Return of the Native

• Writer - Greg Rucka
• Artist - Darick Robertson
• Colorist - Studio F
• Lettering - Virtual Calligraphy
• Lettering - Rus Wooton
• Editor - Axel Alonso
• Editor - Warren Simons
• Editor in Chief - Joe Quesada

Summary

  Somewhere in the Canadian wilderness, where a pack of brown bears are hunting for their meal in a river. One bear, who was eating one of its fresh catch from the river, notices its fellow bears leaving the seen. It notices a creature who wanted to challenge it for its meal. The bear rears up in challenge against the creature, then suddenly gives up and leaves. An outstretched, beastly hand reaches out to grab the remaining carcass of the fish that the bear had been eating.

  A bit further away, Sabretooth was leading two other hunters in their quest to capture this creature known as the Native. Despite their obvious dislike for Sabretooth, the two hunters did what Sabretooth told them to do. As they were able to get closer to the Native, Sabretooth gives the other two hunters the word to shoot the native. Two tranquilizer darts hit their mark, as the native falls to the ground, apparently tranquillized. The three approach the native to chain it. One asks Sabretooth exactly what they had caught, but before he could finish his statement, the native awoke and promptly gored the man. The other hunter, a woman, tried to call for Sabretooth to help, but she too was gutted. Sabretooth attempted to rake at the beast with his claws, but to his surprise, the Native was able to dodge his swing, and instead, laid its own claws right across Sabretooth's face. Faster than Sabretooth could realize, the Native raked its claws across Sabretooth's back, leaving his back extremely bloodied. But before Sabretooth could attack, the beast rakes Sabretooth again in his face, and soon, Sabretooth blacks out. The Native finishes its meal, and leaves. A bit later after he leaves, Sabretooth regains conscious, his healing factor already at work healing his wounds, though realizing that he's got a good challenge ahead of him to apprehend this native.

  Meanwnhile, back in Portland, Oregon, we see Logan getting dressed in Cassie's room as the moonlight hits the face of the sleeping Cassie. Logan hops onto his bike and peels into the night. A few hours later, while doing 110 mphs on the freeway [kids, definitely do not try this], he suddenly swerves to miss a deer who had wandered onto the freeway. Logan is sent flying into a tree as his bike skitters across the freeway. When he regains conscious, he realizes that his bike is broken, the nearest service station was miles away, and it had started to rain. Sighing, he starts his long trek to that service station.

  In Seattle, where Sabretooth was making his report to his customer about his unsuccessful attempt to capture the "native". Sabretooth was angry at his customer, Mr. Willoughby for not debriefing him completely about the mission, while Mr. Willoughby believed that Sabretooth failed in his mission. A tense moment, but Mr. Willoughby's boss speaks up and pays Sabretooth for his services, saying that the mission wasn't a failure and that Sabretooth did confirm for them that the Native was still alive. Though the Native was now that much harder to catch, they wanted to rehire Sabretooth to capture and bring in the Native. Sabretooth, though, had other ideas, saying he knew he could find someone even better suited for the job.

  Somewhere in Montana, at a small truck stop diner. As Logan was having his dessert, he overhears two truckers at the counter talking about a story they heard on the news about sightings of Bigfoot. As Logan finishes his dessert, Sabretooth walks in, having a few choice words for Logan. As Logan glares at Sabretooth, who had took the remaining of Logan's slice of pie to eat, the two exchange a few more words. Tension escalates, but Sabretooth breaks the tension by pulling out a top secret envelope from inside his jacket. He tosses the folder in front of Logan. Logan opens it and looks through the documents, which were documents pertaining to the "Native", which appeared to be a product of some type of weapons development (similiar to the Weapon X project). As Sabretooth gets up to leave, he tells Logan that this creature "...was the one that got away. And the hunt is on."

Summary

  Marvel's big promotional push for April is the relocation of four titles to the Marvel Knights imprint - Wolverine, X-Statix, Hulk and Mark Millar's new Spider-Man book. I've always regarded this as a bit of a non-event, since none of the relocated books are really going to change tone at all. The decision to shunt them off into Marvel Knights is more indicative of a plan to make the rest of the Marvel line blander - which you would have thought flew in the face of the commercial lessons of the last few years, but we shall see.

  If anything, this month sees those three titles in unusually commercial mood. Hulk has Iron Man guest starring, X-Statix has the Avengers, and Wolverine abandons its normal array of human criminals to bring back Sabretooth and the Weapon X project. Since these are scripts written by Greg Rucka before starting his DC exclusive deal, I assume that the relatively audience-friendly story this month is just a happy coincidence.

  It's been a while since Sabretooth's been in this title. The major problem with this book has been the relatively poor quality of opposition for Wolverine, so it's actually a nice change to have him back. Rucka's interpretation of the character is a lot less bloodthirsty than most, which is to say that this version can actually hold a conversation without killing the person he's talking to.

  I much prefer these approaches; Sabretooth's all too easy to write as a one-dimensional lunatic, but he's much more effective when he's given a more rounded personality, and allowed to play mind games. This time round, his idea seems to be to save himself the hassle of hunting down the mysterious Native by getting Wolverine to do the job for him.

  Some people will find that this version of Sabretooth is just a bit too reasonable for them, I admit - it's very far off at that end of the spectrum. Still, this is a very promising start to the storyline, and after a year of more low-key stories, it feels like the right time to start bringing elements of the Wolverine mythos back into the book - particularly ones like Sabretooth who work within the relatively grounded tone of Rucka and Robertson's stories.

  Rating: A-