Today's Fact
Before the world feared Sabretooth, a chained boy in a Canadian cellar decided a hand was a fair price for freedom.
Young Victor Creed's father decided his son's mutation was the Devil's work. After the boy's violent childhood episodes, Zebadiah Creed chained his son in the family cellar like an animal — and, as told in X-Men Origins: Sabretooth Vol. 1 #1 (2009), he set about exorcising the beast by pulling Victor's elongated canine fangs out of his mouth with pliers, again and again.
The exorcism could never work, because the fangs were not a curse — they were a healing factor announcing itself. Every extracted tooth grew back. Victor's mother Victoria slipped down to feed the chained boy, listened to him beg her to let him go, and left him there anyway, too frightened of both her husband and her son to choose.
So Victor chose for himself. Working one hand loose from its chain and finding the other would not budge, he gnawed his own trapped hand off, climbed out of the cellar, and attacked the parents who had caged him. The hand, like the teeth before it, grew back — the first limb Sabretooth ever lost was one he took himself.
Why It's Obscure
Creed's origin stories contradict each other constantly — but every version keeps the cellar, the pliers, and the teeth that would not stay pulled.
Gallery
Comic art of Sabretooth — note the fangs his father kept pulling, shown plainly in the headshot cover.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against at least two independent sources before publication.
Bullpen Bulletins
- X-Men Origins: Sabretooth — uncannyxmen.netThe issue summary details the pliers pulling Victor's teeth in the basement, the chain he could not break, and his escape with his hand ripped off before he killed his parents.
- Victor Creed — WikipediaThe biography confirms the cellar chaining, the systematically pulled canines that grew back, and Victor gnawing off his own hand to escape.