The show of the year
I have heard Kitty Pryde described as comics’ ultimate “Mary-Sue”. As the teenage every(wo)man character in comics that were made for kids, surely that’s what she was meant to be. As those comics were written by Chris Claremont, she inevitably also became some kind of ninja master after being haunted by a weird ghost samurai.
Discussion (100) ¬
They’re going to a f**kin’ David Mamet play?! David F**kin’ Mamet?!
This is possibly the first, and only, time that Mamet will be mentioned in an X-Men comic. I’m just sayin’, is all.
A.B.C. Always Be Cloning
Warlock! WARLOCK! (happy dance!!)
Now I’m wondering who of those three is the Mamet fan (for some reason I’m thinking Rogue, but I can’t quite put my finger on why) and how they convinced the other two to go see the play.
Nah. Gotta be Kurt.
Yeah, my take is Kurt wanted to go see it, Ororo’s going with him out of curiosity because she hasn’t been to an off-Broadway play before, and she talked Rogue into coming along in case it’s terrible or they run into Sentinels or something and she needs backup and/or a wingwoman to help her politely extract herself.
I don’t know. Kurt has always been more of an action/adventure guy when it comes to films and theatre. Mamet feels a tad too harsh for him.
He’s also very open to new things, though. I could see him being curious, and wanting to expand his horizons. And it’s not like action/adventure is his ONLY interest.
Of course, depending on date Kurt may have noticed Mamet’s work on films like The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, or The Untouchables.
Rogue is going to shake Mamet’s hand at the after-party and suddenly gain the power to communicate volumes of repressed emotion in forceful, elliptical sentence fragments.
I GOTTA believe Claremont, or at least Bendis, put a Mamet reference in a X-Book somewhere
Oh my word I can already tell this is gonna be a huge giggle
It must’ve been so much fun to write Logan’s dialogue
I adore the chutzpah of using “Brick Springstern” right after rattling off the completely-unchanged names of multiple characters owned by the Disney Corporation. It’s basically looking the Mouse square in the eye and saying “No, I’m not on principle opposed to the idea of attempting to avoid trouble by altering names slightly. I just don’t see a reason to do it for *you*.”
John didn’t invent Brick Springstern, as he explained on the previous page. He came from issue #14 of the Marvel Transformers comic.
Oh bah. I actually saw this page first and missed that.
Hey, there’s nothing copyrightable about “Peter”, “Rachel”, “Kurt”, or even “Ororo”, they’re all just regular first names. Even “new mutants” as a phrase is pretty hard to defend….
Our good friends Peter Raspyvoice, Rachel Winters, Kurt Wigner, and Ororo Manroe!
Rachel Winters, Shelley and Erin’s long-lost third sister?
She’s got the hair for it, anyway.
Wow, I’d forgotten all about Rachel Summers.
She was right there yesterday. Looking at Kitty’s butt.
Ah, Minnesota. That wonderful, sparse followup to “The Large Creek,” recorded on one of the world’s only three-and-a-half-track recorders.
The half track? It was for Pet Sounds.
Neither were a patch on “Nightfall in the suburbs” or “Started to Jog”, though.
Logan strikes me as more of a Gordon Lightfoot (or whoever the Allisonized equivalent is) kind of guy.
Maybe even Stan Rogers.
“But I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier— oh, wait, my healing factor just kicked in.”
“…With the last of Wagner’s elfin ears?”
Oh, VERY good!
I feel like Logan would be still very into The Guess Who. I’d like to see him beat someone up to “American Woman” in the next Deadpool movie.
We have the makings of a great Logan playlist. I’ll nominate “Crazy on You”, “Nautical Disaster” (released a decade too late for this comic, but what the hey) and “Sunny Days.”
“Woman from America” is the iconic song from the Guess Whom, but they lost some of that magic, in my opinion, when the guitarist/songwriter left, over a decade before this comic was originally published, forming Blockchain Turntable Turbo. I can envision Logan soloing an enemy base with BTT’s “Getting Stuff Done” as the soundtrack. (Incidentally, today’s blockchain technologies based on proof-of-work were also directly inpired by this song)
Ah, you’re thinking of Gaspard Piedléger, the noted Québécois chanteur.
While Kitty Pryde is likely up there in the Mary Sue charts, its not like she doesn’t have competition, even within the X-Men. For starters there’s Jubilee, Aka 90’s Kid Kitty Pryde with Fireworks powers, but then there’s also the ever present Wolverine in the room as well.
Especially later on when he’s simultaneously on almost every other team in Marvel Comics and has an ever growing fanclub of girls he mentored as teens. Ah, the power of marketing to fanboys and a built in powerset that works well for plot armor.
Hey are you the same troll who called Lottie a Mary Sue?
I don’t think there’s any hostility in Krys’ comment. This all reads true to me.
And just for the record, Kitty has at least died once and came back again like many X-Men characters. Mary Sue does not really apply in the realm of superhero comics.
Apologies for me overreacting. We had a rather unpleasant commentor incident a few Solver strips back.
*Apologies Krys and thanks John.
No problem, especially since I didn’t see this comment at first.
Honestly of the three characters I mentioned, Jubilee was the only one I didn’t like, at least until a much later writer had her come back as a vampire with an adopted orphan baby she was trying to be a single mother to? But as mentioned she was kind of the 90s model of Kitty, cause the animated series needed a “cool teen” as a jumping on point in a show about a bunch of adult mutants, even if that teen didn’t actually uh speak to the intended audience well.
Poor Rahne and Roberto. Left out of Kitty’s imagination
Yeah, I was just about to ask. Also where’s Xuan (or did she not show up until later?)?
She was an OG New Mutant, but left after only a couple issues, she only came back a couple years later as a secondary NM character until the 21st century when she became a teacher in New X-Men v2
I ran out of space in that corner of the page!
Yeeeaaahhh, taking Rachel to a rock cancert at that point in time would… not be a good idea.
Avoid any performance of “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog”.
Punching the air is not his tempo? Dunno, that seems exactly something he could like.
He may prefer his punches to connect with something.
If Logan punches the air, Marvel continuity requires that there be a ninja in it.
I love this, but won’t John get a bite in the behind from the copyright vampires for this?
I’m not charging for it! Let’s wait for all the people who draw endless Marvel headshots at cons and endless commissions for hundreds of dollars to get bitten by the copyright vampires first, eh? Weirdly that seems to be fine.
Anyway, they’ll have to get in line behind Batman’s lawyers
I wish you luck and agree with you that you are within the law as written.
People forget, or never knew, that all those work for hire comics are copyright of the authors until they hand them over by contract to the publisher. Muddied by the fact that the contract usually came first and motivated the creation of the comics, but you know what I mean.
That said it’s not unprecedented for webcomics creators to fall foul of big companies with large legal budgets. The author of Rusty and Co. (A D&D comic) had some trouble with Wizards of the Littoral over, of all things, the use of the trademarked “Yuan Ti” in the person of a character called “Yuan Tiffany”. She now goes by her initials and identifies as a lamia, but I gather it was touch and go.
No one else seems to remember this* but there was a fan-produced Wolverine (and Kitty, I think) online comic in the late 2000s that was quite well regarded and, I seem to recall, Marvel liked it so much they gave the writer/artist a job.
*I don’t believe that I am from the future, but it’s possible.
Oh gosh! I’ve just found it.
It was Wolverine: Dying Time, by Jeffrey Brown. Although it’s much darker and less whimsical than I remember, and Marvel didn’t give him a job based on it.
But I think his biggest selling books by far are officially licensed Darth Vader books for kids so… he made it in the end.
I think the main thing to take from this is that I am not from the future, so I haven’t already read your Wolverine comic, and I can enjoy the upcoming pages spoiler free.
Woah, Minnesota!? Why, that’s one of my favourite Brick Springstern albums, alongside classics such as ‘On the Run’, ‘The Crazy, The Naive and the 10th Avenue Line” and “Shadows on the Brink of the City”!
How about “The Stream”?
My favourite is “Loud Atmospheric Noises Boulevard”.
Or “‘Hello’ from Union City”.
Not too sure if that’s an open can of beer or a can of hairspray on Logan’s dresser in the bottom middle panel. I mean, either works…
Both big parts of the Logan Lifestyle®
He’s the best at styling his own hair, and what he does is pretty.
I’m reminded of the Havok and Wolverine miniseries, where the artist had gone over the top with Logan’s hair spike things, so they were like a foot or more long. The first mainline X-Men comic afterwards, Storm (I think) walked in on Logan teasing his hair up into super-long tails, and commented on it, to which Logan’s response was, “Eh, it’s just something I was trying when we were in Mexico. Don’t think I’m going to keep it.”
I’m intrigued by the cutlass hanging on Wolverine’s wall, I always figured him more as a katana man.
I think part of the beauty of being Logan is that he’s totally willing to eviscerate you with anything that happens to be at hand. Or inside his hands.
Also, I just noticed the little picture frame of Logan and Mariko. That made me feel all Nightcrawler-fuzzy inside!
Yup, pirates were more of a Kitty (via Kurt’s imagination) thing.
Was his American Civil War service purely a movie thing? I get the impression that his history in all formats is canonically long, and probably involved military units who used cavalry sabres or whatever with knuckly guards.
I think his time in Japan was relatively recent, in fact.
I recall a flashback in the comics where Logan was involved in what I believe to have been WWI. I don’t remember any Civil War bits, but that’s not to say there weren’t any.
Logan ages in a very strange way- the more time passes in the real world, the earlier he was born. So he ages in both directions. When he first appeared in Hulk #180-182, I think he was supposed to be a teenager.
I love how she does not even think of inviting Scott. No one thinks of inviting Scott. They assume it would cut into his very important Fretting Time. They’re probably right.
(Scott Summers is mmmmaybe my favorite superhero, but also I love how everyone bags on him for being a lame dork, because they’re sort of right, but he is the BEST lame dork.)
I mean, Scott likes U2, so I think he’d be down for Brick! Would have been a nice bonding moment for 2 of the smartest X-Men, too bad Scott IS a big dork and Kitty at 14 definitely wants to seem cool. Sadly, hanging with an on-the-spectrum Boy Scout wearing sunglasses at night would be death for her!
You could also make a case that Scott isn’t actually there, being over at X-Factor at the time in question, and that any version of Scott we see is just Scott hallucinating that he is there (as this is more or less exactly when he starts losing his mind over his Jean/Maddie dilemmas).
Nah there was a couple years there, before x-factor, where Scott was on the team. Then he lost to Ororo in a fight for leadership and retired. John said this was 1985 and that’s when he’s there.
Sigh. You’re right, with this completing the trifecta of mistakes I’ve made in these comments. I even thought I’d verified this but was let down by a mistaken eBay listing for X-Factor #1 that was a year off.
Scott leaves the X-Men in late ’85 and founds X-Factor shortly thereafter, which means that with no snow on the ground in New York we have undeniably placed this tale in spring or summer of 1985.
Good job, fellow obsessives.
Oh dear. I feel so out of the loop here. I was always a DC comics gal, and know little of these X-Men. (Yeah, maybe now is the time to learn …)
Oh phew, I’m not the only one. I’m going to miss out on 98% of the inside jokes on this one. But it’s still John Allison so will enjoy anyway!
But if anyone wanted to put a little primer under each comic explaining why each is particularly pleasing to the X-men fans, I wouldn’t be mad. Educate me!
I’m pretty sure that’s what most of the comments are going to be for the duration.
I’m fully prepared to argue that by giving us a comic full of inside jokes and minor continuity questions that need to be vigorously argued about on the letters page, John has flawlessly replicated the 1980’s Marvel Comics experience.
Very good comment A+
I’m trying to remember what you had to do to score a No-Prize.
Different editors had different criteria at different times. Here’s the best overview I’ve found. https://www.cbr.com/knowledge-waits-the-history-of-marvels-no-prize/
Truth!
Okay so, Wolverine’s man-name is Logan. Kitty and Peter broke up…. how/why? Ummmm…..anything else I should know??????
I know who Rogue is because I probably vaguely identified with her at some point in my younger life. And I know Wolverine is Tough and Cool.
Eeeeeek. Any pertinent information here would be greatly appreciated!
Are the “new mutants” known characters too?
“New mutants” question answered in other comments. Actually I remember them now that I think about it.
Well, the New Mutants were originally known as the “Gnu Mutants”, and they were Marvel’s answer to the Animorphs… 😉
Or the Power Pachyderms.
Bad Sean! Don’t make us get the rolled-up newspaper.
Peter (Colossus, who can turn into organic metal) and Kitty (Shadowcat, who can become a “living ghost” and walk through walls) got together circa 1984 in one of Chris Claremont’s more controversial storylines, as Kitty was still only 14 or 15 at the time.
A year later, the Beyonder sends everyone to Battleworld for the first Secret War, where Peter has his brain rewritten by a sexy alien healer girl he falls for, causing no shortage of emotional turmoil and causing him to break up with Kitty when he gets home.
As for the rest…there’s just too much water under the X-bridge to explain in one comments section.
Kitty was only 13 when she joined the X-Men. I think she was 14 when they started their relationship. Of course, peter was pretty young, himself- he had been the youngest X-Man before kitty joined. I think he was 18 when he joined, but that would still likely make him at least 20 when they started their relationship. A 14-year-old and a 20-year-old does seem kind of disturbing to me, frankly.
13 and 19.
It was explicitly (lol) platonic. At one point they’re infected with brood eggs (Think Alien chestbursters) and Kitty says to Peter “We should totally do it because we’re gonna die” and he turns her down because she’s too young.
I don’t think they actually consummated until the 21st century, I want to say the Ellis run but I was no longer a current reader at the time.
Astonishing X-Men Vol.1 #14 in 2004, according to this link.
Interestingly, that means that Colossus had never consummated their relationship at the time he nearly beats Pete Wisdom to death in a fit of jealousy for dating Kitty on the late 90’s Excalibur run.
Good thing Kitty never told Piotr about losing her virginity on her 15th birthday to Sat-Yr-9
Thank you!!
As I recall, Kitty and Peter broke up because of his fling with an alien healer on an artificial planet in another galaxy, while he was temporarily being written by Jim Shooter. Which would be bad for anyone’s relationship.
Also who gives someone tickets to a concert on the day of, and then doesn’t go with them??? Rude.
Jokes aside, Kitty can’t be a true marysue because she’s written FOR the reader rather than the writer. I guess there’s just that hostility towards the reader among some people that treats any case of ‘a character the reader is intended to identify with’ as a bad thing, as if appealing to them is somehow wrong. It’s an old problem in critique, the recent version of it that’s killing big comics (apparently) is just a new version of the bad old hobby of thinking that anyone who would like your work isn’t worth writing for.
The end state is writing stuff for nobody, which is very similar to being a published PhD.
I find calling Kitty a Mary Sue to be way off the mark. Kitty was never perfect. She failed, often a lot. She felt heartache. She was Logan’s spunky side kick. Jubilee followed in her footsteps. They tried to do that with Armor. They should do that with Pixie.