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.