Kitty and Emma promised to train three teenage mutants so they could be heroes, protecting friends and family from bigotry and bloodshed. Will Kitty’s own now-bloody history break up the team? Find out in Exceptional X-Men #5, written by Eve Ewing, drawn by Carmen Carnero, colored by Nolan Woodard and lettered by Travis Lanham.
This one’s gonna take me more than a few deep breaths. Because it’s so good, because (once again) it gets my favorite character so deeply right, and because it does such a number both on her past, do-gooder, good-girl self, and on her present, grownup, tragedy-damaged life.
Ewing’s set out since Exceptional #1 to tell two kinds of stories at once, and let them reflect on each other. That’s why this issue, like the last one, splits neatly in half. Story A, not just here but throughout the series, follows Kitty Pryde — aka Shadowcat, Shadowkat, the erstwhile Red Queen and Katherine Anne Pryde — as she slowly leaves behind her latest attempt to leave superheroes behind. Back in her native Chicagoland, she comes to terms, again, with her vocation for teaching, her drive to protect and instruct, and her toolkit for helping teenagers who look (to her) like her: potential saviors, potential victims, younger brothers and sisters she never had, gifted children who could remake the world if it only gave them time.
Her motives are pure, her intentions nothing but good. That’s how she’s always seen herself. It’s how her in-universe allies, and her readers on this Earth, have mostly seen her, for in-universe years and our-Earth decades, while Emma Frost does the mind-controlling, Scott Summers does the trolley problems and the Wolverines do the killing. As for Kitty’s ninja training through the demon Ogun, with an assist from the senior Wolverine, that’s … at this point our Kitty would rather not think about it. Even though, during the Fall of X, she used it. A lot.
Story B follows Ewing’s newest mutants, Chicago’s own Axo, Bronze and Melee, as they figure out whatever and whoever the heck they want to be: high school students acting as normal as possible? Trained fighters, defenders of their kind? Sorta badass? Kinda like a team? Like any good Masks PCs, they’re young enough not to know, old enough that their actions seem to matter, and teenage enough to nurture all sorts of fragile beliefs about right, wrong and what is morally pure.
Those beliefs drive the plot here, and in order not to punch the walls or break down in a fit of overidentification, I’m going to describe the second half first. That would be Melee’s decision to quit training with Kitty, quit the team and go home to her normal high school life. Why? Melee learned (last issue) that Kate killed some people. On purpose. Perhaps recently. Melee herself, of course, knows right from wrong. So when her mutant cousin Ellie — who’s green and reptilian and can’t pass for human — gets bullied in middle school, Melee shows up to protect her fam and save the day.
Her choice backfires, hard. Thao (Melee’s human name) confronts the bullies, tries to fight and disappears, since she can’t yet control her powers 100% of the time. “Everyone’s staring at me,” Ellie complains, accurately. Next day, Ellie refuses to go to school. Axo calls Melee out in a chain of texts for “storming in to ‘save’ somebody in the cringiest way possible,” and Thao apologizes. Sometimes we don’t know exactly the thing to do, and sometimes we can’t just quit, or march in, or take over. We’re all morally compromised in some way, and we have to listen to one another before we can decide on the right thing to do.
Usually that means don’t abandon your friends. Kitty wouldn’t. And neither does Thao, coming back to the ballet studio where the Exceptional X-Men train. “I’m choosing this,” Melee tells Kitty. “Even if you are not perfect. If we are not perfect. I’m choosing this — to be an X-man.” I hope I’d choose it, too. If I had to choose. If bigots were hunting my friends, or hunting me, or trying to make me illegal, not that there’s any particular point to the mutant metaphor right now. Speaking of which: Check out this issue’s letter column for X-Fan in Appalachia’s missive. Dear X-F in A: I’d be honored to hear from you.
It’s also an honor to just keep watching these pencils, and inks, and colors that match. Carnero, as usual, excels in non-combat scenes, both in panel arrangement and in figure drawing. Trista (Bronze) doing her eye makeup while dressing Thao down; Ellie crying and turning away from, and then toward, her older cousin; Thao looking hard at Kitty during their boxing practice, figuring it out. Has anyone else noticed how well Carnero draws the variety of facial structures, and body types, and heritages, that Ewing has given her team? Can somebody give Carnero and Woodard shiny medals, and then give Thao and Ellie big hugs?
I’d say Kitty needs a hug too, but really — like most of the rest of Marvel’s mutants these days — what she needs is a do-over, a way to undo the trauma that the Fall of X inflicted on everyone. Some people got tortured. Kitty became, not a torturer, but an assassin, the Shadowkat who took to heart long-ago lessons from Wolverine; the heroine who, in X-Men (2021) #25, killed about a dozen Orchis agents at once, by phasing things into their skulls and hearts and throats, or phasing them into the ground.
The first half of this issue (the Story A part) shows how Shadowkat got that way, and where she picked up her ninja-inspired Fall of X costume. “I didn’t go looking to become a different version of myself,” she remembers, staring at her Red Queen pirate outfit in a page-high, off-center mirror. “Something had already changed inside me. Something broke. And I needed my outsides to match my insides.” We then get three pages of glorious ninja combat, followed by dialogue with everyone’s favorite butch assassin from Marvel Japan, Yukio, who calls Kitty’s then-recent violence “unbecoming.” Isn’t she supposed to be the good girl?
Kitty’s response deserves framing: “Unbecoming of who? The child soldier forcibly possessed by a warrior demon?” What’s amazing (Ewing wants us to realize), what ought to startle us about this character, isn’t the time she spent as a killer: It’s all the times she chose not to kill. Having taken into herself the Xavier School’s child soldier ethos, the everyone’s-always-under-attack atmosphere in so many years of X-comics, and the murdery skill set she got from Ogun, our Kitty has nonetheless spent most of her life looking for the nonlethal solution, the political way out, the speech or demonstration or showstopping moment that would make all the bad boys into good boys, if they only had a chance.
No wonder so many of us grew up wanting to be her. No wonder, after Orchis killed her family, framed her and her best friends for mass murder, and vaporized her only community, she wanted something no better than revenge. And no wonder she’s trying so hard to build a school that can save mutants, and teach mutants to protect one another, and not destroy them instead. Sometimes we really don’t know what to do, and we fear that our loved ones, and our students, would turn against us if they knew what we knew. Eve Ewing? She gets it. She gets it all.
Oh, also there’s a big bad coming up: an evil tech company called Verate, which takes people’s DNA samples and promises to make them look better, feel better and conceal their mutant status. Or something. Your ComicsXF team called it back in issue #1. Feels pretty Sinister to me.
Points of Pryde
- How good is Carnero at visual subtext? This good: When Yukio addresses Kate/Kitty/Shadowkat in a ruined fabric store, we see Kate’s reflection in a mirror she damaged during the ninja fight. That mirror, in turns, gives a callback to the full-length mirror showing Kate’s old pirate outfit, undamaged, just a few pages ago.
- I’m gonna assume that Ewing knows the history of the familiar slogan “making the outside match the inside.” (Again, X-Fan in Appalachia: Get in touch.)
- How good is Carnero at drawing teens with varied shapes, styles and body types? Check out the high schoolers and the middle schoolers (yes, you can tell them apart) halfway through. Even though all of them wear solid colors or broad stripes (otherwise they’d take too long to color and draw).
- Two panels of comedic stage business show Thao (Melee) walking back into her family home and tripping over the hard debris of teen life: “Is your plan to assassinate me with a skateboard?” she asks her brother. Someone’s got assassinations (as in: Kitty did a few of them) on the brain.
Buy Exceptional X-Men #5 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.
