As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

SABRETOOTH & THE EXILES #2
“Chimera Protocols”
Writer: Victor LaValle
Artist: Leonard Kirk
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1. Sabretooth, Nekra, Toad and Oya, with Sabretooth striking a leaderly pose, all in a rather rickety dinghy compared to the vessel in the story itself.

PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute page.

PAGES 3-5. Nekra and Sabretooth fight.

When we left off, Barrington and the Creation had just abducted Orphan-Maker, and Sabretooth had shown up to offer the team a ride. It’s not directly explained why Nekra has attacked Sabretooth, but the recap page indicates that she’s mainly just taking her revenge for him abandoning the group at the end of the Sabretooth miniseries. At any rate, her attention quickly shifts to the fact that Sabretooth isn’t healing in the way that he ought to.

Toad, being a career lackey, wants direction. Melter, being relatively immature, is just enjoying the fight. Nanny couldn’t care less about anything other than Peter (though in fairness, she has a point, because there’s an immediate crisis to deal with).

Oya doesn’t like the violence but also wants to know why they aren’t just using the seed that Cypher gave them in Sabretooth #5. In that issue, Cypher simply told them to “track down Sabretooth and drop this in the soil on which he stands.” Nekra accused Cypher of “sending us to assassinate him”. Cypher denied that, but added “He’ll wish that’s all it did.” Consistent with her history as a revolutionary, Nekra is very sceptical about all this, and (quite rightly) views Krakoa as the state, not as the underdogs. It’s not immediately clear why she says that they can’t rely on resurrection, but she may be assuming that the Krakoans wouldn’t resurrect someone who had fled the state. That’s doubtful, but it’s at least reasonable for her to figure that a prison-breaker wouldn’t be rushed to the top of the resurrection queue.

Third Eye is quietly exasperated by the people he’s expected to work with, while Madison Jeffries is broadly dismissive of them as well – note though that he refers to mutants as “humanity”.

PAGE 6. Recap and credits.

PAGE 7. Data page. This quote is a version of the Hippocratic Oath, attributed to Thomas Inman (1820-1876). Inman was a surgeon in Liverpool, but he also wrote extensively on religious symbolism.

PAGES 8-9. Barrington reports to GC.

GC‘s identity was uncovered by Sabretooth at the end of the last issue, but he hasn’t shared it with us yet. Given his reaction, the theory that it’s his son Graydon Creed, a long-time anti-mutant villain, seems plausible enough.

The Barrington Coil was shown being inserted into Sabretooth in the previous issue. There’s nothing especially coil-like about it, but the name seems intended to bring contraception to mind.

Evidently, despite the scale of her operation, Barrington is quite some way down the Orchis pecking order. Orchis seem to have a habit of just chucking money at some projects and not paying much attention to them, in addition to their main plans.

PAGES 10-11. Nanny explains about Orphan-Maker.

Mr Sinister. The flashback showing Mr Sinister with Peter as a baby is new, and Nanny rescuing him, is new. However, the basic point that Nanny rescued Orphan-Maker from Mr Sinister comes from X-Factor vol 1 #40, where Nanny at least claimed that this was what had happened. In that issue, Nanny simply claims that Sinister was going to destroy Peter in order to prevent him from becoming dangerously uncontrollable. In this version, Nanny claims that Sinister initially planned to use Peter as a doomsday weapon, but then goes on to say that he changed his mind after learning how dangerous Sinister was.

If Nanny is telling the truth, then it raises some obvious questions about why Sinister wasn’t able to come up with some sort of containment exercise himself – or, if he really did think that was unacceptably risky, why he’s tolerated Orphan-Maker running around all this time. Nonetheless, by all appearances, Nanny’s account here seems to be at least broadly accurate.

This flashback also seems to confirm that Orphan-Maker was indeed a child in adult-sized armour, at least before his resurrection in Hellions (where it’s strongly implied that he’s become a lot bigger).

PAGES 12-13. The group enter Station 2.

Sabretooth is actually right when he says he has the most experience at gathering intelligence. Third Eye can presumably verify that Sabretooth is telling the truth, which might be another reason why Sabretooth is telling the truth.

PAGE 14. Orphan-Maker explains his armour.

This is… weird and plot-convenient. Of course, it does seem to be true that Orphan-Maker’s armour can’t be destroyed – everyone seems to have regarded the risk of containment breach as unacceptable all along – but… why would you design something that important and give Peter the option of just taking it off? And if Nanny designed something so immensely useful, why isn’t it being used more widely?

Obligatory nitpick: Orphan-Maker’s armour was breached when he died in Amenth in Hellions #6, and nothing awful happened. Perhaps it’s because Orphan-Maker himself was killed moments later.

PAGE 15. Sabretooth and Madison Jeffries.

Madison interprets his power as the ability to speak to machines; Sabretooth evidently sees this as a bit of delusional window dressing on a machine-control power. Madison does in fact acknowledge that he could control the machines, but he evidently perceives them as having minds of their own. It’s possible that this is tied specifically to the level of complexity of the machine, since Madison doesn’t generally seem to be under the impression that every simple object has a personality.

PAGE 16. Orphan-Maker and Barrington.

Barrington is making common ground with Orphan-Maker on the basis that they both have immediate superiors who won’t listen to them and who expect their orders to be obeyed without question. It still seems a bit forced for him to come round to the idea of removing his armour quite this quickly, though.

PAGES 17-18. Sabretooth and co find the mutant prisoners.

The prisoners are all generics as far as I know; the two who get names, Herd and Bab, seem to be new.

Sabretooth is clearly aware that he’s relying heavily on his reputation to impress the bunch of C-listers he’s stuck with, since he’s in no condition to fight. He tries (with some success) to get around acknowledging that too directly, by telling them that he won’t be able to protect them all.

PAGE 19. Data page: another Orchis memo.

Gregory Pincus (1903-1967) and John Rock (1890-1984) were indeed scientists responsible for the development of the modern birth control pill. As in the previous issue, this is a story about a valuable medical advance being developed by experiments on an underclass. Quite why Barrington is choosing to share this information (in-universe) with her Orchis superiors is an interesting question – note that she ends the memo by submitting it “to Orchis Command directly”, i.e. bypassing GC. Obviously her pitch is that she has a valuable product – she may not appreciate what Orchis’s priorities are – but why does she think they want to know about the history of medical trials? Is she hoping they’ll be attracted by the possibility of exploiting mutants? They’re kind of doing that with her already, surely.

As with last time, while the basic point about commercial success being built on vulnerable test subjects is correct, some of the details are debatable. The initial trials in the Worcester State Psychiatric Hospital involved both men and women, and were supposed to be just testing whether the drug was safe for human use. The main reason why the full scale trial was done in Puerto Rico was to avoid the Comstock Laws, which effectively made it impossible to trial a contraceptive pill in the mainland USA; Puerto Rico had much more favourable laws on contraceptives at the time.

PAGES 20-24. Creation bursts in, and Third Eye takes everyone to the astral plane.

All fairly straightforward. But note that when Sabretooth realises he can’t just run away from the problem, he does start taking the alpha male role of co-ordinating a response – even though it’s Third Eye who actually comes up with the idea. Then again, Third Eye hasn’t shown much interest in being a leader, and Sabretooth is listening. By his standards, this is a remarkable level of co-operation.

PAGE 25. Trailers.