Sabretooth

Little is known about the early life of the feral mutant named Victor Creed, although it is believed that he suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of his father who, disgusted by the boy’s mutant nature, frequently beat him and chained him up in the darkened basement of their home. As an adult, Creed took the name Sabretooth, and by the 1910s he was known by this name in a small Canadian frontier community where he intimidated almost everyone. One of the few exceptions was a young man named Logan, whom Sabretooth sensed had superhuman abilities similar to his own. Hating the love that existed between Logan and a young Indian girl named Silver Fox, Sabretooth brutally assaulted her, apparently raping her and leaving her for dead. The enraged Logan then forced Sabretooth into a pitched battle, which ended with Sabretooth victorious. Unbeknownst to either combatant, Silver Fox survived the attack and soon departed from the community.

Little is known about Sabretooth’s subsequent activities until the early 1960s when served in Team X, a special intelligence unit run by the Central Intelligence Agency for the subversive Weapon X Program. In Team X, Sabretooth was reunited with both Logan, now known as Wolverine, and Silver Fox, however none of them recalled their past experiences due to false memory implants provided by Weapon X’s ally Psi-Borg. Sabretooth had a falling out with Wolverine during a mission in East Berlin in Germany during the early 1960s, exacerbating the already tense animosity between the two. During that same mission, Sabretooth met and romanced Leni Zauber, an operative for another unnamed government agency. Unbeknownst to Sabretooth, Zauber was actually the shape-shifting mutant known as Mystique. Sabretooth remained with Zauber for a month before returning to his Team X duties and remained with the team until its disbandment. He then set out on his own as a hired assassin, earning a worldwide reputation. At some point in the subsequent decades he became a student of the enigmatic Foreigner, head of the assassin guild known as the 1400 Club and one of the few men that Sabretooth respects. Sabretooth was also again manipulated by Mystique, who, for reasons of her own, seduced him in order to become pregnant with his child. However, the resultant son had no mutant potential and was abandoned by Mystique, growing up to become the anti-mutant activist Graydon Creed.

While working for the elitist Hellfire Club, Sabretooth clashed with Wolverine in the latter’s capacity as an agent of the Canadian government’s Department K. Months later, an amnesiac Wolverine, having recently been subjected to experiments which bonded the unbreakable metal Adamantium to his skeleton, sought the advice of Adamantium creator Doctor Myron MacLain. Sabretooth, hired by unidentified parties, interrupted the consultation and attempted to kill his former foe and teammate, only to be stopped by Wolverine’s allies. At some point, Sabretooth took up the practice of annually stalking Wolverine on the day Wolverine believed to be his birthday.

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n recent years Sabretooth, although always a violent man, gradually began developing a psychotic bloodlust that overcame his admittedly heartless human persona. As a result of this further mutation, Sabretooth’s features became more animal-like, a condition which eventually corrected itself. He first came to attention in the modern era when he abducted noted attorney Jeryn Hogarth who was rescued by his client, the martial artist known as Iron Fist. Later, Sabretooth formed a partnership with the costumed criminal the Constrictor on an assignment for the crimelord Montenegro. However, driven by his hunger for violence, Sabretooth disguised himself and slew several people in New York City, resulting in reports of a mysterious “Slasher.” When Sabretooth was exposed as the Slasher, he and the Constrictor found themselves fighting not only Iron Fist, but his allies in the super-strong Power Man, the cyborg detective Misty Knight, and the mutant adventurer El Aguila. Sabretooth and the Constrictor were forced to retreat, however the pair later sought revenge on Knight, only to again meet defeat at the hands of Power Man and Iron Fist.