krisis

Guides to Sabretooth & Weapon X (Early Access for ALL Patrons!)

Added 2019-02-05 20:44:21 +0000 UTC

Today's new guides for all Patrons covers an X-Men character (and often-villain) with long and sometimes convoluted history, as well as the program he's frequently associated with...

Sabretooth, Victor Creed - The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Weapon X & Weapon Plus - The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Log in to CK to access these guide. Leave a comment if you do not have access to your CK login and I'm happy to help.

These guides help to expand Crushing Comics' core of X-Men coverage. Since that's what brought so many of you to my site they are available to all Patrons from $1 and up. Thank you for your support!

First, hello to the new Patrons who joined this campaign over the end-of-year holidays! I appreciate your support, especially during a period where I wasn't launching new content.

Having you on board along with my amazing, incredible, and uncanny long-time supporters has meant I can plan for a few new developments behind the scenes here at Studio Krisis in 2019!

When I started filling in the gaps in my X-Men collection in 2010, I realized that there was a lot of Sabretooth comics and a lot I didn't know about Victor Creed.

I fondly recalled his X-Men debut in Mutant Massacre, I was around for his brief rehabilitation before Onslaught, and I was reading him in a modern team-up with the X-Men at the start of Mike Carey's run, but I was missing a lot of connective tissue in between.

That lead to many questions. How did he get from a random Iron Fist villain to an X-Men villain? How long was he employed by Mister Sinister? Why did we think he was Wolverine's dad? What happened that made him suddenly reliant on psychics in the early 90s? Did he really turn good in the mid-90s around when he helped out in Phalanx Covenant, or was it just an act? What exactly is his relationship with Mystique? Did he ever have an adamantium skeleton, and if he did where did it go?

And, most confusing to me, did he actually have anything to do with the Weapon X program that spawned Wolverine?

This guide answers every one of those questions and more. It's written in the style of the Guide to X-23, which means I run through the narrative of every Sabretooth appearance ever published. That took an extremely long time to do - about as long as my Guide to Wonder Woman, and Diana has been around since World War II!

Along the way, I learned how Sabretooth was an unremarkable flunky for the first decade of his life as a character. One time he was beaten to a bloody pulp by Black Cat! I also realized that his mission to hunt the Morlocks drove a lot of his early X-appearances beyond just Mutant Massacre, including a terrific showdown with Archangel in X-Factor.

Creed's onoging Morlock hunt flowed through his early appearances in Wolverine and New Mutants until the introduction of the Weapon X Program in Marvel Comics Presents coincided with the invention of Logan's Team X past, which forged a more permanent canonical connection between Creed and Logan (other than just the hints of their potential familial relation).

I also finally cleared up my confusion about Sabretooth's 90s journey from his mini-series to X-Men Unlimited #3 to X-Mansion to Wolverine's lobotomy on the edge of Age of Apocalypse to X-Factor.

It turns out that his brief flirtation with being good was incredibly well-coordinated across four different ongoing x-titles (I had forgotten about the bit in X-Force!), and if you read them in order you truly get a coherent story about how Victor Creed may have been edging toward permanent rehabilitation before Logan screwed things up with his middle claw.

In taking a broader view of Sabretooth's history, his character arc becomes much more clear. While it's not as epic and well-coordinated as the tragic rise, fall, and return of Magneto's villainy, Sabretooth's story is surprising coherent when taken as a whole. His brief stints of altruism all make sense in context, because in the end they had all been self-serving up until his inversion in 2014's Axis and subsequent membership in Uncanny X-Men and Weapon X.

Originally, I thought a Sabretooth page would make sense as a home to both of Marvel's Weapon X ongoings, which are a rare gap in my X-Men team book coverage that's relegated only to my "Other Ongoing Series" guide.

Yet, the more I learned about Creed's history and the Weapon X program, the more it became clear that Weapon X deserved a guide all on its own. Neither Weapon X ongoing title was really Creed's story, even though they both featured him heavily.

Also, the concept of "Weapon X" became so much more than the program that spawned Wolverine, thanks to Grant Morrison expanding it to "Weapon Plus" in New X-Men, connecting it all the way back to the origin of Captain America!

The trickiest part of the Weapon X guide was figuring out exactly who was a part of the programs for Weapons I through IX. A lot of seemingly reliable internet sources are totally wrong on this and based entirely in conjecture, like ones that say Luke Cage was part of the Weapon Plus program!

I managed to research and debunk a few of these misleading claims with help from Zack at Xavier Files and the X-Plain The X-Men community. As a result, I'm pretty certain that the bulleted list of Weapon Plus participants at the top of the guide is the most accurate one on the internet at the moment.

The Weapon X guide also became a convenient home to Greg Pak's Weapon H, a combination of Wolverine and Hulk. While I know that sounds gratuitous and super-lame, Pak somehow recaptured the essence of the inspiration behind Barry Windsor Smith's original "Weapon X" story to follow how a new unwilling recruit might play out if he had a stronger connection to the world he left behind. It's a book I never expected to like but wound up loving.

What's up next for comic guides?

I told you back in November that "guides might have to slow down" for a while thanks to my office acting as a permanent guest room for a visiting family member.

(For those of you not up on the long-term developments of Chez Krisis, my family (and my entire comics collection) moved from Philadelphia to Wellington, New Zealand in the middle of 2017. Up until November, we had seen only two people we know from the states in that entire time.)

Our permanent house guest wound up coinciding with even more visitors from the states and a big (non-comics) career move for me. It was a lot to digest all at once. It was amazing for my personal pursuit of happiness, but it put the major whammy on having any time for Crushing Krisis projects.

Now I'm back in my home office and back on a schedule. Me being me, I just spent an entire week carefully cataloguing every minute of every day to get a sense of just how much time I can devote to Crushing Krisis.

I want to be cautious about over-promising the speed of new guides to you all, but I also want to be consistent. I don't want to be the Patreon equivalent of a comic book that double-ships for months and then disappears from the schedule (which is kinda what happened in November - sorry!).

Right now it seems realistic to aim for three content launches a month:

a new Marvel Guide (sometimes driven by your Patrons' Choice votes) in my march towards covering all Marvel titles, ever;
a key DC Guide, as I continue on my journey to cover the 52 biggest hunks of DC Comics
one major revision to an existing project, like the X-Men Reading Guide improvements, or a page that adds context to existing guides, like a Marvel Era Guide.

Of course, some of those things wind up being quick four-hour projects and others are the month-long development journey of the Sabretooth guide, so we'll just have to see how things go this month and then reassess.

The launch of this pair of guides means I've hit my goal of maintaining an exclusive guide for every dollar contributed during the year by a Crushing Cadet! Woot! I set this goal back in July because it felt like a tangible way to show the benefits of pledging to potential supporters, plus kept me focused on creating new content that all pledge levels could access.

Now that I've reached my goal, I've updated the pledge level descriptions to reflect this.

Finally, due to popular demand, the Teen Titans & Young Justice guide will become available to the public later today.

As always, I value your feedback - both on this new guide and in general. Don't hesitate to comment to let me know your thoughts - including what's on your most-wanted guides list!

Current Exclusives For Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 12 Guides!

DC Guides: Batman - Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight