Exceptional X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #1
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Kate Pryde has retired as a superhero and is working in a bar called Lulu’s Tavern in Bridgeport, a district of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, Bridgeport used to have a reputation for racial intolerance but is now one of Chicago’s most diverse areas. We saw Lulu’s Tavern before in X-Men #35.
Kate is depressed, anxious or both. There are a couple of points in the issue where she seems to break the fourth wall, though you could rationalise that she’s talking to herself out loud if you want. She’s taking the fall of Krakoa badly. While she describes Krakoa as her home “sort of”, presumably referencing her semi-detached status as the one mutant who couldn’t use the gates, she evidently feels it as a loss. She worries that the more hubristic aspects of the Krakoan age are going to come back to bite the mutants now, and she’s appalled by her dark-and-violent phase as Shadowkat in Gerry Duggan’s X-Men. Being around other mutants strikes her as living in “the shattered remains of the life I knew”, and since she can pass for human, she’s going to drop out of all that, live a normal life, and try not to think about it.
Since Kate has been a full time X-Man for so long, her attempts to reintegrate into her pre-X-Men life have led to her moving in with Priti, a girl she knew in middle school (see below). Kate is very conscious of the fact that she’s trying to recapture a life that she left when she was much, much younger.
Kate has a date lined up, or rather thinks she does, because it turns out that she’s got the day wrong. Her date is unnamed but referred to as “her”.
Kate finally relents to do superhero stuff when someone shoots at Trista (of whom, see below), to the extent of getting her to safety and then taking her home. She gives Trista her name and address, and specifically invites Trista to call her Kitty (which is going to be her name again going forward). In context, this is less gratingly retro than you might think – it’s the one aspect of her younger life she hadn’t yet reverted to, and from the readers’ point of view it serves more as a connection to her classic X-Men set-up, relenting on her complete denial of the mutant world.
While Kate is initially frustrated by the encounter with Trista, since it’s a reminder of how nothing ever changes for the mutants, Trista’s thank you gift seems to cheer her up a lot, and she wears the (garish) earrings that Trista gives her.
Trista Marshall is a teenager who gets turned away from a Bunny Starlite Dreams concert, apparently some sort of J-Pop act, given the way the crowd are dressed. She’s in full on cosplay mode when we see her, but she is dressed up for the show. When she loses her temper she turns metallic, develops some tendrils from her hands, and apparently has superhuman strength. It’s not clear whether the doorman who shoots at her misses the first time, or whether Trista is bulletproof but gets knocked to the floor. She’s mortified at having used her powers in public, seemingly more because she’s embarrassed about being a mutant than because she fears any retaliation. She doesn’t know any mutants, and wants to live a normal life, which prompts Kitty to give the “mutant pride” speech to Trista (and by extension herself). Trista lives with her grandmother, who knows that she’s a mutant; we’re not told what happened to her parents.
Trista’s thank you parcel includes a note about “mutant pride” and an awful lot of confetti.
Emma Frost seems to be living rather opulently in a hotel, though I suppose it could be a mansion. It’s likely that she’s mind controlling people. She’s psychically scanning various X-Men, apparently as candidates for some unspecified project. After rejecting Banshee (her former co-headmaster from Generation X), Storm, Wolverine and Nightcrawler, and putting Bishop down as a “maybe”, she turns her attention to “Kitty”, but doesn’t actually contact her.
Iceman appears on the bonus page, getting a flight to Chicago for some reason.
THE SUPPORTING CAST:
Lulu is Kitty’s boss at the eponymous Tavern. She seems nice. There’s another bartender called Lizzy who doesn’t seem to be significant.
Priti is Kate’s flatmate. They were good friends in middle school. Priti’s dog is named after 1970s ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, so presumably they were in dance class together. We’re not told whether Kate and Priti have stayed in touch all this time, or whether Kate was so desperate that she wound up calling people she hasn’t seen in a decade. Priti seems generally supportive while trying to give Kate space.
Trista’s grandmother completes the book’s selection of impeccably decent supporting characters, encouraging Trista to stand up for herself.
VILLAINS:
An unnamed bouncer at the Bunny Starlite Dreams concert, but boy, there seem to be a lot of other armed guards for him to call on. Maybe that’s just American music venues for you.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 5 panel 1: “The helm of a pirate ship.” In Marauders. There are other places Kate could have listed as former homes – from her time in Excalibur, for example – but there’s really no advantage here in invoking anything other than her back story, the trad X-Men set-up, and the version of the X-Men that came immediately before this.
Page 6 panel 4: “All that ‘You have new gods’ stuff is back to bite us, hard.” Referring to Magneto’s speech in House of X #1.
Page 10 panels 1 and 4: “Is mutancy contagious? Reports out of San Francisco tonight…” These two panels show Cyclops’s X-Men team rescuing Ben Liu in X-Men #2. We were told in X-Men #3 that Cyclops had been caught on camera mentioning that Ben’s powers emerged as an adult, sparking a conspiracy theory that mutantcy had become contagious.
Page 10 panel 3: “It’s my first time trying to Verate app and this is the customized skincare…” The bonus page for this issue – which they failed to include a link to in the digital edition – features an advert for an app called Veri (sic), described as “a new app that uses your DNA … to design custom lifestyle solutions fit for you and you alone”. It specifically lists “skincare” as an example, so presumably this is meant to be the same thing. The small print mentions an “irrevocable genetic data-sharing agreement with VERI International” (void in North Dakota). Sounds sinister.
Page 10 panel 5: Lorem Ipsum. Given as the name of Kitty’s favourite band from high school. Lorem Ipsum is the standard block of Latin which is commonly used as placeholder text. It’s also a real Dutch indie band, which is presumably a coincidence.
Nope, this one wasn’t for me. I’m vaguely accepting of a need for a return to status quo, but gleefully flinging off the character growth that Kate went through in the last few eras isn’t a story I’m interested in reading.
What’s more, the retread isn’t even good retread – why not at least send Kate back to the Belles of Hell in homage to the last time she gave up on being an X-Man and went back to Chicago to tend bar? And Kate and Emma have been paired together and been frienemies enough times (including in the most recent era, but never as effectively as in the Whedon run) that it’s frustrating to see them start from square one.
This issue really seemed determined to stress that Magneto’s speech in House of X 1 was a bad idea.
A lot of people were confused by why the bartender didn’t let Trista in. Could he tell she was a mutant?
A lot of people thought Trista bore considerable responsibility for escalating the situation, She didn’t leave when the bouncer asked her to. When he pushed her, she responded by turning metal and attacking him. Although later on, she says it was an accident- I guess she can’t control her powers?
Am I the only person that thinks this issue was written like Kitty still has her secret identity? Nobody recognizes her, Trista doesn’t recognize her name and no cops show up at her workplace after the incident with the guards. The guards know that they were attacked by a young white brunette who can walk through walls- Kitty should be the prime suspect.
Trista’s eyes are yellow even in her “powered down” form. It’s another instance where ableism intersects with anti-mutant sentiment in the Marvel universe (ie that character with vitiligo from the Ms Marvel mini being treated as a mutant).
@John- I think the point of this was that Kitty wants to get away from the person she became on Krakoa. She wants to be a hero again, not the idiot who almost killed Firestar because she couldn’t take ten minutes to ask Tony Stark if Firestar was his undercover agent. That’s the point of changing her name from Kate back to Kitty- it was Kate who was the violent killer. Kitty was the idealistic hero.
I think that’s also part of the argument for moving Kitty’s relationship with Emma closer to what it was during the Whedon era. In the Whedon era Kitty was keeping Emma in check. In Duggan’s run they were just friends, and arguably, that’s part of what led up to Kate becoming Shadowkat.
Yes, Kitty would logically be under suspicion and more than likely visited by some form of authority with questions. Perhaps O*N*E, which we saw in adjectiveless.
Maybe someone has scrubbed away the memories of her civilian id, but that is a long shot. Or maybe it will happen next issue. Kitty does not seem to be worried, but clearly she is compartimentalizing her worries.
In my professional experience, American venues don’t tend to have armed guards handy. They have unarmed security for stuff like metal detectors/bag checks/guarding doors, and actual police on scene for anything more demanding (and usually EMS on scene for medical emergencies and the like.)
But in a comic book world, I suppose it makes sense to have armed security for everything from pre-school to concerts…
If you were in a major city, you could have anyone from Doctor Doom to the Wrecking Crew showing up where you live or work. Can’t blame normal people from being prepared for anything,
I’ve found the public’s knowledge and recognition of the X-Men has been portrayed inconsistently through the years. Cyclops, Magneto, Wolverine, Angel, Beast, Storm, and Dazzler are the most famous ones. I don’t know how high profile Kitty/Kate Pryde has been, outside of Excalibur being public super-heroes in the ‘90s. Regardless, I can buy most people not recognizing her on sight, similar to how I could be sitting next to a member of the Tampa Bay Lightning and not realize it. The phasing should have raised some red flags, but who knows how closely the public connects mutants to their powers if they’re not flashy.
I liked this issue – good art, a believable motivation for Kitty, and the promise of more Emma Frost have me interested- but thought it wasn’t obvious enough that Trista was a mutant. I knew from context that she must be, but didn’t notice the yellow eyes.
If it had been me, I’d have assumed the heavily costumed girl was wearing contact lenses. Best not to think if cosplay would even be a thing in a world of costumed supertypes. Could cosplayers in New York be arrested for superheroing?
Maybe she’s known for “accidentally” attacking people at the venue and is on a lust.
@Mike Loughlin- the problem, as Devine noted, is that there are medical conditions in real life that cause yellow eyes. Apparently, the idea was that Trista’s yellow eyes look different from yellow eyes caused by medical conditions, since Kitty could tell that she was a mutant just by looking at her. But the artists didn’t draw people with yellow eyes caused by medical conditions in the issue, so many readers didn’t realize that was supposed to be the case. This is Ewing’s fault- she should have thrown in a line of dialogue like “My eyes mark me as a mutant- they look different from yellow eyes caused by medical conditions.”
List not lust.
The problem with Pryde is how radical the changes were. She was the non-threatening good girl who still called herself Kitty as an adult. Then suddenly she was constantly drunk and joyfully welding guns into people’s kneecaps, but at least she had a grown-up name. Then just as suddenly she was a dour assassin with a preference for killing that would pull the Punisher up short. And now, with no apparent cause, she’s suddenly the good girl with the infantile name again. Maybe that will be explored later, who knows, but all we have now is whiplash while still not recovered from two previous cases of whiplash.
“…she’s suddenly the good girl with the infantile name again.”
@Si – Adult women IRL go by “Kitty”. There was a character in the Fawlty Towers episode “The Anniversary” named Kitty who was a middle-aged woman.
Then there’s the real life Kitty Pryde whom John Byrne named the character after. She and Byrne were in art college together (specifically, the Alberta College of Art in my hometown of Calgary). She eventually changed her name to “KD Pryde”, but only because she got tired of people showing up at her art shows just to get an autograph from the real-life Kitty Pryde.
The most famous Kitty was probably the 28-year old woman named Kitty Genovese, who was raped and murdered in Queens, New York back in 1964. The case became infamous due to the widely believed erroneous reporting that there were 38 witnesses to the attack with each of them doing nothing. Later investigations revealed that there were nowhere near 38 witnesses, and of the actual witnesses, most of them did contact the authorities. The incident and furor surrounding what was seen and done or not done did help lead to the creation of the 9-1-1 emergency call system in the US and Canada.
Still, the case was immortalized in the Harlan Ellison short story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” and through Alan Moore’s usage in Watchmen as the major influence on the Rorschach character’s descent into violence.
Maybe in the case of Kitty Pryde, the fact that the future version of her from the DoFP timeline referred to herself as “Kate Pryde”. Thereby planting the idea that Kitty as an adult would take to calling herself “Kate”.
Not to mention Kitty Dukakis, potential First Lady in 1988.
Oppenheimer’s wife too.
This is the first of the new X-books that I thought was actually good. The others have varied from “hard no” to “might become something”. Kitty’s characterization worked for me, the art was good. Having Kitty doing a small solo adventure while introducing some supporting characters and just teasing Emma was well paced.
I like the underlying theme of age. Kitty was once the young teen girl now she mentors new young teens. She very well may be having a mid life crisis coupled with a huge traumatic break. I like the idea of a superhero that has had cliche superhero trauma happen to them just choosing to give up.
I think the bouncer might have refused Trista entry just because he is an asshole. There are clubs where entry is at the total discretion of the bouncer and they can leave you out without any particular explanation (the most famous is Berghain in Berlin).
@John
‘why not at least send Kate back to the Belles of Hell’.
Wasn’t it destroyed in the last X-Treme X-Men miniseries that came out a year or two ago?
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
If Logan can go into the woods to run naked with a pack of wolves every time he gets upset, Kitty can go to Chicago to cosplay as a baseline human if she wants.
(That’s also how Guggenheim started X-Men Gold IIRC.)
I liked this. No team, no supervillains in sight (I don’t think we’re going as far back as to count Emma), just a character piece. As an introductory issue? That’s pretty unorthodox. Risky, even, considering the trend to cancel a book at issue #5 if an editor gets even slightly worried about sales.
@Si: “No apparent cause” seems like a bit of willful misreading, considering how clearly her current situation has been established as a reaction to what she did during the Fall of X. Her withdrawal from the X-Men, her attempt at normalcy, abandoning the name she used as Red Queen and (ugh) Shadowkat, it’s all been consistently portrayed as an attempt on her part to cope with the trauma of Krakoa’s collapse and the extreme violence she subsequently engaged in.
@Krzysiek: That tradition predates Guggenheim – she did the exact same thing when Colossus died at the end of the Legacy Virus storyline. It’s a bit of a pattern for her to try and fully disappear into a normal civilian life, only to realize she can’t in good conscience ignore the mutant community around her.
I may be wrong, I didn’t read all the comics, but I can’t recall Shadowkat showing any remorse or regret. Just one storyline she was exploding people, the next she was avoiding the super life entirely.
I wouldn’t even mind that, the ghost ninja thing was terrible, except that it’s her third major heelturn in five short years.
That’s how Duggan ends her story – either in X-Men #34 or Fall of the House of X, I don’t remember. There’s a scene where she’s overwhelmed by all she did, Logan tells her… something, I don’t know, probably the same thing Bill Murray says at end of Lost in Translation. Basically ‘I’ll do the murdering from now on’. He goes off to kill Xavier (he doesn’t), she stays in the rain to embrace the trauma.
It’s not a story arc, it’s not really character development, it’s a single scene, but then again most of Duggan’s output in the final year of Krakoa was single scenes that didn’t amount to anything in total. But it was there that being a remorseless murderess broke her.
@Kryzsiek- It was X-Men 34. And Breevort has said that Duggan wrote that scene the way he did to set up for this book.
I haven’t read this book yet, so maybe this is addressed there. Claremont spent a lot of time establishing Pryde as an extreme tech genius. She’s just moved to the #20 most expensive city in the world. Why is she working in a bar?! (Unless it’s to give her a bit of income until she can establish a serviceable tech career…)
And in general, I’m in strong agreement with John’s first post up there. I understand the need to move things back towards the “original” status quo. But just jumping there entirely feels wrong. And trying to live life as a “normal” human feels really wrong. Even if she’s trying to do her utmost to reject the last N years’ worth of comics, shouldn’t that lead to her trying to atone or find a better way of helping people/mutants or something?
If someone just wrote a couple of lines of dialogue to the effect of “we were all so high on Krakoan flower drugs, we didn’t know what we were doing!” then a lot of the character whiplash would be explained away.
From the very beginning of Krakoa, everyone’s affect seemed off. And that only got worse by the end. Frankly, a lot of the weird euphoria, depression, and violence could be easily explained by some kind of addiction.
@Sol
It is clear that Kitty is in the grip of depression. A job as a barmaid, with no particular responsibilities and a defined schedule is what allows her to get by without trying too hard.
If she wanted to, she could easily work for Tony Stark (he proposed it to her years ago, I think), but she is not in the right frame of mind to do anything challenging with her life.
I worked as a bartender for almost ten years, and if you can get in at a good place, it can be very lucrative. I did more world-traveling during that period in my life than I’ve ever done before or since and it was the income coupled with the flexible scheduling that allowed for that.
Obviously Doug is, uh, otherwise occupied currently, but the mention of Kitty’s middle school friend reminded me that Kitty and Doug used to be best friends, and I genuinely can’t remember if they’ve spent ANY meaningful panel time together since he returned, what was it? Over a decade ago now?
Have they? Is there some Kitty/Doug interaction I’m not aware of? Her congratulating him on getting married? Him expressing concern over her being unable to use the gates? They were on Utopia together, they were both on Krakoa and even both on the Ruling Council. (Well, in Doug’s case, just a translator, but he was still there at meetings.) I guess that friendship is just consigned to the past?
Kitty/Kate’s wild swerves actually read as a good comic-book-extrapolation of growing up, going to college, moving to a city for the first time, failing, slinking back home.
Si’s summary above — “She was the non-threatening good girl who still called herself Kitty as an adult. Then suddenly she was constantly drunk and joyfully welding guns into people’s kneecaps, but at least she had a grown-up name. Then just as suddenly she was a dour assassin with a preference for killing that would pull the Punisher up short. And now, with no apparent cause, she’s suddenly the good girl with the infantile name again.” — basically describes half the people I knew in my twenties, just with added guns and murder.
I liked this one a lot.
I concur on the characterization whiplash, though certainly I found Pirate Kate a bit easier to run with than dour assassin. Maurauders was fun, at least, but Duggan’s characterization often seems propelled by plot necessity rather than other way around. But this direction makes some amount of sense without completing hand waving away those earlier arcs. I think the line wide use of Krakoa Era so far has struck a fine balance.
Anyway, this issue was fine. I don’t love having an ensemble cast where two characters (on the cover) fail to appear entirely, but let’s assume they’re not going to cancel this book at issue 6 and we’ll have time to see what Ewing is building to.
What I did enjoy about this issue is the same for NYX; these versions of Chicago and NY are recognizable as real lived in places, full of normal people who aren’t embedded in the world of heroes, and that’s something that a post-Krakoa X-line should be aspiring to; put the heroes in the world outside our windows and let them interact with normal folks.
I also enjoyed the art in this issue, though I’m not happy about reverting to Kitty’s straight hair after years of being depicted with curly hair. Maybe she bought a new straightener when she returned to Chi?
I think if everyone would just try to remember that all of these longstanding intellectual proper…uh, I mean “characters” are securely fastened to their classic interpretations by bungee cords, then you won’t be overly disappointed when the inevitable, sudden snap-back occurs because you’ll have expected it.
[…] X-MEN #1. (Annotations here.) Exceptional X-Men launches as more of a Kitty Pryde solo book than a team book – only one of […]
@Moo: Acknowledging that these characters will always snap back to particular depictions doesn’t mean there’s no value in discussing how well or poorly the snap back is written, how convincingly (or not) the reset is portrayed, etc. The X-Men have had better transitions to “classic” status quos before, but they’ve had far worse as well.
@Diana – I think, in certain instances (well, most really), that it’s better to just do the reversion quick rather than drag it out just for the sake of doing it as convincingly possible, and I feel that this is one of those instances. It is in the context of a line- wide new direction, after all. Better to quickly get all your actors on their marks and just get on with it.
@Moo: But multiple books – most notably NYX, but also Adjectiveless, X-Factor and now Exceptional – are actively using Krakoa and the events of FoX as the springboard for their storylines. A cleaner break might’ve been preferable, but the FtA writers aren’t consistently taking that approach.
@Diana – Okay, but maybe referencing Krakoa is more crucial to some of the new setups than others? I’m not reading, so you’d know better than I would. I do think that in Kitty’s case that, if the idea is to take the character back to classic mode, it’s best not to dwell on Murder Kate. Like, at all.
@Moo- the plot requires Kitty to be initially reluctant to help other mutants, and also “a flake”, in Kitty’s own words. There’s no way to make that work without referencing Murder Kate.
@Michael- So, the problem is that Ewing doesn’t appear interested in spending a year or so on more convincingly transitioning Murder Kate back into classic Kitty? She’s right not to, IMO.
“Lorem Ipsum. Given as the name of Kitty’s favourite band from high school. Lorem Ipsum is the standard block of Latin which is commonly used as placeholder text. It’s also a real Dutch indie band, which is presumably a coincidence.”
If this had been a Chris Claremont-written story about Kitty then I would assume it was not a coincidence.
Pryde has been radically reinvented three times in a short duration. It must make poepple question why they should invest in Kitty now, when she might be someone else in a year. Cath or Kiki or something, with yet another personality.
Maybe Eve Ewing has a plot worked out, which will unroll over time and explain everything perfectly. But otherwise maybe it would have been better to let the character lie fallow for a year or so.
“Pryde has been radically reinvented three times in a short duration. It must make poepple question why they should invest in Kitty now”
You mean there were seasoned readers who actually invested themselves in “Shadowkat?”
That’s Shadowkat with a K, by Charles Dikkens, the well known Dutch author.
I doubt there’s a person on the planet who misses Shadowkat. There’s no question she had to go.
@Mark – Ah, yes. Dikkens. Author of my favorite book. A Sale of Two Titties.
Or was that Edmund Wells?
@Si: Those changes happened in the context of Krakoa. Krakoa’s done. In the immortal words of Spaceballs’ Colonel Sandurz, we’re at now now. Longtime readers won’t be choosing this specific character and this specific moment as their breaking point, and new readers won’t care what she was calling herself or doing six months ago. It’s fine.
The in-universe reasoning for the K in Shadowkat (which I’m ambivalent about) is added to the unanswered nomenclatural questions I have alongside what Fantomex’s EVA and Normon’s HAMMER stand for.
I mean I know Norman delegated that acronym, but I’d think someone working directly under him would eventually get to even the most (literally) meaningless task?
Oh meant to add that the first Kitty I encountered was probably the old lady on That 70s Show. So yeah very much not an infantile name. Especially since the 70s was before it was normal to just kinda never stop being a bit kiddy forever if you wanted
In the case of HAMMER, wasn’t it just thematic? His organization’s name doesn’t stand for anything except heavy-handed authoritarianism, just like Norman doesn’t really stand for anything else.