Sabretooth & the Exiles #1: All True Revolutionary Stories are Driven by Love

If there’s one thing common to all of Victor LaValle’s work, it’s that impactful entertaining stories always want to tell you something more, always have layers to peel off. While the run of Sabretooth (in my book, the best X-comic 2022 has given us) took advantage of Victor Creed’s incarceration to explore prison and prison abolition, this first issue of Sabretooth & The Exiles kickstarts its run in a laboratory setting, with an experimental scientist, and cloning of mutants, to delve into another topic that is vital to examine through race lens: eugenics.

But there’s no bread without butter, as Leonard Kirk’s rough, even rugged, art (but in a way that shows emotion and even characters’ solidarity when it needs to), and Rain Beredo’s bloody, even claustrophobic colors, set us right in the mood. And that’s where the magic of the continuation of Sabretooth lies, in the fact that the combination of all its components traps you, enchants you. From the solidarity and political consciousness shared between Nekra and Oya, to the intriguing theme of the lab and the new creature created in this eugenicist experiment, to Creed’s final liberation (that, from his morbid point of view around pain, you kind of start to enjoy, even root for)… To then show you a pile of massacred mutant bodies. And making sure, via the data pages, that you understand this story is about disenfranchisement more deeply than a lot of mutant stories had been. Their bodies taken away from them. And, what does it mean to be less than human?  Where other great authors like James Baldwin have explored the dehumanization of black bodies, LaValle picks up the pen and situates it in a mutant fictional context, but with so many similarities to real-life events that the entertainment becomes chill and awareness. Then, the adventure begins for our unlikely heroes. With a monster at the helm, but, what is exactly a monster here?