On the list of things Marvel really needed to publish, another Sabretooth mini is just below the long-awaited grim and gritty revamp of Speedball. Daniel Way, whose job at Marvel seems to be tackling these unnecessary miniseries focusing on villains (see also: Bullseye's Greatest Hits), gets the call to hook up with the often-inscrutable Bart Sears and tell a story about the inhuman, conscience-free killer whom Mark Millar once correctly pegged as a low-rent Wolverine clone. The good news is that the book isn't as dire as you'd expect, and that aside from an overly bulked-up Sabretooth, Sears's artwork is actually plenty readable. The bad news is that aside from a moderately clever twist sequence at the end, the story reads pretty much exactly like what you'd expect, and does nothing to justify its existence, just like so many of the mutant spinoffs Marvel is flooding the market with right now.
I really don't much like the character of Sabretooth, and I certainly don't buy him as a protagonist. I remember enjoying the Sabretooth miniseries done in '93 by Larry Hama and Mark Texeira, although even that grew a little tired a couple issues in, and there were several forgettable miniseries and one-shots after that. I remain puzzled as to why there's a conviction that this one-note psychopath can carry his own stories. Certainly Way does nothing to convince me here, as Sabretooth doesn't show us anything in the way of a personality that we haven't seen before.
Of course, Way tries to do what he has done with books like Venom and Bullseye, which is to use the title character essentially as the antagonist of the book. Sabretooth is the monster in the monster movie, and the story is actually focused on those going up against him. That's all well and good, but Way doesn't really do anything to make those characters stand out as interesting either. Aside from a forgettable attempt at humanizing them by telling an unrelated story of World War II, these guys are there just to be killed by the monster. And honestly, there's so much atrocity going on in the top 10 books, with Avengers dying off or betraying the team and supervillains raping and killing supporting cast members in Identity Crisis, that I'm not terribly impressed with the deaths of a handful of extras in a book based on a third tier supervillain.
The good news of the book actually comes on the art front, as Bart Sears and Mark Pennington show off some of the skill that made The Path beautiful to look at. Sears still has the unfortunate propensity for weird full shots of characters inserted onto a page that crowd out the rest of the panels and confuse the storytelling, but his depiction of the arctic environment is believable enough, and the storytelling here is considerably clearer than a lot of his work, especially the recent Captain America and the Falcon. In addition, his generally overly muscled characters are not to be found in most of the work, with the exception of Sabretooth, who has that ugly '90s Image look to him.
There is a clever misdirection on the last two pages of this book that gave me a bit of a chuckle, and brought in a surprising nemesis to face off with Sabretooth (for once, it's not Wolverine.) However, one clever bit of writing can't save what is otherwise a formulaic story that echoes too closely with the other work Way has done and doesn't really develop any characters well enough that we care what happens to any of them. 3/10
