ERNST SABLINOVA
Real Name: Ernst Sablinova
Identity/Class: Human (Symkarian) (World War II to modern day)
Occupation: Mercenary, Nazi hunter (largely retired)
Group Membership: Wild Pack (Battlestar/Lemar Hoskins, Amy Chen, Crippler/Carl Striklan, Larry Curtis, Doug Powell, Fritz Sablinova, Silver Sable/Silver Sablinova, others);
formerly Avengers Initiative (Ulysses Bloodstone, Dominic Fortune/Duvid Fortunov, Timothy "Dum-Dum" Dugan, Nick Fury, Kraven the Hunter/Sergei Kravinoff, Namora, Sabretooth/Victor Creed)
Affiliations: Bogart Jeffries, King Phillip of Symkaria, Lorna Kleinfeldt, Uncle Morty, Raul Quentino, Sandman (William Baker)
Enemies: Captain America imposter, Genesis Coalition (Dmitri Petrovich, Fritz Sablinova, Ivan Trefkov, others), Red Skull (identity unrevealed), National Front (Wilhelm Schultz, others), numerous other Nazi groups
Known Relatives: Fritz Sablinova (brother, deceased), Anastasia Sablinova (wife, deceased), Silver Sablinova (Silver Sable, daughter, deceased), Anna Sablinova (niece), Morty (last name unrevealed, brother-in-law), Foreigner (ex-son-in-law), unidentified relatives (Anna's parents)
Aliases: Silver Sable
Base of Operations: Castle Sable, Symkaria;
formerly the Genesis Coalition's Black Sea stronghold
First Appearance: (mentioned) Amazing Spider-Man I#265 (June, 1985)
(partial) Web of Spider-Man Annual#5/5 (1989)
(full) Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#1 (June, 1992)
Powers/Abilities: Ernst Sablinova is an excellent combat tactician, although his strategies are severely out-of-date. After his ordeal with the Genesis Coalition, Ernst Sablinova was left permanently wheelchair-bound. His kidneys were damaged, requiring him to go on dialysis; he was also left with one functioning lung. In his prime, Sablinova was a superb hand-to-hand and armed combatant, well-versed in the use of a number of melee weapons and firearms, and was an experienced scuba diver.
History: (New Avengers II#10 (fb) ) - Known as the Silver Sable, Ernst Sablinova fought Nazis across Europe during World War II.
(New Avengers II#10 (fb) ) - Sablinova was summoned to Boston, Massachusetts in 1959, where he met monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone. There, they both met Nick Fury, who had summoned them, and his team of Nazi-hunting Avengers - Dum Dum Dugan, Dominic Fortune, Kraven the Hunter, Sabretooth, and Namora.
(New Avengers II#11 (fb) ) - Sablinova convened with the Avengers in Helsingborg, Sweden, on the trail of the Red Skull. After Sabretooth stole a truck, Sablinova drove it, with the rest of the team inside, into the Skull's base. Thanks to Namora's command over sea life, they overwhelmed the guards and entered the base, which was soon set ablaze in the battle. The Red Skull fled, leaving the Avengers to contend with Captain America - or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
(New Avengers II#12 (fb) ) - While the others pursued the Skull, Fury, Bloodstone, and Sablinova stayed behind to battle the ersatz Captain. They defeated him, and went outside the burning base to find that the others had captured the Skull and a case of a Super-Soldier Serum variant; Fury deduced the Skull was an imposter. Before they could interrogate the Skull, however, Sabretooth decapitated him.
(New Avengers II#13 (fb) ) - Fury took the case and left the others in Sweden.
(Avengers 1959#1) - In autumn 1959, the team gathered in a New York restaurant to celebrate their successes. Sablinova departed with Bloodstone to hunt big game in the Savage Land.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#34 (fb) ) - Ernst romanced Anastasia, a Symkarian girl, and turned down a royal appointment so he could remain in Symkaria with her. Once, he risked his life to save her from a burning barn, and thus won her heart. Shortly afterwards they married, and had a daughter, Silver.
(Amazing Spider-Man I#265 (fb)/Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb)/Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25/1 (fb) ) - In league with the Symkarian government, Ernst Sablinova formed the Wild Pack with his twin brother Fritz (whose death they faked) to hunt down Nazi war criminals; Fritz occasionally took Ernst's place to confuse their enemies. Anastasia worried that he'd die, leaving her and the infant Silver alone, but he told her he had no intention of dying.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb) ) - Over the years, the Wild Pack hunted down and neutralized nearly every surviving Nazi organization.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#1 (fb)/Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#8 (fb) ) - The young Silver spotted a group of Nazis, led by Ivan Trefkov, in Symkaria, and overheard them plotting to kill Ernst. She ran to tell him, unaware that they were following her. Before Silver and Ernst's horrified eyes, Trefkov and his men gunned down Anastasia. Ernst blamed Silver, and opened fire, but Trefkov escaped.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb) ) - In the years that followed, Ernst trained Silver to join the Wild Pack; still blaming her for Anastasia's death, he became cold and distant. Often he would be gone for months, then barely acknowledge her when he returned. Fritz, posing as Ernst, handled part of her technical training while Ernst was away on missions.
(Web of Spider-Man Annual#5/5 (fb) ) - Ernst travelled to Moscow; after being absent for months, he returned to see his daughter during a training exercise, bringing her a crystal cat figurine as a gift. His arrival distracted her, and she was struck down, much to Ernst's disapproval.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb) ) - Ernst accompanied Silver to London for her first mission with the Wild Pack, against the KKK splinter group National Front, who planned to smuggle Nazi war criminal Wilhelm Schultz into the US. The Wild Pack attached their hideout; when one of the Nazis held Ernst at gunpoint, Silver hesitated to execute Schultz, who took advantage and stabbed her. Before Ernst could shoot him, Silver stabbed Schultz with his own knife.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb) ) - King Phillip gave Ernst a castle to serve as his base of operations as a reward for his service.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#1 (fb)/Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9 (fb) ) - As he aged, Ernst had two heart attacks. Silver, now his second-in-command, argued that he was too old for field duty, but when his intelligence network located Ivan Trefkov, he jumped at the chance to avenge his wife. He led the Pack to Tokyo, and planned the mission so that he alone would kill Trefkov, using Silver and the other Pack members as a diversion. Silver realized her father's subterfuge and planted a tracking device on him, finding him just as he confronted Trefkov. He threw aside his weapon, preferring to kill the Nazi with his bare hands, but Silver's arrival distracted him, allowing Trefkov to stab him in the chest. Before the Pack could regroup, Trefkov escaped with Ernst.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25 (fb) ) - Believing Ernst to be dead, Symkaria held a funeral for him.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25 (fb) ) - Trefkov brought Ernst to Hydra. He was held prisoner until Fritz, who had also been taken prisoner by Hydra while searching for him, allied with Trefkov to form the splinter group the Genesis Coalition. They hooked Ernst up to machinery in the Coalition's Black Sea base, using his brain as a living computer to devise battle strategies for them; Ernst tried to concentrate on military failures to sabotage their plans. Fritz's sanity eventually slipped, and he lost sight of his original intention to destroy Hydra and the Genesis Coalition from within.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#8 - BTS) - Genesis Coalition member Dmitri Petrovich told Silver that Ernst was still alive.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25) - International assassin (and Silver's ex-husband) the Foreigner led Silver and her Wild Pack through the Coalition's base, where they found Ernst. Although he commanded her to leave him and stop Fritz, she insisted on taking him with them. In the ensuing battle, Silver killed Trefkov and the Foreigner killed Fritz, shattering the Genesis Coalition. Silver brought Ernst back to Symkaria, but his years of captivity left him confined to a wheelchair and with extensive organ damage. Days later in Castle Sable, he talked with Silver, and told her that he was proud of her.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#30) - Silver told Ernst of her intention to retire from the Wild Pack; he expressed his disappointment, but before their conversation could continue, the Foreigner arrived, asking a favor of Silver.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#31) - Ernst bemoaned his physical condition to Silver, and pressed her for details on Trefkov's death; he was displeased when she described her lack of catharsis.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#33) - With Silver in Japan aiding the Foreigner, Ernst observed a Wild Pack training session. He learned from Battlestar that Sandman and Quentino had gone AWOL to rescue her, convincing him that the Pack needed a firmer hand at the wheel. Later, upon her return from Japan, he learned that she was pregnant (although unbeknownst to her, it was a false alarm), and was upset that she planned to keep it, and hadn't told him. Later, he was present when Silver announced her retirement from active duty.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#34) - Ernst overheard Silver reject an offer from CIA agent Bogart Jeffries to clear her to operate legally in the US, in return for her joining the Wild Pack on a mission to locate a rogue weapons research team in Chile. He berated her for it, and suggested that her mother would have been disappointed in her. Angered, Silver put her father in change of the CIA's mission. He did so eagerly, and devised a plan that was considerably riskier than those Silver had mapped out, much to the consternation of Battlestar.
(Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#35) - Ernst coordinated the mission from Castle Sable; as Silver passed through his command center, he again suggested that she should be with them. Thoroughly enjoying himself, he suggested that the Pack kill one of their captives to elicit information from the others; an order Battlestar refused to comply with. As the mission continued, Ernst's tactics proved to be woefully out of date, endangering the team. Finally, Silver took off in an airship to join them; Silver's arrival turned the tide. She also insisted on recovering the rogue research team members, instead of their prototype weapons, as Ernst and the CIA wanted. As she risked her life to apprehend the chief researcher, Ernst finally expressed some concern for his daughter and told her that she had done well, even though she had broken the deal with the CIA.
Comments: First mentioned by Tom DeFalco, Ron Frenz, and Josef Rubinstein. Partially depicted by Fabian Nicieza, Mark Propst, and Andy Mushynsky. Fully depicted by Gregory Wright, Steven Butler, and Jim Sanders III.
In 1991's Web of Spider-Man#72, Dominic Fortune tells Silver Sable that he knew her father. Twenty years later, boom, Avengers 1959. Ain't continuity grand?
Sablinova's hair is brown in his flashback appearances with the Wild Pack in Silver Sable's '90s series, up to and including his capture by Trefkov, but it's silver in his Avengers 1959 appearances, which must take place before it. Furthermore, those appearances also establish that he was known as the Silver Sable in WWII, indicating that his hair was silver even then. Hair dye?
For Ernst's timeline to work, he has to be quite a bit older than Anastasia - he was active in WWII, but Silver Sable, despite her prematurely-silver hair, can't be any older than 35 or so.
Shadowland: Blood on the Streets indicates that someone in Silver Sable's family died during some recent unrest in Symkaria. Anna turned up alive and well in that miniseries, so that leaves either Ernst or Morty as the only two possibilities.
Yes, that does appear to be AYN on the front of Ernst's wheelchair up there. Maybe Gordon Purcell is a big Atlas Shrugged fan.
Profile by Minor Irritant.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Ernst Sablinova should be distinguished from:
images: (without ads)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#35, p2, pan3 (main image)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#34, p19, pan2 (headshot)
New Avengers II#10, p19, pan3 (with 1959 Avengers)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#9, p6, pan3 (with original Wild Pack)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25, p20, pan3 (imprisoned by the Genesis Coalition)
Appearances:
Amazing Spider-Man I#265 (June, 1985) - Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Frenz (pencils), Josef Rubinstein (inker), Jim Owsley (editor)
Web of Spider-Man Annual#5/5 (1989) - Fabian Nicieza (writer), Mark Propst (pencils), Andy Mushynsky (inker), Jim Salicrup (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#1 (June, 1992) - Gregory Wright (writer), Steven Butler (pencils), Jim Sanders III (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#8-9 (January-February, 1993) - Gregory Wright (writer), Steven Butler (pencils), Jim Sanders III (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#25 (June, 1994) - Gregory Wright (writer), Steven Butler (pencils), Pam Eklund (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#30 (November, 1994) - Gregory Wright (writer), Scot Eaton (pencils), Jim Amash (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#31 (December, 1994) - Gregory Wright (writer), Gordon Purcell (pencils), Pam Eklund (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#33-34 (February-March, 1995) - Gregory Wright (writer), Gordon Purcell (pencils), Pam Eklund (inker), Craig Anderson (editor)
Silver Sable and the Wild Pack#35/1 (April, 1995) - Gregory Wright (writer), Gordon Purcell (pencils), Parks, Hudson, McClellan & Alexandrov (inkers), Craig Anderson (editor)
New Avengers II#10-13 (May-August, 2011) - Brian Michael Bendis (writer), Howard Chaykin (artist), Tom Brevoort (editor)
Avengers 1959#1 (December, 2011) - Howard Chaykin (writer, artist), Lauren Sankovitch (editor)
First Posted: 07/16/2012
Last updated: 03/25/2013
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
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