Warning! Spoilers ahead for Sabretooth #5!
Recently, Sabretooth escaped imprisonment on Krakoa and is set to resurrect one of the X-Men‘s weirdest teams: the Exiles. This falls in line with a particular editorial trend since the age of mutant sovereignty began in the Marvel Universe: launching new X-books while under the name of legacy X-teams and titles. Tini Howard & Marcus To’s Excalibur, Leah Williams & David Baldeon’s X-Factor, and Vita Ayala & Rod Reis’ New Mutants are all examples. The teased return of the Exiles is especially intriguing, as the title most often focused on alternate reality mutants, a subject long ignored in the Krakoan era.
Sabretooth has been trapped within the Pit underneath Krakoa since the events of House of X and Powers of X relaunched the entire X-line. Victor Creed’s experience in the Krakoan carceral systems remained a mystery until the debut of his own miniseries earlier this year. Through his own narcissism and cunning manipulation, Sabretooth proves he’s an underrated X-Men villain by engineering a scenario where his presence in the Pit creates a larger existential threat for the mutant nation than if he were free.
Unfortunately in, Sabretooth #5 from Victor LaValle, Leonard Kirk, Rain Beredo, VC’s Cory Petit, and Jordan D. White, Sabretooth’s freedom from imprisonment is ultimately short lived. By the end of the issue, Victor Creed finds himself jailed within a for-profit mutant prison owned and operated by Orchis. Sabretooth utters his final line as he greets his fellow inmates, “to me, my Exiles,” and the end page declares, “Next: Sabretooth & the Exiles.” Taking these together, it appears that Marvel is not only bringing back a new version of the Exiles, but also teasing ‘Sabretooth & the Exiles’ as an upcoming X-title. This is an intriguing development, as Sabretooth has proved he’s X-Men’s evilest villain. The current arc has been about using his status as a villain marginalized by Krakoa to manipulate others into following him. Perhaps the cycle begins anew as Victor begins recruiting his Orchis-imprisoned colleagues and dubbing them the Exiles.
Traditionally, the Exiles are a team of multiversal mutants, and are sometimes lead by a heroic variant of Sabretooth. With the most recent Exiles volume coming to a close back in 2019, the fan-favorite variants of Marvel’s merry mutants have been conspicuously absent from current publications coming out of the X-office. From within the narrative itself, multiversal variants of mutants find themselves distinctly marginalized by Krakoa. Alongside most mutant clones, mutant variants are not eligible for resurrection protocols should they die on Earth 616. As Krakoa does not prioritize the lives of these alternate reality mutants, perhaps this is also the population of mutants most likely to end up in an Orchis prison. If this is the case, 616 Sabretooth forming his own team of Exiles out of variant mutant inmates would create a nice thematic connection to the original Exiles stories.
Even if Exiles characters like variant Blink or Nocturne, the alternate reality daughter Scarlet Witch and Nightcrawler, never appear, this new ‘Sabretooth and the Exiles’ story holds a lot of potential. Whether it becomes a new ongoing X-book, a giant-size one shot, or an arc in one of the other X-titles currently running over at Marvel Comics, it seems that the Exiles are set to come back in a big way. It’s an unexpected move, but one that is ripe for continuing explore the mutants’ intersection with with carceral systems, which is a central theme in the Sabretooth mini. Sabretooth may be imprisoned once more, but that’s not stopping him from creating a new version of one of the strangest X-Men teams, the Exiles.
Sabretooth #5 is available now from Marvel Comics.
