This is "How Can I Explain?", which is a feature spotlighting inexplicable comic book plots.

Today, based on a suggestion from a reader whose e-mail I can't seem to find at the moment (perhaps it was asked of me on Twitter or something? If you're the person who asked me this one, e-mail me again so that I can credit you), we look at the odd mystery of what was up with Sabretooth's time at Weapon X.

As I am sure I have mentioned in the past, Sabretooth was always intended by his creators (Chris Claremont and John Byrne) to be connected to Wolverine (Byrne literally designed Sabretooth's face to be what Wolverine looked like under his mask, but while Byrne was working on that, Dave Cockrum ended up revealing what Wolverine actually looked like under the cowl, so Byrne used that design for Sabretooth's face instead), but instead he ended up as a recurring villain of Power Man and Iron Fist because Claremont and Byrne introduced him in the pages of Iron Fist instead of X-Men (Byrne was SO close to being the artist on X-Men at the time, so had they held off for a few more months, they could have introduced Sabretooth as an X-Men villain and have him be an X-character right away).

This time outside of the X-books (which lasted for almost a decade) led to some other inconsistencies that I will address in a future column (think "Black Cat beating the heck out of Sabretooth"), but whatever, however long it took he finally showed up in the pages of Uncanny X-Men where he was a member of the murderous Marauders, who tried to wipe out the Morlocks.

He had his first AND second fight with Wolverine!

Now that the X-books had their hooks in Sabretooth, they were not letting go of him. Chris Claremont, in particular, had a very specific idea on how Sabretooth should be handled. Claremont viewed him as sort of the bigger, badder version of Wolverine that Wolverine would never be able to truly defeat but Wolverine's determination to keep fighting him would show how great of a hero that the ol' Canucklehead was.

It was with that idea of Sabretooth in mind that Claremont revealed that Sabretooth and Wolverine's relationship went back many years, with Sabretooth visiting Wolverine on his birthday every year just to torment him.

That story was significant in that it revealed that the two characters had a long history with each other. This also led to the revelation that Wolverine's memories were messed up, as otherwise, why wouldn't he recognize Sabretooth when they "met" during the Mutant Massacre?

In the first storyline in 1991's X-Men following Chris Claremont's departure from the series after the first story arc, Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio revealed that not only did Wolverine and Sabretooth know each other in the past, but they were both part of Weapon X!

In fact, they were even on a Weapon X-centric team known as Team X!

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While the idea of Sabretooth and Wolverine being part of Weapon X together was introduced in the pages of X-Men, it was in the pages of Larry Hama's Wolverine that these ideas were really explored, especially since Lee and Portacio left Marvel to found Image Comics soon after that storyline.

Hama really got into Wolverine's memory and the implants that the Weapon X project put into his mind to make him remember events that did not actually occur. However, Hama made it clear that it was not just Wolverine that suffered from the memory implants.

In Wolverine #63 (by Larry Hama and Mark Texeira), we see that all of Team X suffered from memory implants...

However, that's the weird thing. Why didn't they do anything to Sabretooth? As we can see from Wolverine #10, he had the same powers as Wolverine back in the day....

So why didn't they DO anything with him? He's just basically the same guy either way, so what was the point?

Years later, when Sabretooth got involved with Weapon X again, they gave him new powers, so why not back then? Did they do something that we've just never noticed? It's inexplicable so far.

Okay, that's it for this installment! If you have any suggestions for other inexplicable comic book plots, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!