Listen to the episode here!
Art by David Wynne! You can get prints here through 11/2/2014; or contact David to purchase the original.
Kitty’s Fairy Tale is one of the best and most beloved issues of Uncanny X-Men.
D’awwwwww. (X-Men #153)
The Beast With No Name does his best River City Ransom. (X-Men #153)
The rest of the X-Men are as delighted with Kitty’s fairy tale as we are. (X-Men #153)
No, seriously. This issue is FANTASTIC. (X-Men #153)
In a lot of ways, Kitty’s Fairy Tale is a fantasy riff on the Dark Phoenix Saga with a happy ending, which makes the end of the issue kinda bittersweet. (X-Men #153)
Kitty Pryde and Wolverine: We read it so you don’t have to.
The fact that she still has her skates is really damn charming. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1)
Don’t call Wolverine, Kitty! He’ll bogart your miniseries! (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1)
Kitty’s dad: kind of the worst. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #2)
Your homework: Rate the creepiness of this scene on the X-Men scale of one to Belasco. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #2)
Okay. That’s legitimately fairly cool. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #2)
In which Al Milgrom is not Frank Miller, and Chris Claremont writing for Al Milgrom is not Chris Claremont writing for Frank Miller. SIGH. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #3)
“Well, Kitty Pryde called me from Japan and then disappeared… BUT WHO COULD THIS INTANGIBLE MASKED OPPONENT POSSIBLY BE?” (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #3)
Can we talk about how Yukio’s outfit in this scene is THE BEST OUTFIT EVER? (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #3)
And that’s why you always leave a note. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #3)
Samurai eyefucking, illustrated. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #4)
Oh, Kitty, no. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #4)
Remember being fifteen and thinking “Shadowcat” was a really good, really grown-up code name? (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #4)
Headcanon: Yukio moonlights with the Hong Kong Cavaliers. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #5)
This cover is a pretty good metaphor for what went wrong in this series. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #6)
Sorry, Wolverine. Your Samurai eyefucking game is lacking. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #6)
THE BEST PART IS THAT THEY ARE DRESSED LIKE THAT TO GO OUT FOR ICE CREAM. We would SO have hung out with these weirdos in high school. (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #6)
Seriously, Yukio, what the hell are you even wearing? I mean, it’s awesome, but, what? (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #6)
Excalibur Kitty is the best Kitty. (Excalibur #2)
NO, SERIOUSLY.
That time Kitty realized it was very much the early aughts.
Despite its dubious title and weirdly hypersexy-shiny art, X-Treme X-Men: Mekanix is actually a super solid Kitty Pryde series.
Professor K.
Kitty and Illyana sass is the best sass. (Wolverine and the X-Men #37)
If you like granular, obsessive journeys into media, we recommend the hell out of the podcast Into It, in which our friend Elle interviews people about their pop-culture obsessions.
Next Week: Rachel finally gets to make some Spalding Grey jokes.
Links:
I did not at all expect you to mention my podcast, and then I got excited when you did! Of course, I was already pretty excited, because this is a Kitty Pryde episode featuring Greg Rucka, and that’s all kinds of awesome.
I haven’t been reading along with you guys as a rule because it’s too much and I don’t love 70’s and 80’s era comics, but when I saw you were doing the Wolverine miniseries I thought I would check it out too. It was good times. Then I saw that you were doing an episode on a Kitty Pryde/Wolverine miniseries that I didn’t know existed. Why not read this one too? Ugh. When I hated the art, was annoyed by the endless internal monologuing, and felt like the story went absolutely nowhere, I thought it was just me. Turns out we all agree that this series is crap. Hooray. On the bright side, at least I know who that Ogun guy from the Death of Wolverine issue is now. Saves me a trip to Wikipedia.
On a side note, I can confirm that Shadowcat is totally the name a 15-year-old kid would pick out for herself. The codename I gave myself as a kid was Midnight Fox. Oddly similar considering the fact that I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Shadowcat at that point given her lack of presence in the X-Men cartoon.
As a young (smart, into computers, kind of awkward) teen in the early 80s, Kitty was exactly the girl I wished I could have known in real life. Certainly agree that the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series was poorly executed in multiple ways, but at the time I was graduating high school and the sense of “okay, Kitty, the world’s getting tougher now and you need to push back harder. And then you can be a kid again for a bit” resonated with me. Looking back as an adult, I wish it had been a lot better, but oh well. As a young adult around 1990 there was Excalibur Kitty, whom I totally agree with Rachel was the best Kitty. She was tough and a leader but still fun, and it was great. And then Scott Lobdell happened and half the cast got flushed down the toilet and I didn’t know Kitty anymore and I quit reading comics in disgust for about 20 years.
Just now starting to get back into comics now due to a variety of reasons, and I’m beginning to get to know this Professor K person. It’s a little awkward and it’ll never be the same between us, but I am nevertheless pleased with the adult she’s grown up to be.
Have you read Whedon’s Astonishing X-men? I’m still sorting out my feelings on her characterization there.
Kitty’s characterization in Astonishing X-Men was what made me love her character. I had been into comics as a young teenager, but that was the Jubilee era, and I sort of drifted out of fandom when I hit my sophomore year of high school or so. I got back into X-Men with the movies and decided to read Joss Whedon’s run, and I loved the Kitty I saw there, maybe because I could relate to her snarkiness (and Jewishness, although I don’t remember them spending a lot of time on that in Astonishing X-Men– I’m probably due for a reread, though). Her one-liners with Emma Frost are things of beauty.
When I went back to the ’80s stuff and started digging into the earlier days of Kitty Pryde, the character was definitely different than what we got in Astonishing X-Men– not worse, but different. I did like her in the Mekanix series, but I couldn’t stand the way she was drawn, which made it hard for me to enjoy the way she was written, which I thought was very good. But it was the Kitty Pryde Astonishing X-Men that piqued my interest enough to go back and start reading Marvel back issues to see where her character had come from.
Unrelated, the idea that Claremont’s long-term plan was to hook up Wolverine and Kitty, and that Kitty was Logan’s one true love, is so random and weird that I couldn’t even figure out how to assimilated it when it was discussed during the podcast. Bizarre.
That whole monologue when she chooses Shadowcat as her name reminds me a lot of Batman’s “I shall become a bat” monologue in Year One.
Another wonderfull episode guys! I read KP/W mini back when it came out. All I remember about the book was gawdawfull artwork and Kitty got a new name and tweak in skills. Must agree with Mr Rucka when he said you were spending too much time on the subject!
Once again Im torn. You keep reminding me what I loved about reading X-men for 25 years. After every podcast, I feel like going and buying the title monthly and getting the back issues I need to fill the gap. But stop myself when I remember why I stopped reading.
and FWIW, I read the shit out of the Micronauts comic. Excellent sci fi book. Dont know if that ties into being an expert on the Microverse, but thought Id throw it out there.