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Feb 23

Sabretooth and the Exiles #4 annotations

Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2023 by Paul in Annotations

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

SABRETOOTH & THE EXILES #4
“Station Four”
Writer: Victor LaValle
Artist: Leonard Kirk
Colourist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1. A whole bunch of Sabretooths claw their way out of their respective graves. This doesn’t happen in the issue, but it’s symbolically linked to the reveal at the end.

PAGE 2. Orchis Station Four calls for help.

These guys were identified in issue #1 as “Nobodies”.

Point Nemo is indeed a name for the location on Earth which is furthest from land (the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, if you prefer the more formal name). The caption says it’s “1,000 miles from any landmass in all directions”, but that’s actually understating it – it’s 1,670. It’s in the South Pacific, roughly equidistant from the Pitcairn Islands, Easter island and Antarctica.

This may or may not matter, but it’s also the location of the city of R’lyeh in H P Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” – which Magneto’s Bermuda Triangle island base was loosely based on. On the other hand, in modern times, its main significance is that it’s seen as a nice safe place for spacecraft to crash.

Station Four. Just to recap, this is the fourth Orchis station we’ve seen in this book, although confusingly one of them was numbered Station Six. (“Station One” had previously appeared in the 2021 Juggernaut miniseries.) Station Six was a big floating ship; Station Two was a prison over a volcano; and Station Three was the astral plane outpost from the previous issue. Issues #3 and #4 are titled “Station Three” and “Station Four” respectively, though issues #1-2 don’t follow that pattern.

PAGES 3-4. The cast consider the dead Creed duplicate.

Issue #3 ended with the cast recovering the body of this Creed duplicate from Station Three. They’ve now returned to the ship that Sabretooth stole from Bling! at the end of the first mini, and recovered from Orchis at the end of issue #1. It’s become much bigger, however – it was the size of a yacht before – and we’ll find out later that Madison Jeffries is responsible for this.

Sabretooth is preoccupied with getting revenge, and while he mentions Professor X, he actually seems more concerned about Orchis. He does at least make an effort to frame it in a way that Nekra and Oya will sympathise with – avenging his duplicate. There’s no real sense here that he cares about this guy, though. As Sabretooth reminds us later, his powers are currently being suppressed (by Dr Barrington’s coil) and his real top agenda is to do something about that.

PAGE 5. Recap and credits. The strapline, “Sabretooths & The Exiles”, is not a typo.

PAGE 6. Data page. A brief recap of the history of this boat, mostly telling us what we already knew.

Bling!’s engineering genius is previously established, though it doesn’t come up often. Her mother, Angel Dupres, has never actually been seen on panel as far as I know; X-Men: The 198 Files gives a random back story about being the daughter of hip hop royalty, which remarkably never seems to come up. Apparently, either Bling! didn’t feel that strongly about naming the ship in honour of her mother, or the rest of the Exiles didn’t feel very strongly about Bling!’s feelings, since they’ve renamed it the Maroon. (Note, incidentally, that this whole crew of 1008 mutants is now being billed as “the Exiles.”)

The Maroons were a community of ex-slaves in 18th century Jamaica. They were previously mentioned in Sabretooth #5.

PAGES 7-8. Nanny and Orphan-Maker meet Herd and Bab.

Orphan-Maker now has new armour to replace the one that was broken open in issue #2. We saw Nanny and Madison Jeffries building this armour on Station Three last issue. (That means it was created in the astral plane, but Station Three and its contents were apparently all physical.)

Understandably enough, their time in the Pit has not reconciled Nanny and the Orphan-Maker to Krakoa – instead, they immediately set about advising the rescued mutants to stay the hell away from it. This is not the intended result of time in the Pit, but frankly, what did Professor X seriously expect?

PAGE 9. Sabretooth contemplates his doppelganger.

“Third Eye says we shouldn’t have been able to bring this Sabretooth’s physical form back from the Astral Plane.” Not sure I follow that – they brought the new Orphan-Maker armour back too, after all. Nonetheless, for some (no doubt good) reason, Third Eye thinks that this version of Sabretooth must have had psychic abilities. Perhaps the idea is that he was being used as the anchor to keep Station Three on the Astral Plane.

PAGE 10. Data page: a memo from “the General Contractor” to somebody else within Orchis. We’ll find out later on who this guy is (though it’s who we were expecting anyway).

As in previous issues, we get an intra-Orchis discussion here about an example of oppression. This one is actually shorter, since the final few paragraphs are plot-related and amount to “back off while I deal with Sabretooth in person”. The story of Indian boarding schools is of course true, and given the quoted slogan, a likely source is Ward Churchill’s Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (2004).

The slogan is credited to one Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924), who used it in reference to the assimilationist ethos of his Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Pratt was an influential figure in the development of Indian boarding schools. By the standards of his time, he was a well-meaning white liberal who opposed segregation laws and genuinely thought he was helping marginalised people to participate in mainstream culture as equals. The problem is that on his approach, the road to equality lay in eradicating every other cultural tradition.

How closely Pratt’s thinking really resembles the General Contractor’s is debatable. The GC appears to have in mind an army of mutants who “might serve the needs of the human population by standing against their kin in the coming war”, which rather sounds like he wants some brainwashed soldiers.

PAGE 11. Third Eye and Madison discuss Point Nemo.

Nanny is characteristically determined to protect mutant infants. But she also mentions later that she’s thinking about “what I can teach them”, which sounds a lot like what she can get them to do – after all, she turned Orphan-Maker into a weapon in similar circumstances.

PAGES 12-13. Barrington and the Creation get sucked into Station Four.

Self-explanatory.

PAGE 14. Sabretooth talks to the kids.

Nanny is obviously wrong to say that the kids wouldn’t be welcomed on Krakoa; she may or may not believe it herself, but she doubtless wants to have them under her influence to some degree instead. Sabretooth, of course, thinks likewise.

PAGES 15-16. The core cast discuss.

Toad has been ignored by the others because he wasn’t one of their core group – he was tacked onto the cast right at the end of the previous Sabretooth mini. But he reads it as personal rejection. By comparing them to the Quiet Council, he’s basically accusing them of making decisions for everyone else without any legitimacy.

Melter is somewhat protective about Orphan-Maker, who has been quietly idolising him throughout the series.

PAGES 17-18. Sabretooth lectures the Exiles.

Sabretooth is claiming that ugly, misfit mutants aren’t welcome on Krakoa – which isn’t true in the slightest, but it’s keeping these people on side. Note who gets the various reactions. Oya and Melter – the nice/naive ones – are in disbelief that Sabretooth is being taken seriously. Nekra doesn’t find it surprising but does think he’s playing with fire. Third Eye sees it as a demonstration of manipulative technique. And Toad, who’s been a deluded follower himself, understands “what angry people will do for their leader”.

PAGES 19-21. Madison Jeffries is killed, and Sabretooth is kidnapped..

The fact that Madison deliberately hung back on page 16 to look at the water suggests there’s more to this. But Third Eye does seem to very that he’s dead, and the art undoubtedly has him in two bits.

PAGE 22. The core cast try to take command.

Sabretooth vanishes just as he was being accepted as an inspirational leader figure. The others are saying the right thing but none of them really have the credibility with these people. Nekra is certainly trying to position herself as leader, but is anyone listening?

PAGES 23-24. Sabretooth confronts the General Contractor.

It’s Graydon Creed, the son of Sabretooth and Mystique. Creed was last seen in Weapon X vol 3 #27 (2018), when Sabretooth’s efforts got him resurrected. Traditionally, Graydon has been a fairly mainstream anti-mutant politician/campaigner figure, so his departure into hunting down multiversal Sabretooths is something of a change of direction.

It seems unlikely that Graydon could really have killed every other version of Sabretooth in the Multiverse, but we’ll see next time how literally we should take that. That said, the only really high profile alt-Sabretooth is the Age of Apocalypse version, and he already died in Astonishing X-Men #60.

PAGE 25. Trailers.

Bring on the comments

  1. Jenny says:

    Are you not doing Captain Britain, Paul? It does seem like a continuation of Excalibur but I can’t blame you for not wanting to.

  2. Moonstar Dynasty says:

    Another very solid issue until the Graydon Creed reveal. I’m completely over multiversal shenanigans. Still, LaValle has earned a lot of goodwill with me so I’ll hold my breath until next month.

  3. Omar Karindu says:

    How closely Pratt’s thinking really resembles the General Contractor’s is debatable. The GC appears to have in mind an army of mutants who “might serve the needs of the human population by standing against their kin in the coming war”, which rather sounds like he wants some brainwashed soldiers.

    Iy may be intended as a loose analogy to the practice of Indian boarding schools sending their graduates back to convert others in their tribes/nations (Christian conversion being a core part of the cultural erasure/assimilationist ethos of the schools).

    It might also bring to mind the Native Americans who joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs police and were later sent to put down the Ghost Dance movement. One Native American BIA officer — Marcellus Red Tomahawk — killed Sitting Bull for resisting arrest during the suppression of the movement and sent his children to the Carlisle school.

  4. Paul says:

    I will do Captain Britain, yes, though probably not before the weekend. I regard it as a continuation of Excalibur/Knights of X. I see Amazon UK has it listed as a five-issue miniseries, but given Fall of X on the horizon, that doesn’t really mean a great deal one way or the other.

  5. Michael says:

    Orphan Maker and Nanny really only have themselves to blame for being sent to the Pit- they were part of a unit the Krakoan government sent on missions and Orphan Maker murdered two Americans on American soil. The Krakoans had to punish him somehow or else it might be viewed as an act of WAR.
    We’re never going to get a full explanation of what Orphan Maker’s power does, are we?

  6. GN says:

    I suspect the Multiversal Sabretooths reveal is here to tie this book thematically to the traditional Exiles book concept.

  7. Joseph S. says:

    “The Maroons were a community of ex-slaves in 18th century Jamaica.”

    I believe the term also applies to other communities, as in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and parts of Central America, which often included indigenous peoples as well.

    “…and the art undoubtedly has him in two bits.”

    Just before being torn in half, Jeffries gets a thought balloon (“Think fast! Think fast!) and his eyes light up, implying that he used his powers for something. I’m sure we’ll find out what next issue.

  8. Mike Loughlin says:

    @Moonstar Dynasty: totally agree. I just hope the next issue doesn’t dwell on Graydon Creed’s multiversal shenanigans for more than a page. There’s too much plot to wrap up or at least move along for the next mini-series.

    @Michael: I try to figure out Orphan Maker’s powers and can’t come up with much beyond being a living super-bomb or unleashing the deadliest virus ever. Or is he another Moira-type? Is that why Nanny stunts his growth?

    The line about mutants who will side with humans against mutants in the coming war reminded me of Immortal X-Men 10 and Prof. X confessing that he founded the X-Men in part to fight other mutants. A comparison could be made to minority police officers and whether or not they’re being used as tools against their own communities in the service of a racist agenda. I would like to see LaVelle explore this idea, but I don’t think that’s where this series is going.

  9. Taibak says:

    I suppose it’s possible that Orphan Maker’s power is simply to make everybody afraid of him.

    And I guess it’s not out of the question that his power is completely harmless and Nanny is just completely mental.

  10. Si says:

    If it were up to me, Orphan Maker’s power would be some kind of omega-level time manipulation. Like maybe he could stop time itself if he were at full power, or something like that. This would explain how Nanny used to be able to turn adults and infants into children. She was bleeding off some of his nascent powers. The armour redirects his own powers against him, stopping him from growing up.

  11. Jdsm24 says:

    Or maybe it’s Nanny’s mutant power (aside from her super genius) to de-age organic matter , and she’s affected by her own power , which is why she’s physically the size of a midget , because she’s physically at the same age as her de-aged victims (newly pubescent/early teens like with Storm)** , and which is why we never see her , because Marvel is afraid of the Unfortunate Sexual Implications* ;p , especially since it’s canon that she was married to (and apparently divorced from) the chief male scientist of The Right (as revealed in Hellions) , who was an old man.

    * she’d be a rare American example of a what the Japanese fetishists call a LoliBaba , an immortal young girl on the brink of puberty (another example is Anne Rice’s vampiress Claudia, the most famous American example , and at Marvel, there’s also the Olympian goddess Hebe and the Eternal trickster Sprite)
    ** it’s arguably implied that Storm may have gotten intimate with Forge after she regained her memories despite still remaining in her de-aged form , if the art by Art Adams & Co. was any indication

  12. Bengt says:

    Wasn’t Barrington’s burns caused by Orphan Maker? So at least part of his power is energy release, though it can be a side effect of a more interesting power.

  13. Sam says:

    @Michael I’ll go with Orphan Maker being the secret younger brother of Sienna Blaze; if we looked under the armor, we’d see the family resemblance. His powers are allegedly as dangerous as hers to use, but aren’t in practice.

  14. Michael says:

    @Jdsm24- At Marvel, Hebe is usually depicted as physically at least 18. She’s kissed both Peter Parker and Hercules, and Marvel doesn’t want to imply they’re pedophiles.

  15. Allan M says:

    I’m guessing that Madison used his powers to transfer his mind into the ship, hence the glowing eyes and “think fast!” It’d be an expansion of his powers but broadly in bounds for a technopath. And a mutant becoming a machine – anathema during the Krakoan era – seems in line with the miniseries’ tone.

  16. Chris V says:

    Michael-Surely, in the case of Hebe, it would be Hebephilia rather than paedophilia.

  17. Karl_H says:

    Was the 616 Graydon Creed this much of a badass? I didn’t remember he’d been resurrected, and assumed this was a counterpart from another universe, which is entirely reasonable given what he’s up to.

  18. JDSM24 says:

    Well , Graydon IS the biological son of both Sabretooth and Mystique , so the latent potential for “badassery” was always there , and AoA Graydon Creed (who was part of the anti-Apocalpyse human resistance led by the AoA counterpart of William Stryker, who shockingly was genuinely heroic like AoA Sabretooth) was indeed a badass who even looked like DC’s Bane LOL

    And at the risk of being that Ackchyually …Guy , pedophilia is indeed sexual preference for youth which is pre-pubescent (elementary/preschool/kindergarten/nursery) while hebephilia is the first half of adolescence (middle-school) and ephebophilia is the second half of adolescence (high-school/college)

  19. neutrino says:

    @Paul Marvel claims that was a misprint on Amazon and it’s actually an ongoing series, but not many people expect it to go past issue #5.

  20. Ben says:

    This chain of comments is legitimately bonkers.

  21. Jerry Ray says:

    In the interest of nitpicking, was anybody else bothered by the appearance of “my bad” in the otherwise rather formal letter from GC to Orchis? I found it rather jarring. It seems like a lot of current comics writers don’t quite have the chops for the text pages, since they often feel out of place tonally or have a puzzling “who is writing this/who is intended to read this” quality to them.

  22. Jdsm24 says:

    Blame Silicon Valley , especially Google , for the deprofessionalization of Corporate America in the Knowledge Economy of the Information Age LOL

  23. ASV says:

    I’m not sure there’s been a single text page purporting to be a written document that didn’t read exactly like spoken dialogue.

  24. Mike Loughlin says:

    Author of multiple well-regarded prose books Victor LaValle definitely knows how to write beyond super-hero comics. I do agree that comic book writers as a whole struggle when they get out of their super-hero/fantasy/sci-fi zone, but I don’t put LaValle in that category.

  25. GN says:

    @Jerry Ray, ASV: I think Tini Howard is really good at writing data pages – they always feel dense with data and varied in tone. Al Ewing is good at them as well. The worst kind of data page is of the ‘someone writes a letter to someone else’ variety.

    Jonathan Hickman’s data pages in his independent books are excellent, you can tell he put a lot of time into them. His Marvel data pages (post-HOX/POX) seem rushed in comparison, I think the monthly schedule put a strain on him.

  26. GN says:

    I was looking back on Sabretooth recently and thinking about the overall structure of Victor LaValle’s run. When LaValle was first announced, Marvel said he would be writing three separate X-Men mini-series that from a triptych, which I took to mean they form a three-act structure.

    Sabretooth was about Creed and a number of other mutants (rightfully or wrongfully) being imprisoned in the Pit of Krakoa, and their efforts to escape the Pit. This book represents ‘Hell’.

    Sabretooth and the Exiles is about Creed and his fellow prisoners running away from Krakoa and getting entangled with ORCHIS. They move in and out of several private prisons/stations holding mutants. This book represents ‘Purgatory’ or ‘Limbo’.

    So it stands to reason that the third 5-issue miniseries from LaValle would be about ‘Heaven/Paradise’ – or in other words be about Creed and the Exiles’ (all 1008+ of them) return to Krakoa. Since this book will launch under the Fall of X banner, it will likely revolve around a reckoning with Xavier and the Quiet Council, after which the Exiles might help them fight ORCHIS.

  27. Orphan Maker’s power is clearly that he can’t stop growing; if released from his armour he would eventually grow so large he would destabilise Earth’s orbit and send the planet spinning into space or the Sun.

  28. Woodswalked says:

    I don’t think Sabertooth will go back to Krakoa. My guess is that he will start traveling through time and dimensions with Blink, Morph, and Nocturne. No matter how dumb the scenario, LaValle will make it good.

  29. GN says:

    I agree with Michael that at this point, we’ll likely never going to definitively find out what Orphan-Maker’s powers are. The writers seem to be going with the idea that whatever the reader’s imagination can come up with is scarier than anything established on page, and I can see the wisdom in that.

    He’s not an Omega mutant though – JDW said the Krakoan Omega-mutant list was fixed unless someone becoming Omega was part of the story (i.e. Synch).

  30. GN says:

    Woodswalked > I don’t think Sabretooth will go back to Krakoa. My guess is that he will start traveling through time and dimensions with Blink, Morph, and Nocturne.

    I feel like Sabretooth has to go back to Krakoa, at least for a little while, because the narrative is building up to a confrontation/reckoning with Xavier and the QC.

    Regarding the multiverse stuff, while I believe the Creed variants reveal was a homage to the classic Exiles remit, I’m not sure if LaValle is going to fully lean into that direction. I do agree that if he does go that way, LaValle could write a veery interesting multiversal Exiles book.

  31. Woodswalked says:

    GN “I feel like Sabretooth has to go back to Krakoa, at least for a little while, because the narrative is building up to a confrontation/reckoning…”

    That is exactly what I don’t think will happen. This arc is ultimately a statement about injustice. It doesn’t fit that there will be a new multiversal Exiles book, at least by LeValle. I think it will be one of the exposition text blocks that aren’t quite a datapage that provides how we are leaving injustice unresolved. The painfully obvious lack of a reckoning fits the message about our society. The alternative would involve some influence in the Fall of X, which I don’t think editorial would have allowed in the remit. I would be pleasantly surprised by that level of co-ordination and long term planning outside of Ewing and Gillen. We both seem to have faith in the author. I am at the edge of my seat looking forward to reading more. I am curious which of us will end up being closer.

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