The Marvel Universe is a famously weird place. I’m not talking about atomic age incidents, botched space flights, and mutants (well, not entirely). No, the Marvel Universe is weird down to its base fabric; superpowers and the supernatural permeate its history back to prehistoric times.
There was no normal part of human history.
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Sabretooth: The Dead Don’t Talk is set in 1800s New York, and it sets out to display just how abnormal that city was in the post-industrial era. Think Gangs of New York, but one of those gangs is composed entirely of Frankenstein-like reanimated corpses.
The book details Victor Creed’s bloody ascent to the top of the criminal pile, but Victor is rarely the most interesting thing going on in the story. Gruff, violent, and only as ambitious as the plot needs him to be at any given time, Victor remains as single-note a character in his own book as he has been in a majority of his villainous appearances. The book is much more interested in exhibiting that wide-open Marvel weirdness than it is in enriching its central character.
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But the period setting of The Dead Don’t Talk is fun, almost too much so. Filled with colorful characters and thematic echoes, the book wants to ratchet up the historic wonders and play with the malleability of the Marvel history; it looks to populate its period with all the goofy magics and science fiction wonders we’ve come to expect. There are echoes of the future: an inventor shows off his iron armor, a Fisk becomes kingpin of New York a full hundred years before the rise of Wilson Fisk. In a flashback, a man searches for the tomb of Khonshu and happens into that of a rival god – a near miss for a Moon Knight appearance. A major supporting character appears to be an Immortal Weapon of K’un-Lun. The gangs of the city have colorful themes: one wears masks, one is made up of sorcerers, and one goes about its violent business with electrified gauntlets. The gangs are superpowered.
In a world where this sort of malarkey is so widespread and openly on display, would there be room for skepticism or wonder? If animated corpses have long been known to run protection rackets and iron suits were being exhibited in city parks in the 1800s, why would the average civilian be awestruck by an Iron Man or surprised that vampires could overrun the Earth? How much historic weirdness is too much weirdness for the amazing in the Marvel Universe to remain amazing? The world of The Dead Don’t Talk undermines the idea of the Age of Marvels because it implies that those Marvels are only natural progressions of the everyday. Reanimation trumps super soldier; Egyptian crocodile men overshadow the Lizard.
The Dead Don’t Talk is fun, but its energies might be misspent: it does too much with its setting and not enough with its titular character. For all its spectacle, its narrative arc swings wildly but comes to a non-starter of a conclusion. It’s great to see creators at such play, but it’s hard not to feel as if there might have been missed opportunities obscured by all the whimsical clutter.
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