Kate Pryde thought she had quit teaching teenage mutants how to get by in a world that hates and fears them. Emma Frost wants her to pick up where she left off. She won’t even have to leave Chicagoland this time. Find out if Emma gets what Emma wants in Exceptional X-Men #3, written by Eve Ewing, drawn by Carmen Carnero, colored by Nolan Woodard and lettered by Travis Lanham.
Sometimes I wonder whether superhero comics just can’t give me, any more, what I want most from them, what I got from my favorite runs of New Mutants back in the day, and by “day” I mean Vita Ayala and Rod Reis’ day two years ago: character work that draws on characters’ histories, people who grow and change and face their pasts, and throw punches every so often, but the punches are never the point.
Sometimes I wonder. And then a new issue of Ewing and Carnero’s Exceptional drops, and I feel better about the future of this backward-looking, self-conscious kind of story, because someone’s doing it right. Not by coincidence, they’re doing it with a constantly backward-looking, self-conscious, anxious legacy character too, one who remains the most effective reader surrogate X-comics (I’m tempted to say cape comics) have ever had. Just as Kate Pryde wants to start a new life tending bar, and dating women, in Chicago, she discovers she has to dive back into taking care of teenage mutants and freaks. They literally show up at her door, and Emma Frost makes her return to her old mode.
“I have a vision for your life, Kate,” Emma says, blue lipstick gleaming, “and you should be glad for that.”
In the same way, we X-fans may want our favorite characters to start new lives, with new problems, in (let’s say) a new island nation. But Disney and Marvel and market forces and entropy and nostalgia say the characters have to dive back to old modes. Kate gets a canon reset within the story very much as all of Marvel’s A-list mutants got a canon reset in the real world of publishing. And Kate’s no happier about it than I am. But, just like me, she’ll learn to live with it. Emma — or Marvel — will make her.
In fact, Emma’s willing to start a physical fight, and to go diamond form. It’s a standoff, of course: indestructible vs. intangible, rendered dynamically in Carnero’s Dodsonish pencils and inks and Woodard’s hues. And it resolves when Kate’s reasonable, non-super-powered roommate shows up and insists they all stand down. “I’m Priti. I just live here.”
It’s Priti’s first time meeting Emma, and she reacts just as you’d think a civilian would: “Does she dress like that every day? That’s a lot.” Ewing’s story beats hit so hard not just because she understands Kate so well, but because she understands the clash between superheroes’ heightened reality and everyday concerns. The way that superheroes dress, and think, and react makes them look out of place when they’re just hanging out, or trying to do regular jobs, just as the way non-powered humans unused to super-doings act and react makes them cannon fodder when, say, Purifiers or Sentinels appear.
Which they don’t! It’s like Ewing read the great and deeply flawed Mekanix miniseries and realized she could out-Claremont Claremont, giving a more mature Kitty a better push away from superheroes and then a stronger pull back toward them. Kate herself has done some thinking — just like the fans have — about Xavier’s broken dream. Emma wants Kate to lead, in effect, a new troupe of New Mutants. “No more whisking kids away from their families to be social pariahs out in the boonies, risking their lives,” Kate responds. “I didn’t want to go back to any of this.”
But she will. She must. These kids need her. And she looks great, in her dance wear, once she decides to do it: defiant, annoyed and yet willing to go back into the classroom for them.
You’re not reading Exceptional X-Men if you don’t care about Kate Pryde. It’s hard to imagine who else the book would pull in. Once you get into it, you’ll meet new teenage mutants you didn’t know you needed so badly, as badly as they need Kate’s support. Alex, big and green with polychrome eyes, looks like a bruiser but has empathy and emotion-based powers instead: “People come to me and confess their biggest secrets … and I can read their moods.” Like most young empaths and telepaths with any shred of ethics, he’d rather not, but he’s stuck with it.
Thao Tran phases. “Like Kitty … I suck at phasing. My goal is to not suck.” And Trista Marshall, the girl with purple locks whom we met two issues ago at a concert, acquires metal skin and fires off tentacles, like Colossus crossed with Omega Red. “My goal is to not hurt people,” she tells her friends, in a converted ballet studio that’s … let’s say it’s not not a reference to Uncanny #139, with Kate in the teacherly role once played by Stevie Hunter, and Thao, Alex and Trista playing the role of Kate. Trista, in particular, wants to do hero stuff: We see her sketchbooks, where she’s bestowed three codenames, Axo, Melee and (for herself) Bronze. “Someone I love very much has abilities a lot like yours,” Kate tells Trista. “And is one of the most gentle people I know.”
Then there’s a fight, with a secret that Axo detects. I won’t tell you the secret, but I will tell you that, as with the rest of this issue, there’s a serious meta component. Kate behaves like a reader of X-comics, and Emma like Marvel’s higher-ups and editors, telling Kate what she has to see, believe and do. And just when Kate’s ready to quit, Bobby Drake shows up. Bad timing? Or perfect timing? Did Emma bring him here? Was it for this?
Comics are a visual medium, and Emma Frost is a visually striking gal, so much so that Kate looks drab by comparison (drab by design: the last thing Kate wants is a hero costume). Bobby, when he arrives, looks spectacular, bringing icicles and frozen walls and shiny blue-white translucency everywhere, less like most older versions of the man than like the best Elsa moments in Frozen 2 (this is a compliment), so that Kate, stylized, seen through a wall of hard water, looks like she herself got frozen in time, canon-reset back to the era when she had to be a good girl, and obey her peers, and act straight.
In other words: This comic looks beautiful, all the stops are out, our Kate Pryde has returned, and I don’t even know who I would be if I didn’t recommend this third outing for Ewing, Carnero and Woodard to anyone who likes the mutants I like. That said, I’m wondering how much room for development these new characters will get as additional legacy mutants arrive. I’m also asking myself how Carnero’s pencils would come off with someone else inking? I ask because some of the figure drawing comes with very thick lines around edges of bodies, almost like someone cast Carnero’s art in stained glass.
Nolan Woodard’s colors do a great deal of work, and well: The shadows on faces, the folds in civilian clothes, the architectural backgrounds hit the sweet spot between block-color simplifications and boring photorealism. It’s all just heightened enough to make sense for Kate’s world. Which is also Emma’s world. And ours. We may try to get out, but we live in a world that hates and fears us, and we’re gonna get pulled back in.
Points of Pryde
- Carmen Carnero should design more clothes. Not just Emma’s cutaway pants-and-top number: Kate’s coat, and the folds in Kate’s coat. And Alex’s short-sleeved, leather or pleather jacket.
- Alex assumes that his peers, Trista and Thao, will get a reference to Dragon Ball Z. Will you? It’s like he’s there to remind us that cape comics have to change and grow with the times, which means reaching kids whose first comic experience is either Raina Telgemeier or translated from Japanese. Good.
- Also good: these three teen mutants bond with each other. Watch their body language in the studio; watch how they come together as Emma quarrels with Kitty again.
- When was the last time you read any story in any medium about teachers and students that showed constant, consistent, credible sympathy for both? I can wait. Yeah, Ewing’s got a rare gift. So does Kitty. A few gifts, in fact. “I can walk on air. Ninja stuff. Computer stuff,” as she says. Pedagogy, too. Let’s hope she gets to use it.
Buy Exceptional X-Men #3 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
