Sabretooth #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
SABRETOOTH vol 4 #1
“The Adversary”
by Victor LaValle, Leonard Kirk & Rain Beredo
SABRETOOTH. If you’re wondering, volume 1 was the 1993 miniseries, vol 2 was a 1998 one-shot, and vol 3 was a 2004 miniseries. This is another five-issue miniseries.
COVER / PAGE 1. A grinning Sabretooth in hell, with Krakoa visible behind him.
PAGES 2-5. Sabretooth is consigned to the Pit.
This is a reprise of Sabretooth’s “trial” and banishment at the hands of the Quiet Council in House of X #6. Sabretooth’s narration is new and replaces most of the spoken dialogue. But what remains is taken directly from that issue, except for Sabretooth’s final line: “No prison can hold me. I’ll be free before you even notice.” In fact, that issue came out in October 2019 and we haven’t seen him since.
Xavier’s line “It’s distasteful, I know…” originally continued “…this business of running a nation.” The emphasis here is much more on the personal treatment of Sabretooth.
We do get Sabretooth’s almost universally contemptuous views on the members of the Quiet Council. He has a point about Magneto’s hypocrisy, and Apocalypse is the only one he actually respects. He sees the three outright heroes as children, and dismisses Emma and Sebastian as costume drama (which is more a reflection of his style than hers).
If “the Rainbow Gang” refers to anything specific, I don’t recognise it.
Sabretooth refers to Mystique as “Leni”; Leni Zauber was the cover identity she was using during the brief relationship that led to their son Graydon Creed.
PAGE 6. Data page. Someone reflects on what the Pit actually is. The obvious candidate is Sabretooth, but it doesn’t really sound like his voice. Could it be Cypher (imagining how he would answer the questions in italics)?
The wildlife factoids are accurate.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits. The small print reads “Destiny of X”, “The Pit” and “Cast into Exile on X”.
The recap covers Sabretooth’s involvement in the plot of House of X. I’m not sure it was previously stated that he had been resurrected on Krakoa, but it was strongly implied, since he was one of the many characters to get killed on panel during Matthew Rosenberg’s run – specifically, he was beheaded by Magik in War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men #3.
PAGES 8-13. Creed imagines himself killing the X-Men who have come to recapture him.
Like apparently almost all of this issue, this scene is in Sabretooth’s mind, so there’s not much continuity to be explained here. Much like Wolverine, Sabretooth imagines himself retreating to the wilderness to hunt. Unlike Wolverine, he imagines himself sadistically killing the X-Men.
PAGES 14-18. Cypher strikes a deal with Sabretooth.
We established during Inferno that Cypher and Warlock know much, much more about what’s going on on Krakoa than previously thought; we’ve also seen in X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #12 that they’re prepared to ignore directions to put people in the Pit. Clearly, it’s Krakoa (rather than the Quiet Council) who feel that this punishment is too harsh; that’s consistent with Krakoa’s refusal to countenance putting Nature Girl in the Pit for murder. Note that Cypher insists that “nothing like this will happen to another mutant again” – he implies this is Professor X’s decision, but it may well be Krakoa’s. It may also mean that Krakoa’s attitude to Nature Girl wasn’t based on her own actions, but on a general objection to the Pit. And it begs the question of what happened to the Toad after he was taken into the Pit in X-Men: Trial of Magneto #5.
Plainly, even before Sabretooth accepts Krakoa’s deal, he is not experiencing what Xavier told him to expect – “alive but immobile… aware but unable to act upon it”.
PAGE 19. Another data page about the nature of prisons – and again, this doesn’t sound much like Sabretooth’s voice.
PAGE 20. Sabretooth indulges his dreams of slaughter.
Obviously, the first victim is Professor X. Next is Iron Fist, billed as an “old acquaintance” because Sabretooth started off as an Iron Fist villain. And the next panel is a bunch of wolf-type rivals – Feral is clearly recognisable, and that looks like Wolfsbane near the front. Wild Child is on the right, with an echo of the collar worn by his Age of Apocalypse version. The others might be Wolf Cub or some of the wolf-themed Dominant Species mutants from Chuck Austen’s Uncanny X-Men.
PAGE 21. Sabretooth reflects.
Imagining killing people gets boring after a while. Might this experience actually force him to… do something else?
PAGES 22-23. The Feral Council meet.
This is Creed’s parody of the Quiet Council, obviously. Sabretooth appears here in his traditional costume, in a suit which he sometimes wore in the 90s, and as the bloody child from some origin flashbacks. Note that there’s a fourth seat which remains unoccupied.
The multiple Sabretooths decide that the solution to being bored with murder is to increase the scale.
PAGE 24. Sabretooth as “Creed the King”.
This is a Conan parody, obviously.
PAGE 25. Sabretooth as the Starjammers. All of them.
Sabretooth is playing the roles of Corsair, Hepzibah, LIlandra, Ch’od (with Cr’reee), Raza and Binary – it’s a late 80s Starjammers line-up, basically. In Sabretooth’s version, they bring down entire civilisations. Note that “Corsair” is wearing the same “Mark of Creed” that was used as a brand by “Creed the King” on the last page.
The races Sabretooth mentions are all established in the Marvel Universe. The Acanti are space whales who were enslaved by the Brood; the Shi’ar are longtime X-Men fixtures; the Centaurians’ best known citizen is Yondu from the original Guardians of the Galaxy; and the Kymellians are the horse-like aliens who feature in Power Pack’s origin story.
PAGES 26-27. Sabretooth starts to manifest on Krakoa.
Krakoa seems well aware of what’s happening, and not to have an issue with it. That’s worrying.
The blue violinist on page 27 is Rhapsody, a minor character from Peter David’s X-Factor run. The barman in the Green Lagoon is the Blob, as usual. The guy being threatened by Corsair seems to be Mole, a minor Morlock from the Simonsons’ X-Factor run who also appears in their issue of X-Men Legends this week. He was killed by Sabretooth in X-Factor vol 1 #53.
PAGES 28-32. Some outsiders arrive in Sabretooth’s Hell.
Probably? Or maybe they’re illusions. We’ll find out next time. Anyway, Sabretooth is blissfully torturing an imaginary Quiet Council when this unusual selection of characters shows up on his doorstep:
- Nekra Sinclair is a mutant, but I’m not sure she’s ever appeared in the X-books before. She gets more powerful when she has violent and hateful emotions. So she should be at home here. She debuted in Shanna the She-Devil #5 back in 1973 but she’s been all over the Marvel Universe. Basically she’s a kind of cult leader. She has a weird high concept back story that hasn’t really been a factor since the 1970s, so we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. (Her origin story can be found in Daredevil #110, which is on Unlimited, but it’s the sort of thing that will have you wonder what on earth they were thinking even by the standards of 1974. Suffice to say it’s meant to be making a statement about race, and it involves the Mandrill.)
- Madison Jeffries was a member of Alpha Flight and X-Club. His control over machinery doesn’t seem like it’d do him much good down here.
- Oya was a member of Generation Hope, and later a regular in Wolverine and the X-Men and All-New X-Men (the version with the time-travelling Silver Age X-Men on a road trip).
- Melter is a character from Dark Reign: Young Avengers, who’s appeared sporadically since in minor roles. He was the leader of the Young Masters, but seemed not to be too bad a guy. He appears to have killed people, including his parents, through a lack of control over his powers.
- Third Eye seems to be new.
PAGE 33. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: NEW FISH.
“He became an Avenger for five seconds”
That’s one of the many things that makes it hard to reread that Rage of Ultron graphic novel. It’s from such a specific and brief point in continuity, which distracts hard from the story being told.
Rage of Ultron. That’s a name I haven’t heard in… Well, seven years.
Huh. I guess Pymtron has stuck around for seven years at this point, hasn’t he?
Huh. I guess Pymtron has stuck around for seven years at this point, hasn’t he?
Albeit because the new status quo for both characters makes it harder to use them in stories.
Next someone wants to use Ultron or Pym, it’ll be a story about the merger being undone.
The Axis inversions have the same problem. Aside from a couple of really good comedy miniseries with inverted Carnage and Hobgoblin, what of value emerged from it? A mediocre and largely ignored Iron Man miniseries?
Sabretooth and Havok are the only characters whose inversions were really story points afterwards, and in Havok’s case it’s been one more in a long line of “Havok’s been corrupted” storylines.
More broadly, it’s hard to identify a book that launched with more hype and was pushed to the margins and forgotten more than Remender’s Uncanny Avengers.
Didn’t Hank Pym come back and then sort of die in Duggan’s Infinity Wars?
Didn’t Hank Pym come back and then sort of die in Duggan’s Infinity Wars?
I dunno.
However, according to the Marvel Database, Dan Slott’s Iron Man run very strongly suggested that Pym died when Ultron Pynm was created, and it was just Ultron in a Hank Pym meat suit, deluding itself about a supposed “fusion” the whole time.
Apparently the story involves Ultron creating some other fusions, which are then revealed to just be dead people merged with sentient robots that think they ave fused with humans. Ultron is then terrified into surrender to avoid being “un-fused’ and finding out the same is true of its “Ultron Pym” iteration.
Uncanny Avengers also put it out there that Pym is in fact dead. Ultron even knows it at some level, but won’t admit it (until being tricked into doing so). Personally I like that idea, but then I was never a fan of Ultron.
One of the few times I cared about Sabretooth was in that post-Axis era when he was trying to do good and try to find ways to try and prevent his evil side from causing too much harm as he could feel it re-emerging, it was a much more interesting and intelligent character than evil Victor tends to be allowed to be.
So this is probably all a big thing so that Krakoa gets to see that it’s okay that Sabretooth gets punished because Marvel won’t allow the character to change and presumably that was him watching the Feral Council as the cat at the top of the stairs. No matter how much his violent impulses are indulged all that needs to happen is some small alteration in circumstances and he’s happy to start back up again.
When a character is defined entirely as a sadistic psychopath, just about the only ways to tell a story where they’re the protagonist are “struggling to change,” “forced to change,” or “conflict with a more powerful psychopath.”
Speaking of Gorgon, it occurs to me that the Quiet Council has an alternate option to the Pit — executing an offending mutant in Otherworld and bringing them back scrambled or wiped or whatever.