Intermission: Kitty’s Kit

Because comic book fans like to debate (okay, argue), there’s been substantial discussion about Kitty’s costume as depicted in Astonishing X-Men and subsequent works. First, let’s review the history of X-Men uniforms. The limitations of cheap color printing processes in the mid 20th century, combined with the desire for people appearing next to (or front and back of) each other not to have the same colors, led Marvel generally to color its heroes yellow, blue, red, and white; and its villains green, orange, purple, and black. So the X-Men were yellow and blue. (Though perhaps the blue was supposed to represent black? This is unclear to me.) Magneto was red and purple; his red was not a problem in that particular case since the X-Men had no red.



In issue #27, the X-Men got new costumes, courtesy of Jean, with the blue no longer limited to tights and sleeves; now it extended onto the flanks as well, with a yellow central panel that tapered from the shoulders to the waist. This tends to make the shoulders look broad and heroic. It also has the happy effect of forming an “X” (extending downward through the thighs) with the vertex at the “X” belt buckle.



In the Bronze Age, artists like Mike Grell and Dave Cockrum loved this effect, giving it to many costumes that ended up on the Legion of Super Heroes, sometimes with a frank X over the chest or sometimes tapering to the waist as with the X-Men redesign.






John Byrne’s redesign of Wolverine’s costume added this element to him as well:



“X” featured prominently on the body stockings of three members of X-Factor, but in my judgment this was overly garish and did not really work.



When Kitty Pryde joined the team as a trainee, she wore a version of the issue #27 Jean Grey redesign costume, except with black sleeves and tights instead of blue:



Kitty experimented with many alternative costumes over the next few years, including the zany one with roller skates and gold lame tights:



But she kept coming back to versions of her student costume, sometimes with added red highlights on the distal arms and legs, and sometimes with a big yellow “X” on her forehead.




So when she wears this upon her demotion from the X-Men to the New Mutants trainee squad, she's not so much unhappy with the costume as she is jealous that the new kids are getting to wear it also.



This has been mis-interpreted by some to mean that she thought she had outgrown that costume, even though she had been wearing the version with “X” on the forehead just two issues back, during the Brood climax. But that’s not what she said. She liked it; in fact, it was a part of her identity, in that teenage way that an article of clothing, an accessory, or a haircut can seem like a vital element of one’s personality. So when Kitty returns in Astonishing X-Men, it’s entirely reasonable for her to choose a version of this same suit:



It makes sense. My only complaint is that without the trunks, the yellow jumpsuit features a midline seam visible all the way down into the crotch. This has an unfortunate “vulva effect” on female characters that really ought to be avoided. Thankfully, the briefs are back on the most recent version, which also features a modest V-neck and a popped collar.

#13 “Torn” 1/6 (April 2006)

The Story: This issue is all about characterization. We start with a surprising flashback: The time is just prior to Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Cassandra Nova is in Ecuador, with the Master Mold in the background, and she’s offering a Faustian deal to none other than Emma Frost. Cassandra is going to give Emma a secondary mutation, the power to turn to diamond. This will allow Emma to survive the destruction of Genosha, infiltrate the X-Men, and serve as a sleeper agent for Cassandra, activated when the time is right.

Wolverine gives the students a workout in the Danger Room, leaving them all in a pile. Hisako cusses him out in Japanese and is chagrined when he responds in kind. Oops! This particular student has set her sights on the particular career goal of becoming an X-Man.




Kitty and Peter catch some snuggle time under an autumn oak tree, but when she dozes off, she has a horrific dream of her dead father. Later, the two embrace and kiss in his bedroom.




On the deck of the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, Special Agent Brand argues with a female operative (Agent Hill?) before rocketing off to the S.W.O.R.D. HQ, revealed to be on an orbiting satellite called The Peak.




Scott Summers hangs out with Hank McCoy in the lab and is evasive when asked about his relationship with Emma. It seems he’s avoiding her, angered by her defense last issue of the enslavement of Danger by Xavier.

Emma conferences in her room with the cabal we saw last issue: Sebastian Shaw, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Cassandra Nova, and the white-gloved, hooded figure called “Perfection.” It’s time for Emma to act, they tell her. She goes to Scott’s bedroom and interrupts his bill-paying session, taking the form of Phoenix in his mind.



My Two Cents: Woah, quite a jump forward in time! It’s been eight months of real time since the previous issue of Astonishing X-Men was published. The book is now essentially a bimonthly, with six issues released between April and December 2006.

Emma has done "Phoenix cosplay" with Scott before, and it ought to be quite a sore point with him for the friction it caused in his marriage to Jean.



Whedon is giving Grant Morrison’s work a major retcon. On the one hand, he’s providing an explanation for how Emma gained the ability to turn to diamond. It didn’t just happen conveniently at the moment when it would be really useful to happen; it was part of a greater scheme. Do I believe that the telepath Cassandra Nova also has the ability to grant new mutant powers to people? Ehhh….

As for the rest: Whedon has retconned Emma Frost to be a puppet during the destruction of Genosha. Her memory of the jungle meeting with Cassandra Nova was wiped as part of a long-range revenge plan in case Cassandra was defeated by the X-Men, as indeed she was, when her consciousness was stuffed inside the Shi’ar Superguardian called Stuff.



Grant Morrison hinted in "Here Comes Tomorrow" that X-student Ernst was Cassandra-in-Stuff, but that story’s canonicity is questionable. Of all the new mutants introduced by Morrison, Whedon is only using the Cuckoos, and even then only in cameos, so we don’t know what happened to any of the Special Class who were duped by Magneto. At any rate, now we see Cassandra and three others sitting there in Emma’s room in the X-mansion. How did they get here? What were they doing in Genosha? They seem to go wherever Emma does.



When Logan is training the students, Beast asks Scott, “… and we assume the children are going to survive the experience because…” This is a callback to “Welcome to the X-Men… Hope you survive the experience!” as featured on the covers introducing Kitty and Rogue to the team.



Hisako’s power is related to her Shinto faith; the power of her ancestors flows through her, providing strength and protection. Unlike the mystic Grant Morrison, practitioner of Chaos Magic, Joss Whedon is an avowed atheist, yet one who had no problem depicting Christian iconography such as crosses being effective in the fight against evil in Buffy. Christianity doesn’t figure directly into Whedon’s story here one way or the other, but we will get to see alien religion playing a role down the line.

#14 “Torn” 2/6 (June 2006)

The Story: Emma Frost plays sexual mind games with Scott Summers. First, she’s Jean Grey, and he’s Scott, re-enacting their time on the mesa from X-Men #132. Then she's Emma, and he's Logan. Then comes a trip to the "Black Bug Room" introduced by Grant Morrison, and then Emma takes Scott to his childhood. She shows him that his inability to hold back his optic blasts is actually a product of his own subconscious mind, manufactured to give him an area of his life in which he can exercise control when the rest of his pubescent life felt out of control. Interesting! Emma flips the switch in his subconscious, allowing his power to cease triggering – but also leaving him comatose and drooling.

Kitty Pryde and Peter Rasputin provide some comic relief when their bedroom antics cause her to lose control and phase naked through the floor down into the mansion’s TV room, where she’s obliged to grab a couch blanket before racing past multiple students up the stairs. Also, is the student in that scene wearing a T-shirt with the Pyslocke sigil on it?



Down the lab, Hank McCoy is working, but who should walk up behind him but Cassandra Nova? Cliffhangers abound…

My Two Cents: I’m not sure exactly what’s going on between Scott and Emma here. If this were just soap opera, I’d say Emma is alarmed that her casual comment drove Scott away two issues ago, and now she’s trying to win him back the way she won him in the first place: by casting herself as Phoenix in a psychic fantasy. But after Jean’s death as Phoenix in Morrison’s “Planet X” arc, that would be a bad call which just reminds Scott of how he hurt Jean with this sort of cosplay last time. Emma hits closer to home when she helps Scott imagine himself as Logan, the X-Man that every kid wanted to be in the mid 80s. Scott wants to be Logan, “the poster child for mutant cool” as Emma puts it, though as Grant Morrison reminded us, Logan wants to be Scott.



I like Whedon’s retcon about Scott’s (lack of) control over his power. It makes a sort of sense when compared with the Weapon Plus arc from Grant Morrison, in which Scott’s optic blasts failed to function while he was depressed over the apparent destruction of his marriage. In the loss of Scott’s parents, Whedon finds a trauma old and strong enough to be a plausible explanation. This is similar to psychological theories of how bulimia can begin as a desire for people to find an area in their life that they can successfully control, even if that control comes at a terrible personal cost.



Logan’s gruffly terse “’bout time” upon seeing Kitty and Peter come down for breakfast was well played. Grant Morrison had previously implied that Logan’s sense of smell is so acute that he can’t help but know who is sleeping with whom all around him. Whedon doesn’t give Logan an arc of his own, but Logan makes a great avuncular grouch, a far cry from the omnicomptent ninja/spy of the heady Claremont period.



The flashback to X-Men #132 gives us an opportunity to contrast two different theories of comic book art. Both sequences depict the same scene. It’s the last moment of happiness that Jean and Scott have, the picnic and lovemaking atop a remote mesa, before tragedy strikes over the next several issues, culminating in Jean’s death. Here’s the dialogue in each version of the scene, with Whedon’s version imagining what happens on the mesa after Claremont’s scene:

Chris Claremont/John Byrne version


Claremont/Byrne’s version has five panels on 2/3 of one page: two long shots (full body), two medium shots (waist up), and one close-up. Word balloons appear above and below the figures. We can really only see Scott’s face well once, and Jean’s face well once, due to the distance and angles of the shots, though Byrne does his typical excellent job working with the space available to convey emotion. Byrne’s three vertical panels and two horizontal panels speak to his Bronze Age expertise in fitting the images to the space like a Tetris board. Sometimes we get the feeling he would have preferred more space; the third panel in particular would have benefitted from at least twice the width available, and the first two panels are also forced to crop part of Scott out of the frame in a way that no photographer would have recommended. Contrast that with the spacious opportunities of modern decompression here:

Joss Whedon/John Cassaday version





Form follows function. Although the two versions have about the same number of words, the Claremont/Byrne version has to spend almost half of them explaining super-powers to the novice reader (Scott’s optic blast and Jean’s tramsutation of her clothing, described as “telekinesis,” which doesn’t seem like the right word).

Whedon/Cassaday give it 3.25 pages with 13 widescreen (full page width) panels: one extreme close-up (the visor), four close-ups (two of Scott, two of Jean), seven medium shots (upper chest and head of Jean and Scott), and one extreme long shot (watching the setting sun). One of the medium shots is actually recycled from the previous panel and slightly zooms in, simulating camera movement, suggesting that the reader is literally being drawn into this intimate scene.

The full height of each panel is given up to figures, with sky above their heads only in the extreme long shot and one medium-close shot. But there’s plenty of space for word balloons on the sides of the widescreen panels, where much of Cassaday’s pages are given over to the changing colors of the setting sun, which is some combination of pretty and indulgent, depending on your appreciation for such things. Cassaday makes full use of the extra space afforded, and the extra detail of modern printing techniques, in the last two panels, where Emma twists the knife, making Jean devalue Scott’s concern over the danger of his power.

I had never thought before about the plot point which Whedon raises here: through Scott’s visor or glasses, everyone is a redhead. He met Jean after his powers activated, so he’d never seen her real hair color before. Or her green eyes. Whedon gives us some nice symmetry between the first and the last lines of dialogue in this plot thread:

Negasonic Teenage Warhead gets her name from a Monster Magnet song.

#16 “Torn” 4/6 (October 2006)

The Story: Danger helps Ord of the Breakworld escape from S.W.O.R.D.’s orbital platform The Peak. Danger has learned from S.W.O.R.D.’s files about which X-Man is the one predicted to destroy the Breakworld. Ord is happy to have some help killing the X-Men.

Beast and Logan continue their cat and scaredy-cat “game” in the woods behind the Xavier Mansion. Logan is terrified by Beast and more terrified by his own instinctive reaction to Beast’s presence:




The super-villain team (Sebastian Shaw, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Cassandra Nova, Emma Frost, and the mysterious hooded Perfection) gathers in the mansion basement and attempts unsuccessfully to breach a container they call The Manger. Emma gets blasted with lasers and mocked by her comrades.



Blindfold, Hisako, and Kitty Pryde simultaneously find Peter and Scott unconscious in the infirmary. Then Kitty finds Logan out in the yard babbling about a giant blue moose (meaning Beast) and a bald woman. Kitty wasn’t around to meet Cassandra Nova last time but has probably heard of her.



Kitty ambushes Emma Frost and drags her into the earth, abandoning her inside a small cave deep underground.



Kitty leaves Emma trapped in the cave and returns to the mansion. She encounters the villain Perfection, who removes the cloak and is revealed underneath as… Emma Frost in White Queen gear? But didn't Kitty just leave Emma down underground? Kitty is as confused as we are.



My Two Cents: There's really not a lot for me to say! No deep meaning here, just another delightful issue melding action with fun dialogue. Kitty is clearly the hero of the moment, taking charge of a messed up situation. John Cassaday takes care to keep her looking more "girl next door" than super-glam, which sets her apart from the overly demonstrative and plasticized Emma.

I was thinking more about "Wing" myself...

#18 “Torn” 6/6 (December 2006)

The Story: Blindfold brings Beast a ball of yarn impregnated with a chemical that awakens him from his feral state. Logan has been similarly revived by the aroma of beer. Hisako, Logan, and eventually Beast take on Ord and Danger successfully.





The Comics Code might have had a problem with showing Logan decapitating Danger and then impaling Ord and Danger all the way through. Just a guess.

Scott methodically guns down all the villainous apparitions which Cassandra Nova was causing Emma Frost to imagine into existence. Kitty Pryde retrieves the real Emma from her subterranean prison so that Emma can send the fragment of consciousness inside her own mind to join the rest of Cassandra in Stuff. Meanwhile Cassandra-in-Stuff is racing to do the opposite and fully escape. At the pivotal moment, three things happen.

1) Emma snaps out of her stupor and says “Go to hell.” Was she exorcising Cassandra from her mind, or refusing Scott’s request? Ooooh the ambiguity!

2) Ord and Danger break into the room, guns a-blazing, to kill everybody.

3) Agent Brand beams everybody in the room (except for Stuff) onto a hovering spaceship, inaugurating the final Whedon arc that begins in the next issue. It’s a cliffhanger!



My Two Cents: A very satisfying (if exposition-laden) ending to this very satisfying arc, with the title now explained. Emma is the main one who is “torn” for multiple reasons. She has immense survivor’s guilt over Genosha, where she could not save any of her students, as symbolized by Negasonic Teenage Warhead. She also has a fragment of Cassandra Nova inside her, working at cross purposes to herself. Each of them requested Kitty’s presence for a different reason. Cassandra wanted Kitty to set Stuff free; Emma wanted Kitty to end her “torn” state by killing her. Scott wants to stop Cassandra but is unwilling to sacrifice Emma in the process.




Whedon leaves it ambiguous as to whether Cassandra was defeated at the end of this issue or not. The postlude at the end of Whedon’s entire run gives me the impression that she was indeed defeated, but that’s just my inference based on the fact that she’s not mentioned again when the team returns from their S.W.O.R.D. adventure A little more dialogue about that matter would have been appreciated.

Scott spends the rest of the series wearing the black and yellow X-jacket debuted by Grant Morrison rather than the blue body stocking in which we saw him during Whedon’s first twelve issues. Makes sense; without his optic blasts, his visor is worse than superfluous, and his costume would look really dorky without the visor.