Shadow and Flame with Magik

Writer Ray Fawkes

Artist Jonathan Marks

Colorist Lee Loughridge

Letterer VC’s Cory Petit

Fang has taken Sabretooth to outer space, he is replacing Wolverine on what would have been their annual trip.

65 Lightyears Outside Galaxy.  Designate GRB 0904298.  They are going to storm a pirate fleet flagship.  The alien race is known as, the J’Grajj Raiders.  Over the past two hundred years, they have enslaved, mutilated and murdered trillions of sentient beings.  The J’Grajj have like an octopus for a head with three rows of eyes and humanoid bodies.  Sabretooth takes a few of them out, rather easily.

65 Miles Outside Natal, Brazil.  Fantomelle and her fox, Culpepper, are onto another relic or artifact of Wolverine, someone is hiring them to gather all of these modern treasures.  Fantomelle has to fight off a robot.

In space.  The translator finally kicks in so the J’Grajj leader can speak English.  They have never seen anyone from Earth before.  The leader explains that their race is no longer the butchers that they were once known as.  They have a new religion, Ing’tajj.  They are more enlighten.  I love the examples of how they are have changed.  They no longer devour limbs, just to hear folks scream.  No longer do they main and enslave whole races, just to infect them with diseases that will slowly kill them, to the ones that they sell these poor folk to.  Instead, now, they simply exterminate everything quickly and painlessly.  Their weapons have advanced to the point where they can commit genocide in a single breath.

Sabretooth starts killing the leader, whose last reaction (and is so awesome) is to believe that the translator is broken.  He tries to clarify, that they simply cleanses races or eliminate speices or kill them.  So the translator works just fine.

Fang explains what Sabretooth suspects (and I completely misssed) that the J’Grajj are pretty weak, so those they conquer must be even weaker, which must disgust the old Sabretooth, who still exists somewhere in new Creed’s mind.

Tautona Gold Mine.  Two Miles Beneath the Surface.  Shogun and Lady Deathstrike are sparring.  She is coming at him hard, she yearns for him, as this is some intense foreplay.  This is the type of relationship that Frank Miller would be proud to read.

Junk interrupts this session, to ask for some help, as Mystique has him doing research on Fang.

Lady Deathstrike corrects her earlier statement, they are not playing cat and mouse.  They are playing the frog and the scorpion.  Shogun brought the villains together and he must know that one of them will eventually kill him.  She assures him that it won’t be her.

In Space.  Fang tells Sabretooth how he was one of Logan’s favorite subjects (to talk about, I believe).  How the first forty or fifty years, Sabretooth was a real pain in Logan’s arse.  How Victor Creed tried to kill Wolverine, every year, on his suspected birthday.  As later, Melita would discover Logan’s real birthday.  Or rather, James Howlett’s birthday.  This occurred in Wolverine Volume Three Issue 5.1.  Which was a fun issue, Kitty wasn’t at the birthday party, which is pretty silly, I think.

Fang continues to pour salt on the wound.  Wolverine grew bored and tired of Sabretooth.  He knew that Creed would never actually kill him, he was only a bully.

Fang knows that Sabretooth didn’t kill Wolverine.  Creed did rip out his eye (just like what happened to Daken) but Lady Deathstrike stopped him from finishing Wolverine.

During this conversation, Fang has been setting up the weapons to fire upon the rest of the J’Grajj fleet.  Sabretooth doesn’t want to kill anymore but gives the okay, after being asked too many times.  Fang orders the weapons to fire and Sabretooth changes his mind, too late.  The J’Grajj are down to just a few ships now.

Fang drops Sabretooth off and wants another person for another adventure.  Once again, X23 offers herself.  Fang has a special mission for X23, who he likes to call, Laura.  As Fang teleports the two of them away, X23 places a nano-disk on Fang and now Junk knwos what makes Fang vulnerable, as the issue ends.