Exceptional X-teacher and self-described baby mutant rescue lady Kitty Pryde has disappeared! Looks like she got sucked into a time-and-space wormhole. Can her intrepid students go back in time to get her back? Find out (maybe) in Exceptional X-Men #12, written by Eve Ewing, drawn by Federica Mancin, colored by Nolan Woodard and lettered by Travis Lanham.
On the one hand, Eve Ewing, alongside Nolan Woodard and Federica Mancin (and, before her, Carmen Carnero) has given us the best school book since (at least) Vita Ayala’s New Mutants, the best teen book set on the “real” (Krakoa-less) Marvel Earth since early Generation X, and the best, most emotionally rich, I-can-see-myself-in-her Kitty Pryde since Chris Claremont’s legendary run. On the other hand, I’m predisposed to dislike time-travel stories: It’s quite hard to plot them so that they end up anything but logically implausible (on the one hand) or a nostalgia-driven, thematically empty endless loop (on the other). This issue gives us the start of a time-travel story: The three core Exceptional teens, Bronze, Melee and Axo, go back in time to find and likely rescue the lost Kitty Pryde, by meeting her in her own youth, before she gets portaled away, or stolen, or lost. Ewing’s writing vs. time-travel nonsense: Who will win?
So far, it’s Ewing, in a blowout. I would take off all my clothes and stand in Times Square (or, since it’s Ewing’s Chicago, somewhere in the Loop) and yell at the top of my lungs for an hour about the merits of this book, both visually and psychologically, if I thought it would help Exceptional find more followers. Doubly so after Marvel TV’s rollout for Ewing’s signature character, the Chicago tech wunderkind Ironheart (for more on TV’s Ironheart, see Jude Jones).
Fortunately it wouldn’t help Bronze, or Axo, or Melee, or Kitty, if I got (literally) arrested. Instead, I direct you to the (figuratively) arresting opening pages of this latest issue, a beautifully swoopy, ice-slide-filled, dynamic Danger Room open, though the Exceptionals’ Danger Room is just a rented dance studio in Chicago, with Bobby and Emma providing the danger, and Ewing’s teens coming up with welcome snark: When Bobby’s ice constructions melt, can he absorb the water, or at least help mop it up? Nope: “Mopping builds character.” But I’m glad someone (Melee) finally asked.
That’s a slice-of-life moment, the kind all X-books should include if they want me to stick with them. It’s also — something Ewing’s figured out as maybe no prior X-writer has — a moment for a conversational conflict between digital native teens and the mutant adults who grew up before Snapchat, perhaps even (given Marvel’s sliding time, no one really knows) before Facebook. “Maybe this group is at a point where we should keep our locations on with one another?” Bronze asks, sensibly. The adults ignore her.
Maybe they’re just distracted, since Kitty’s gone missing: Not even her girlfriend Nina (who knows that Kitty’s a mutant, but not that she’s training teen mutants) knows where Kitty went. No one knows what to do. Ironheart flies through the window, showing off (as always) both her awesome suit and her tendency for overconfidence. Maybe Riri knows what to do? She acts like she does. Emma advises her students not to get too close to Stark-like armor-wearers (she would know). Emma realizes that a newly-out, not-yet-controlling-his-powers mutant named Reggie has accidentally sent Kitty back in time. There’s a sitcom-style scene where the newly out, or outed, mutant Reggie tells the Exceptionals that it’s not easy to show your identity, and the rest of them respond, as one, “We know.”
Ever seen five attribution spikes attached to the same word balloon? Now you have. You won’t be sorry (though I’m almost sorry I spoiled the joke). Nor, if you read comics the way I read comics, will you be sorry to see the two-page, one-panel-per-page spread by which Axo, and Bronze, and Melee announce that they’re ready to go back in time to find their teacher. It’s a real (non-sexualized, and fully clothed) pinup, the kind a reader who sees themself in these characters might copy or print out and tack to their bedroom wall. It benefits from Mancin and Woodard’s facility with drawing street clothes (Axo’s denim, Melee’s laced-up kicks), as well as from Mancin’s attention (much improved from last issue) to close-up facial expression. And it doesn’t lose anything once you know, or learn, that full-page, one-panel spreads can come as a boon to line artists on deadline.
And then the beast-shaped, quadripedal, claw-equipped, flying Sentinels attack. Crash! Boom! Whack! Oof! Yikes! Ironheart gets to say she was “born ready” to fight them (it’s like she’s been practicing). And they fight, inconclusively … but by that time Reggie has sent our three core kids through a portal to (drum roll, please) Deerfield, Illinois, approximately circa Uncanny X-Men #129, aka Kitty’s first appearance.
Mancin and Woodard get the rough landing just right: a big oof! right into a pile of three splayed bodies on a suburban sidewalk amid falling autumn leaves. When the Exceptionals land, off-balance, in Deerfield, Mancin orients her point of view so the characters look off-balance, too: a close-up from pavement level; a disorienting, lofty, diagonal overhead view; and then a panel where we see, from the point of view of an ant on the pavement (we don’t see the ant; it’s a metaphor), the characters walking urgently toward us, with the verticals and horizontals of street and sidewalk and characters’ spines askew with respect to the shape of the page. Axo may or may not recognize the Easter egg he lays when he asks, adorably, “Do you think Reggie would be open to feedback on how to improve that experience?” I hope our new-ish mutant teens survive it. They probably will, and they’re also likely to go on snarking, rightly, about the town where Kitty grew up: If it’s such a suburban, mostly white wonderland (and it still is), “why is she so broke?”
The dialogue continues, and it’s for the ages, showcasing the age gap between the future teacher (now in her early teens, wherever she is) and the present-day Chicago teens.
“How are you supposed to find people without the internet?”
“We could use a phone book.”
“What’s a phone book?”
“If I’m Kitty, where would I go? Would I want to go home? Or avoid home?”
I’ve spent most of my life metaphorically asking myself those last three questions. If you’ve got a durable answer, find me. You can probably use the internet. You certainly won’t need a phone book.
Oh, and there’s Kitty: another full-page, one-panel spread. She wears (apparently) the same springy shoes as Melee. And she’s just popped out of dance class. Display-font lettering, pointing toward the next issue, tells us (I won’t tell you) what’s gone wrong. But this series still looks just right to me.
Points of Pryde
- Riri Williams (Ironheart), out of her helmet, shows off a beautiful, complicated updo, with descending strands on either side. How does she keep it so fancy, inside her suit? Being Riri, she’s almost certainly got an invention to hold it in place.
- Bronze rolls her eyes almost all the way back in her head when Melee almost gives a cute secret away. Again, Mancin and Woodard (compared to last issue; compared to most artists at any time) have figured out how to do facial expressions. Bravo.
- Given the upcoming editorially mandated crossover event — a future, or timeline, where Doug Ramsey rules the world — will next issue’s timeline intersect with that one? Will it revisit events of Uncanny X-Men #130? Almost certainly. What about the great stand-alone story, set within the events of Uncanny #130, told in Classic X-Men #35, called “Paper, Not Paper,” illustrated by John Bolton? Probably not. But a girl can dream.
- Bronze holds a cellphone, even when cast back decades in time. What does she expect to do with it? Does she remember that it won’t work?
Buy Exceptional X-Men #12 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.
