A husband and father on a supernatural journey to find his missing family. A sane man locked in a mental institution where a buffalo-headed monster terrorizes patients. A down-and-out janitor who learns he’s destined to join a group of paranormal researchers.
They’re just a few of the protagonists Victor LaValle ’94, BA ’95, has created in his more than two decades as a writer.
Having gained a following among readers and critics for his ethereal horror novels, he has delved into other media—with a TV show set for 2023.
LaValle has even joined the legendary Marvel Universe, with his five-issue comic series Sabretooth: The Adversary. The gory character study of the classic X-Men villain was released in 2022 (along with the first two issues of its sequel, Sabretooth & the Exiles).
In the series, LaValle brings depth and clarity to Sabretooth—an incarcerated mutant killer-for-hire historically written off as one-dimensional—by viewing his wickedness through the lens of his lifelong imprisonment.
“He’s often portrayed as brutal and animalistic—and that often means stupid,” says LaValle. “Which, to me, is a sign of somebody who doesn’t know animals very well, because animals are not stupid. They’re often cunning. They can be clever.”
While penning a comic about a feral mutant may seem a departure for LaValle, Sabretooth shares some notable traits with the author’s other protagonists: they’re intelligent antiheroes forced to make morally suspect choices in order to survive.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
