Sabretooth & The Exiles #5
Graydon Creed holds all the cards in Sabretooth & the Exiles #5, by writer Victor LaValle, artist Leonard Kirk, colorist Rain Beredo, and letterer Cory Petit. As usual, this book is amazing, and there are no two ways about it.
Graydon lords over his father, breaking his neck and talking down to him, when Sabretooth’s Exiles get there. Not the Krakoan mutants, but Creed’s from around the Multiverse. They blitz Graydon, buying some time, and remove Sabretooth’s Barrington Coil, re-enabling his healing factor. Meanwhile, Nanny lets the group in on her plan to help them survive. They don’t trust her, but with no other choice, they allow her to regress them to children and leave her with the six baby mutants. Graydon activates the headless bodies of multiversal Sabretooths and attacks the Exiles, who have found the portal device that pulled them from their universes. Sabretooth busts in, teaches them how to kill the Sabretooth drones, and then throws Graydon into the portal. Later, the Krakoans wake up sans Sabretooth and Nanny, ready to build a new life. Barrington and the Creation decide to go their own way. Meanwhile, Sabretooth and his Exiles decide to pay an old friend on Krakoa a visit for their birthday.
Since Sabretooth dropped last year, LaValle, Kirk, Beredo, and Petit have been killing it. Honestly, killing it is almost not giving that book and this one enough praise. Sabretooth found a way to do exactly what every Krakoa book should do - tell an excellent story about life on the island that said a lot about the real world. Sabretooth & the Exiles doesn’t work exactly the same way its predecessor does, but that’s what makes it so great. LaValle easily could have done the same thing, creating a fantastic story filled with allegory, but he didn’t.
That’s not to say there is no allegory at all, as he fits in a lot of information about American crimes towards Black and Indigenous citizens, but this book was more of a “comic book,” for lack of a better term. But this final issue shows why it’s been so great. From bringing back Graydon Creed to multiversal Sabretooths, this has been a wild, action-packed read. This issue has everything readers could want, giving them a glimpse of the future - the tantalizing Sabretooth War described in an info page - and yet another cliffhanger ending that sets everyone up for the next phase of the story.
Kirk and Beredo have a simpatico relationship that makes their art so much better. The entire team has been working together for so long, and it’s plain to see. The character acting is what makes this book sing. Kirk has become a Sabretooth expert in the last ten issues, and Beredo’s colors are fire.
Sabretooth & the Exiles #5 puts a bow on another best-of-all-time series from LaValle, Kirk, Beredo, and Petit. The Krakoa Era Sabretooth comics are all-around brilliant, and hopefully, the seeds this one plants are going to sprout into another series from this amazing team.
