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-

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