SABRETOOTH: BACK TO NATURE- January 1998

Homicidal Tendencies

Credits: Jorge Gonzalez (writer), Frank Teran (art), Comicraft (letters & design), Shannon Blanchard (colors)

Summary: Wild Child is informed that his former girlfriend, Lori, has been murdered by sibling serial killers Yuri and Komarovsky “Chop Chop” Yevgraf. Sabretooth knows them from his past, and talks Wild Child into traveling to Canada with him. Stealing Yuri’s pain medication, Sabretooth is able to ignore his restraint collar and kill him. Meanwhile, Wild Child rescues Lori’s sister Leisl from Chop Chop in a warehouse. Despite Wild Child’s insistence on bringing him in alive, Chop Chop accidentally impales himself while trying to escape. Sabretooth returns home with Wild Child, content with his supply of Yuri’s painkillers.

Continuity Notes: This takes place during Sabretooth’s days as a compulsory member of X-Factor, although it was published a few months after he broke free of his collar. Sabretooth actually does mention pills have helped him remove the collar in X-Factor #136, so this was worked out in advance.

Production Note: This is a $5.99, forty-eight page, prestige format one-shot.

I Love the‘90s: Sabretooth remarks that he “pulled a Tyson” after biting Yuri.

Review: Here we go, another six-dollar one-shot that could’ve easily served as an X-Men Unlimited issue. I wouldn’t call this a bad comic at all, but over ten years later, the cover price still seems outrageous. You could argue that the story has some significance for setting up Sabretooth’s escape from X-Factor, but the fact that the character left the team several months before this comic was published kinda kills the drama. The tone is appropriately gritty for a Sabretooth comic, and Frank Teran’s art, which falls in-between Bill Sienkiewicz and Klaus Janson, certainly fits the mood better than the Jeff Matsuda X-Factor issues that precede the story.

Jorge Gonzalez has a decent handle on Sabretooth, portraying him as suitably nasty, but still throwing in a few curveballs, like his brief warning to Leisl not to let revenge consume her. Sabretooth could’ve just as easily killed the woman as give her advice, which might come across as inconsistent characterization under a lot of writers, but Gonzalez is able to make the scene feel somewhat credible. In the end, we learn that Sabretooth’s partial motive for tagging along was to push Wild Child into giving in to his animal temptations, but mainly to score some painkillers from Yuri, who he happens to know is an addict. Having Sabretooth take vicodin to get around his collar’s “retaliatory blasts” is pretty clever, although I doubt all of the dope in the world would be enough to deaden the pain we’ve seen the collar dish out in the past. Surely Sabretooth’s healing factor is stronger than any prescription drug, anyway. Maybe the drug material would’ve been a little much for the regular priced, Code Approved comics, and I did find myself enjoying the comic, but I still refuse to believe this story warrants the six-dollar format.