Bold Fashion Choices--Self-Critique Style!

This is the costume Rachel Summers was wearing back in 1988...

Well, for reasons best left unexplained, Kitty Pryde has to disguise herself as Rachel...and she has some not-so-nice things to say about what her teammate wears:

Geez, everyone's a critic!

Of course, if writer Chris Claremont really thought that about Pheonix's get-up, he could have had Alan Davis et. al. change the costume...

From Excalibur #1 (1988)

What's In A Name--Kitty Pryde!!

You know what's always baffled me?

Kitty Pryde.

Not the character, per se, but her super-hero name. Or lack thereof. And why no sobriquet, no trademarkable name, has ever stuck.

There are others, of course. The peripatetic Luke Cage started out as "Hero For Hire," and later spent a whole issue deciding to become "Power Man" (and even fought someone later over the "rights" to the name). When I was out of comics, he apparently decided to drop the Power Man, and become just Cage, or Luke Cage. But even in his case, he actually had those names, they were used on the cover, and Marvel has preserved the trademarks by endowing them to other teams/characters.

For some reason, Marvel Girl fell out of fashion, so when she's not being Phoenix, Jean Gray's series was just called...Jean Gray.

Of course, her hypothetical daughter, Rachel, also goes through the names like Beyonce goes through costumes at a concert--Phoenix, Marvel Girl, Hound, Prestige, Revenant...but at least they keep trying.

But Kitty Pryde? 35 years later, she's still just Kitty. And they've given up.

Yeah, she more or less sort of adopted Sprite, at one point. And Ariel. (BTW, since when did Xavier let students choose their own nicknames? Does that mean Hank McCoy chose to be called the Beast?!?) And yeah, she became Shadowcat, which supposedly was more or less permanent. As if.

But Marvel's own character pages have her listed under Kitty Pryde, and their official wiki has her not as Shadowcat, but as "Pryde, Kitty." The 1985 version of The Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe did list her under Shadowcat, for whatever that's worth...

And the "wedding of the century?" Go ahead and Google it. 99.9% of the headlines refer to the marriage of Colossus and Kitty Pryde, not "Colossus and Shadowcat," not "Piotr and Kitty." Even in a massive media event and press release, others have to use their hero names, and she stays Kitty Pryde.

You'd think that Marvel would have some interest in giving her a trademarkable name, at least. But in the only series that have her name in the title (as far as I know...I doubtless missed some), it's been Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, and Pryde and Wisdom, and Kitty Pryde Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Starlord and Kitty Pryde. Marvel seems to have zero interest in establishing her a super-hero name.

[Is it really possible Kitty Pryde has had only one solo series, that lasted 3 issues? How can that be?]

Kitty is a nice nickname--but while it works for a 13 year old, does it work for a grown woman who's headed the Xavier School and saved the world multiple times? (And yes, we all know grown people who still use diminutive nicknames...) Kitty Pryde sounds nice, rolls off the tongue, has 2 Y's...but Peter Parker is a great name, too--yet no-one suggests dumping Spider-Man.

The die was probably cast by the Kitty Pryde And Wolverine mini-series. Sure, by the end she gave herself a new name. But right there on the cover is Kitty Pryde, trademarked, with an "official" logo,  an acknowledgement that this was how fans knew her, and that this was the name that would sell the book. Other names were moot.

Maybe if they had called it Shadowcat And Wolverine...

Bold Fashion Choices--Kitty Pryde, Take 2!!

Long story short, the Badoon have kidnapped Lilandra and 3/4 of the Fantastic Four and Arkon, so it's time for the X-Men and Susan Richards to attempt a trans-dimensional rescue mission!

Young Kitty Pryde wants to make sure that she can come along for the ride...

Heh. They were still trying to make the "Sprite" name stick!

Oh, dear.

This is the second time Kitty has come under the focus of our crack Bold Fashion Choices squad. And believe it or not, this costume was much better than her last attempt!

It's too bad they didn't keep that as a defining character trait for Kitty--perpetually bad taste in costumes...

From X-Men Annual #5 (1981)

Kitty Pryde Aces Her First Test!

It's time for young Kitty Pryde's first session in the Danger Room!!

This isn't going to be pretty, is it?

Well, that wasn't so hard.

I guess the fact that she beat the room so easily is what encouraged Xavier to rebuild the Danger Room with Shi'ar technology, which was so sophisticated that it eventually became sentient and enslaved by Xavier (because to the modern Marvel writer, there's no crime so unspeakable that Professor X couldn't be guilty of it!).

Of course, this was also the first issue of the Days Of Future Past storyline, which introduced alternate apocalyptic futures to the X-Men's lifestyle. Soon, they would have 15 or 20 members (& villains) bopping about from such alternate timelines, because one universe clearly doesn't have nearly enough story ideas! (I exaggerate, but only slightly...)

In other words. 85% of the things wrong with the X-franchise are Kitty beat the Danger Room with her eyes closed. Thanks, kid!!

From X-Men #141 (1981)

An Architect Builds A Scary House

The recently concluded Daredevil: End Of Days mini-series is set at an indeterminate time in the future, after Daredevil has been killed by Bullseye.

During the course of the series, reporter Ben Urich dies, and amongst the condolences received by his family:

Wha hwa what?!?!?!

Now, this series was written by Bendis, and of course Peter and Kitty Pryde were an item in the Bendis-written Ultimate Spider-Man. But this series clearly doesn't take place in the Ultimate Universe. So is Bendis predicting--or foreshadowing?--that the two will become an item in Marvel-616?? He is An Architect, so maybe we should take that pretty seriously. Of course, it's possible it's some other Kitty...

[This would also suggest, of course, that the events of Superior Spider-Man are not permanent. Well, duh.]

Later in the issue, we overhear a newscast, covering the controversy over The Hand establishing itself as a tax-exempt church (A church of ninjas? Oh my!):

"Vice-President Osborne"?!?!?!?!

Again, we know that in the past, Bendis has had a fetish for making Osborn uber-powerful, going so far as to use the same damn storyline twice during his Avengers tenure.

So is Osborn going to rise a 3rd time, this time only a heartbeat away from the presidency?!? Is that possible? You'd dismiss this as a writer riding his favorite hobby horse in a hypothetical future...but this is An Architect, so his hypothetical hobby horses can easily become real nags.

So watch the future, folks...

Friday Night Fights--Winning With Intangibles Style!!

It's time to get bad to the bone for this week's Friday Night Fights...or is it??

The X-Men are scouring the subway tunnels in New York City, looking for Flag-Smasher, who is planting a big-ass bomb. Because that's what he does.

Marrow and Kitty Pryde are the first to find him...

OUCH!!!!

Oh, this is going to hurt...

Wha...?

OHHHHHH, YEAHHHHH, Kitty for the win!!

And every Kitty Pryde fight should, of course, be accompanied by this song:


Spacebooger agrees that Flag-Smasher does sort look like Space Ghost...

Flag-Smasher gets smashed in X-Men Unlimited #22 (1999), by Brian K. Vaughan, Patrick Gleason and Tom Nguyen

Now is the time for you to go and vote for this fight. Why? Dude--Kitty Pryde clobbered Flag-Smasher. Hello!! So go and vote, dang it!!

Quote Of The Week #1--It Made Sense In Context

I will give you one trillion quatloos if you say this to a loved one today...

It's probably better that you don't ask...

From A+X #2 (2002)

Bold Fashion Choices--Child Abuse

While the recent X-Men: Schism series revolved around the morality of making soldiers out of young mutants, the series ignored the biggest danger of allowing teens to be X-Men: the costumes!!

Travel back with me to a time when young Kitty Pryde designed her own super-hero outfit (Warning--NSFHE (Not Safe For Human Eyes)):






And leave it to Magneto to make the realization it took Wolverine 30+ years to come to:

Kids should never design their own costumes!!

(Oh, and obviously, Wolverine's right, the X-Men and New Mutants never, never EVER sent teens into combat...except for every issue ever.)

Panel from Uncanny X-Men #149 & #150, art by Dave Cockrum, Josef Rubenstein & Bob Wiacek and Glynis Wein.