Comic Book / Sabretooth (2022)

"I know what I am. That's always been my super-power."

— Victor Creed, Sabretooth #1

Sabretooth (2022), subtitled "The Adversary” for the collected edition, is a limited series from Marvel Comics starring the eponymous Sabretooth. It’s written by Victor LaValle, with art by Leonard Kirk and colors by Rain Beredo.

Set in the shared Marvel Universe, it's part of the wider X-Men line and one of several new books launched as part of Destiny of X, the third phase of the long-running Krakoan Age saga.

The series follows on from Sabretooth's trial and sentence at the end of House of X, when he was found guilty of killing humans and condemned to life imprisonment below Krakoa. The first issue recaps some of these events from Sabretooth's own perspective.

The first issue was released February 02 2022.

A Sequel Series by the same creative team, Sabretooth & the Exiles, began in November 2022.

Sabretooth provides examples of:

• 11th-Hour Ranger: Toad, Nanny and the Orphan-Maker only appear in the final issue. They'd all been condemned to the Pit in other series, but played no part in Sabretooth's mindscapes and escape plans.
• Amazon Brigade: The Krakoan Coast Guard appears to have been made up of Bling!, Nekra, and Oya. Sabretooth even calls them "low-rent Amazons."
• An Arm and a Leg: In the first issue alone, quite a few of Sabretooth's enemies end up dismembered.
• Androids Are People, Too: While Madison Jeffries ostensibly is imprisoned for disrespecting Krakoa by trying to build a mechanical habitat for Danger to live on, it's clear his real crime to the Quiet Council is daring to love a robot and treat her as a person instead of sharing their anti-machine stance.
• Answer Cut: Sabretooth's mental monologue returns to the "I've always known what I am" theme. Cyclops, arriving off-panel with the X-Men, greets him with a call of "Coward". Although, as they're just facets of his imagination, the dialogue's not actually unconnected to his thoughts, even if it's subconscious.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Cypher asks Sabretooth how he escaped from the Pit. Sabretooth refuses to answer because he didn't. He can't remember escaping. Because they're still in the Pit.
• At Least I Admit It: The crux of Sabretooth's growing ideological opposition to the Quiet Council. Yes, he's a backstabbing, bloodthirsty scoundrel, but at least he's honest about it and doesn't pretend to be a pure, noble, and self-righteous leader while taking advantage of the people below him.
• Bait-and-Switch Time Skip: Downplayed, but Mole briefly speaks to Apocalypse in the second issue - implying that this part of the story is still set before X of Swords, a crossover which ended in late 2020.
• Bait the Dog: Even after a lot of Character Development and becoming genuinely morally opposed to the Quiet Council, Sabretooth is still the treacherous snake he always was and abandons the other Pit prisoners while making his getaway. It's not hypocrisy in his eyes; he knows what he is and was honest with them — and everyone else — from the start that his primary concern was himself. If they were foolish enough to think they were somehow exempt from that, that's on them.
• Batman Gambit: Sabretooth tells the other prisoners to find Vertigo, Scrambler and Prism on the topside as part of an escape plan which is never elaborated on further. Instead they tell whoever will listen about how unjust and inhumane the Council is, spreading discontent. Which is precisely what Sabretooth wanted and expected them to do.
• Beneath Notice: How the Mole has been conspiring to help Sabretooth with a telepath like Xavier on the lookout. He and the people he seeks out are just simply not considered important enough to keep a psychic eye on.
• Beware the Nice Ones: When Nekra roughly grabs Cypher by the collar in a moment of anger, Warlock responds by practically throttling her into submission.
• Body Horror:
  • Sabretooth's fight with the X-Men leaves Nightcrawler's severed hand embedded in his chest, wrapped around his heart. He then has to rip it out.
  • After Third Eye pulls Melter back from the brink, Melter revives in a new, featureless orange and silver form that is constantly melting, bubbling, and evaporating, like a Chrome Champion mixed with a Magma Man. He does not seem to mind the transformation, however.
• The Bus Came Back: Nekra is back for her first significant appearance in years, as is the new Melter. Issue five picks up Nanny, Orphan-Maker, and Toad's stories from Hellions and The Trial Of Magneto.
• Call-Back: As Sabretooth grows into a symbol of the public's grievances with the Quiet Council, the phrase "Sabretooth was right" starts to be bandied about as a rallying cry, calling back to the "Magneto was right" slogan from Grant Morrison's New X-Men run.
  • The subtitle for the collected edition, "The Adversary," calls back to a villain of the 1980s who notably fought the X-Men and Freedom Force in The Fall of the Mutants.
• Cats Are Mean: One of Sabretooth's inner selves is an entirely mundane-seeming cat which, despite never speaking, is implied to be just as bad as the rest of the Sabretooths.
• Character Development: The longer things progress in the Pit and the more he learns about Krakoa, the more Sabretooth's views and goals evolve. At the start he just wants to escape and kill the Quiet Council out of revenge for them "screwing with" him. By issue 4, he's starting to oppose them out of genuine ideological disgust for their hypocrisy in how they treat the mutants they rule over and the humans and robots they don't.
• Chocolate Baby: Nekra is a black woman, but her mutation leaves her with chalk-white skin similar to an albino. She notes this contributed to a very rough childhood, as her father obviously suspected this when his wife gave birth a "white" child, leading to stress in their marriage that they took out on her.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Despite all of his aforementioned Character Development, when Sabretooth causes enough trouble from inside the Pit to badger Cypher and Warlock into letting him escape as planned, he simply abandons his fellow prisoners without even bothering to argue for their release as well.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Mutants in the pit being able to manifest themselves from Krakoa's substance is a reference way back to Krakoa's first story arc. While it kept the first team of X-Men trapped, it manifested effigies of them to defend against the All-New, All-Different team Xavier organized to rescue them.
  • Skin and Blob have heart-to-heart where they reflect on various strange things they've experienced, like Skin being crucified by Reverend Stryker or Blob being briefly turned into a baby.
  • While Sabretooth's mind and body are recovering from Melter's attack, he comes across a discarded gun and a dead bird that obviously represent Birdy, his girlfriend from Larry Hama's 1993 Sabretooth mini-series who was murdered by Victor's own son, Grayson Creed. The sight causes him to let out a Howl of Sorrow. Then it turns out the Krakoans are planning to revive her...
  • Issue five picks up on Nanny, Orphan-Maker, and Toad's fates after the events of Hellions and The Trial Of Magneto. Turns out, they don't spend all that long in the Pit before being freed alongside the protagonists of this series.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: Part of Sabretooth's development is realizing that trying to get revenge on Xavier and the Quiet Council is pointless, since they'll just come back through Krakoa's resurrection protocols and he's not powerful enough to kill them all anyways. Their reputations, on the other hand, are not so invincible. Therefore, he endeavors to instead expose their sins and dirty deeds to the neglected underclasses and countercultures of Krakoa, to destroy their powerbase rather than attacking them directly.
• Deconstruction: Perhaps more than any other book in the Krakoan Age, this one criticizes and deconstructs how Krakoa functions and the Quiet Council governs, spelling out just how they look to other people (man, mutant, or machine); a cultish dystopia where anyone who fails to "behave" is ostracized at best, imprisoned at worst, all run by a group of smug, elitist, hypocritical, shortsighted, bigoted, self-righteous, and nepotistic douchebags who care more about forcing everyone to think like them then any actual sane or moral governing and gleefully commit the exact sort of sins they condemn everyone else for.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Just about everyone sent to the Pit except for Sabretooth himself and Melter. Third Eye says it best; they weren't punished for any real crime; they were punished for not knowing their place:
  • Nekra and Oya were sentenced for breaking the "kill no man" rule… by killing pirates off the coast of Krakoa who posed a legitimate threat to the island. As Third-Eye and Mole note, that's the exact sort of thing the X-Men and Marauders do; Nekra and Oya just got in trouble for doing it without a state license to kill ("they didn't have a spiffy team name"), rather the any genuine moral objection.
  • Madison Jeffries was sentenced for "disrespecting the sacred land" by trying to help the woman he loves — Danger — come to Krakoa and building her a mechanical home on the island. Third Eye saliently remarks that his real crime was daring to love a robot rather than following Krakoa's general anti-robotic prejudices… not that Cypher is going to get punished for the same thing with Warlock because he's too important.
  • Third Eye himself was thrown in simply because he pointed out the recklessness and dangers of the "make more mutants" law by actually showing people what would happen to all those baby mutants they're churning out and simply discarding into state care. This obviously led to less mutants having kids, putting a kink in the Quiet Council's plans, so Third Eye was condemned.
  • Melter claims that he was sent to the Pit for melting a Krakoan boulder, which counts as disrespecting the "sacred land". Subverted when it's shown later that his actions actually damaged Krakoa, which provoked it into draining him and multiple mutants to unconsciousness so it could heal itself. He was also doing it not to practice his powers but trying to spy on the Quiet Council.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Creed is guilty of this with Oya & Nekra when he first meets them, with both ladies warning him to watch his eyes when entering his mansion.
• Exact Words: Cypher cuts a deal and lets Sabretooth escape, having decided that the danger of him remaining on the island is too great thanks to his stoking of rebellions and twisting of the Pit. However, he never promised that he would only release Sabretooth, and so he takes the opportunity to let all of the Pit prisoners free (having been opposed to its existence from the beginning) and sends them after the fleeing Sabretooth.
• Genius Bruiser: Sabretooth gives the other inmates a history lesson about the 1962 escape from Alcatraz, and after giving another lecture about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, makes it clear that he kind of resents being seen as nothing but Dumb Muscle.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: To say that Cypher, Warlock, and Krakoa weren't intending all of this to happen due to the creation of the Pit is an understatement.
• Hidden Depths: Sabretooth is hinted to still feel some grief over the death of Birdy at Graydon Creed's hands, revealing that even someone like him can feel love. He also demonstrates that he's something of an amateur historian, being quite well-read on a wide variety of historical subjects, American history especially (it helps he was alive for most of it).
• Holier Than Thou: The thing that enrages Sabretooth the most about the Quiet Council and ultimately comes to motivate him to oppose them; he may be a monster, but at least he admits it and doesn't pretend to be some morally perfect Übermensch while doing the exact same things they claim humans do.
• Kangaroo Court: Magneto and Professor X try and sentence Box, Melter, Nekra, Oya, and Third Eye without the rest of the Quiet Council being present or possibly even aware, something which clearly perturbs Cypher.
• Leaking Can of Evil: Although Sabretooth's supposed to be sealed away forever, it's not long before his presence starts haunting Krakoa in various ways. And then the other prisoners learn how to do the same thing.
• Literal Split Personality:
  • The Feral Council (The Boy, the Beast and the Captain) are all aspects of Sabretooth.
  • In the Starjammers sequence, all of the Starjammers are also Sabretooth.
• Losing Your Head: Decapitating Doug Ramsey doesn't prove as fatal as Sabretooth expected.
• Lower-Deck Episode: The story focuses heavily on more obscure and oft-forgotten/unimportant supporting X-Characters like Blob, Mole, Nekra, Shark Girl, and so on. It's also something of a Deconstruction of the concept, since it uses those lesser knowns as symbols of repressed underclasses and people who are forgotten and failed by society, exemplified by Mole's observation that "all mutants are equal, but some mutants (i.e., the main characters) are more equal than others".
• Mental World: Sabretooth creates one around him in the Pit. After an untold amount of time living through various scenarios, some where he places himself in different lives, he eventually molds it into a kind of Hell with him as the top devil on the throne. When other mutants are sent to the Pit, they end up in there with him.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Sabretooth starts out thinking this, but gradually shifts to remembering that non-violent revenge can be just as effective...
• Noodle Incident: Nekra and Oya were sent to the Pit for killing humans, Box and Melter were sent to it for damaging or disrespecting Krakoa, and Third Eye was sent to it because he somehow broke the "Make more mutants" edict. Turns out he was freely giving precognitive predictions to Krakoans of how they callously abandoned the mutants they made, convincing them not to have them in the first place.
• Out of the Frying Pan: Sabretooth finally escapes from the Pit and flees Krakoa on a boat… just to get snatched up by an Orchis cell. Oh, and his former cellmates have been released as well and are gunning for him.
• Parental Substitute: Nekra has steadily become a maternal figure for Oya, Bling!, and Shark Girl.
• Remote Body: Though Sabertooth and everyone else trapped in the Pit are trapped in a mental illusion, if they imagine a far-off place, they can project their consciousness to manifest a body out of Krakoa.
• Reverse Psychology: Sabretooth tells the others to find some of his old comrades from the Marauders (Prism, Vertigo and Scrambler), well aware that they'll ignore that and choose to reach out to others instead.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Sabretooth himself is now supposed to become this, at least at the start of the series.
• Selective Enforcement: Deconstructed; the theme of the title is about law, its enforcement and punishment, and what it all says in the context of the society enforcing it. It's repeatedly driven home that the Quiet Council doesn't really care all that much about the "crimes" committed by those in the Pit on a moral level, because they and people working for them commit said crimes all the time. They're just punishing them for "not knowing their place", stamping out dissenters, or just disposing of them as political pawns once they become inconvenient.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of Sabretooth's fantasy lives is inspired by Conan the Barbarian.
  • Sabretooth mockingly compares Third Eye to Columbo. He responds that he prefers Easy Rawlins.
  • Nekra talks about why Thomas Paine is one of her heroes.
  • Mole's inability to get any of the Krakoan higher-ups to listen to him leads to him disaffectedly saying, "All mutants are equal, but some mutants are more equal than others."
• Significant Name Overlap: In-Universe, Sabretooth clarifies in the final issue that Nanny's Cove is not named after Nanny, but rather Nanny of the Maroons.
• Splatter Horror: Sabretooth tears most of Cyclops's face off (and then uses his dying body, with its lidless eyes, to messily kill most of the other X-Men with his optic blasts).
• Sympathy for the Devil:
  • Sabretooth noted that Mystique wouldn't face him during his sentencing, implying that, unlike the other Quiet Council members, she was not totally onboard with condemning him to the Pit.
    Sabretooth: Can't even look at me, Leni?
  • Krakoa itself feels that And I Must Scream is too harsh a punishment for anyone, even Sabretooth, and so, acting through Cypher, it gives Sabretooth the means to be a kind of lucid dreamer with complete control over a Mental World.
  • Mole was previously brutalized by Sabretooth and admits that he hates him, but also that it was unfair of the council to imprison him for killing people while on a mission for them, when many of them had previously condoned their team members killing if it was in service of their own missions.
• Those Two Guys: Even with the nature of the series forcing the main characters in close proximity most of the time Nekra and Oya are never seen apart. She could be seen as a Redeeming Replacement Goldfish for Mandrill.
• Transhumanism: When Madison Jefferies manifests a body from Krakoa, he appears as a cloud of microplastics, which he says feels more like himself than his flesh and blood body.
• Two Girls to a Team: Of the six inmates, the only women are Nekra and Oya.
• Undying Loyalty: Despite being condemned to the Pit, Melter still believes in Krakoa and Xavier, enough to be willing to risk his own life in order to stop Sabretooth.
• Vampiric Draining: Melter practiced his powers on Krakoa, not entirely understanding the Life Drinker nature of the living island. After he blasted rocks and soil, Krakoa drained him - and everyone else in the area - into unconsciousness to heal itself. Which immediately got Xavier's attention and led to Melter's punishment.
• Villain Protagonist: Sabretooth is definitely in this category at the start of the series. Even after his Character Development, he's still the feral Blood Knight he's always been; he's just personally offended by the Quiet Council's Holier Than Thou attitude and decides to do something about it.
• Victory Is Boring: After he finishes fantasizing about killing everyone who has ever crossed him, Sabretooth finds himself at a loss over what to do next, and even begins questioning his long-held belief that he has always known exactly who and what he is.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: When Third Eye visits Mole again, he assumes that only a day has passed, only for Mole to mention that "it's been... a while" since he last saw Third Eye. It swiftly becomes apparent that things are moving much more quickly in the real world than in Sabretooth's Mental World.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The other Pit prisoners are nowhere to be seen until the last issue where it's revealed they were hiding out in the hellscape the five featured prisoners first arrived in.
• Wham Shot: Mystique asks Destiny why she let Sabretooth escape. Destiny explains that she saw a vision showing Sabretooth may do something very good and important, but won't say what. Then we get to see for ourselves; a vision of a crippled Sabretooth as leader of a countless mutants, announcing "To me, my Exiles".