The attention paid to every detail is incredible. Note, for example, the perfect padding on the boots and the numerous folds that delineate the contours on his knees; the typical silvery coloration characterizing the metallic arm of the hero and the marked swelling of the right biceps, folded to raise the heavy weapon to heaven; the fascinating metallic shades used for the handle of the gun on the abdomen and the dagger at his left ankle; the color fades and the perfect sculpt of pouches at the waist, on the chest and on the quadriceps; the elaborate antenna with headset and microphone at the left ear; the realism of the lapels on the high brown gloves and the extreme naturalness of the hands holding the huge automatic weapons... Weapons that are definitely worth a special mention, both for the oversized dimensions and the top-class level of the sculptural details. The face is made in a workmanlike manner: it is painted with great care and professionality and exhibits the characteristics radial scars on the left eye, a divinely sculpted white hair and the charming yellow right eye that gives the whole face an intriguing appeal. Nevertheless, the feature that in this Retro version immediately stands out is no doubt the base. The head of the sentinel is designed in a superb way and exhibits many breathtaking details. A big hole on the left side and a wide open mouth emphasize all the internal gears of the android, while the silvery hue, which numerous scratches are realized with, shows the real metallic nature of the subject, hidden by the rose-colored semblance of a human face. Even the shape of the deep scratches are studied carefully: the three tracks, in fact, scattered everywhere suggest a clash from the powerful adamantium claws of Wolverine, while the expressiveness that the Khucharek brothers were able to give this android is really awesome, with empty and switched-off eyes that define the sense of defeat at best. The overall quality of this piece (in my opinion) is among the highest in absolute of the entire Bowen production: this, however, does not would be sufficient to explain the stratospheric quotations that distinguish every appearance of the Cable Retro on the market and that more and more often exceed thousands dollars. The reasons for that are probably others, and are related to the instinctive and insane propensity of any collector in finding and owning the rarest and hard to find pieces, those Casone able to give value and shine to your collection. In my case, just thanks to a fortuitous coincidence, I was able to put into collection this true grail among Bowen pieces at a reasonable price and, as a collector, I can guarantee to all of you that having it is really a great satisfaction!