Writing: Fabian Nicieza
Art: Gary Frank
What Went Down: After escaping the X-Men in Uncanny #328, Sabretooth encounters current X-Force member, and former Morlock, Caliban. Sabretooth taunts Caliban, saying that X-Force won’t allow him to be himself. When Caliban hesitates, Creed electrocutes him with some nearby electrical wires.
We learn that the X-Men squad tasked to capture Sabretooth is made up of the five original X-Men. Jean scans the city telepathically, but for some reason Creed’s head wound now makes it harder for telepaths to find him. Cyclops and Iceman go to one of Sabretooth’s apartments to see if he shows up there. He does, and beats up the two X-Men before escaping. Iceman pursues, but he is forced to ice off Creed’s escape after Sabretooth takes a hostage.
Sabretooth escapes to a subway, but wouldn’t you know it, the Beast coincidentally happens to be on board. So they fight as well. As Sabretooth is about to kill Beast Cyclops shows up in the nick of time, so Creed runs away again.
This time Archangel catches up to him and grabs him off the ground, believing that Creed will have nowhere to go in the air. Sabretooth damages one of Warren’s wings, causing both of them to fall, but Iceman manages to save Warren with some ice. While Iceman takes Archangel to the hospital, the rest of the X-Men continue the search.
Jean manages to pick up some thoughts from Sabretooth, and learns that he is trying to get to Boston to kill the Generation X kids. She finds him, and knocks him around with her telekinesis. Cyclops blasts him, but he gets faked out and pulled through a window. The X-Men give him a lecture on why it is important to be good as they fight him, all the while asking Sabretooth what he wants and why he is doing this. Jean gets a hold of him telekinetically, and Cyclops realizes that the thing Sabretooth wants is his own death. Jean drops Creed, and Cyclops has to shoot him in the head to stop him from hurting some cops.
Creed seems to die, but we all know that isn’t going to last. Val Cooper packs him up so that he can join X-Factor. Cyclops tells his friends that it’s sad that Sabretooth technically won since he got what he wanted.
How It Was: Fabian Nicieza returns to the X-Men for this special one-shot, with its shiny cover and lack of advertisements. Yes, this is the same format that the Age of Apocalypse one-shots had, except this doesn’t feel nearly as epic an event as those did. This feels like a genuine attempt at a cash grab since all of the gimmicks feel completely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have no ads, but this comic is definitely not worth five bucks.
This isn’t to say that this comic is bad; this just doesn’t really feel like that pivotal of an event for the X-Men. Nicieza does manage to present a really neat portrait of Sabretooth. Instead of revealing Sabretooth’s motivations, Nicieza leaves them up in the air and this actually works to some degree. It’s also frustrating to have months and months of set up be brushed aside as "Creed was faking it" for unknown reasons. What is neat to see is all the other characters guessing at his motivations: he’s angry, he’s enjoying his freedom, he’s planning revenge, or maybe he wants to die. The whole idea of the book seems to be that nobody knows what Sabretooth wants, including himself, and there is kind of an interesting idea in that which doesn’t get fully explored here.
The original X-Men are an odd choice for the stars of this one-shot. Surely characters like Wolverine, Gambit, and Bishop have closer ties to Sabretooth and thus would have been more interesting to bring into conflict with him. I guess that Nicieza was looking for X-Men to combat Creed’s philosophies as well as his body. But I really like the dynamic he has with Jean Grey where, like Wolverine, he respects her because she is willing to do what is necessary to him because she hates him as much as Logan does. And the scene where Archangel gets his wing broken is pretty shocking, but unfortunately leads to months of him complaining about how much his wing hurts. There’s a little too much sermonizing from the X-Men on the importance of control and knowing one’s purpose, but that’s them taking the high ground; it would be weird if these particular X-Men were only throwing insults back at him.
The real problem with the plot is that it’s trying to set up Sabretooth as this psychopathic killer that needs to be captured before he can kill hundreds of people, but then he never kills anybody. He has plenty of opportunities with the X-Men, Caliban, police officers, various hostages and random people, but he always lets them go. This probably has to do with the Comics Code, but it really cuts the drama to have a violent killer who forgoes every opportunity he has to kill.
The end is completely anti-climactic since we all know that Sabretooth can heal himself, so why even go through the motions of pretending he’s dead? And the fact that the telepaths can’t track him, but can read his mind just enough for plot convenience is a little contrived. But this is still a pretty good chase scene for a character that did play a significant role in the X-Men for a time. The plot isn’t exactly revolutionary, and this probably didn’t need to be double-sized, but it does get the job done with some decent action.
C+
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