Whew, I knew I was not crazy. Good detective work! I listened to several podcasts in close proximity a few months back and got their contents mixed up.

I thought Byrne created Kitty, naming her after the girlfriend of someone he knew in college.

Kitty Pryde: Shadow and Flame #1 “Dragon Quest” (August 2005)



The Story: Kitty Pryde is at the X-Men mansion when she receives an anonymous letter from Japan containing a photo of a caged small green dragon and a note to “Come alone. Bring your dragon.” OK! Once in Tokyo, she’s intercepted by Ryoko Oshiba of the Japanese Department of Supernatural Sciences who explains that the green dragon was recently stolen from her government facility by the Path of Destiny, a ninja group splintered from The Hand.



Reviewing security cameras, Kitty realizes that the dragon thief is none other than her old nemesis Ogun, presumed dead. After some fruitless internet work turns up no leads, Kitty decides to check out the Tokyo nightlife. She and Lockheed defeat a gang of thugs, but we later see they were just a test so that the Path of Destiny can understand her current capabilities.



My Two Cents: This story was released twenty years after the previous Ogun story in the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series, so I don’t begrudge revisiting the setting or the villain. But where can we place this story within X-Men continuity? The back of my TPB says Kitty comes “From the pages of Astonishing X-Men!” August 2005 saw publication of Astonishing X-Men issue #12, the end of Joss Whedon’s second story arc (“Dangerous”), with the third arc (“Torn”) not beginning in issue #13 until April 2006. So this was an ideal time to squeeze in this Kitty solo story. Her romance with Peter Rasputin was heating up, so it would have made more sense to talk with him than Cyclops at the beginning of this “I must go alone” tale, but at least there’s not a continuity problem.



The green female dragon in the photo is called "Greenie" throughout this series but elsewhere is named "Puff." She came back from Battleworld with the X-Men at the end of the original Secret Wars and was briefly monstrous-size in X-Men #181's tribute to Godzilla movies. Somehow she's back to Lockheed-size now.

Who should draw a story about Kitty Pryde and dragons? What about the original “girl with dragons” artist expert, Paul Smith? Yes! (he also did the "girl with dragon" series Leave it to Chance.) Smith has done surprisingly little work for his stature in the field, a situation he admits is due to a poor work ethic and shortsightedness. He gave a surprisingly candid interview to Wizard Magazine in October 1995:

Kitty Pryde: Shadow and Flame #2 “Daughter of the Dragon” (September 2005)



The Story: The Path of Destiny lures Kitty to the top observation level of tourist attraction Tokyo Tower, where she and Lockheed best a cadre of ninja. Some fall to their deaths. Some flee. One is chatty and then bites a cyanide pill. It’s all out of character for an organization allegedly associated with master assassins The Hand, and government agent Ryoko Oshiba is withholding information still, secretly hoping to use Kitty to gain something Ogun has called “Kurokaze.” Kitty returns to her apartment to find Lockheed drugged and a demon-masked figure crouching in the window box. Ogun?



My Two Cents: The first half of this issue is a silent balletic ninja fight clearly homaging Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Wolverine work twenty years prior. The second half is very talky but straightforward. The Japanese scientists call Kitty “Daughter of the Demon,” referring to how she was trained by Ogun in her mini-series. They also believe she killed Ogun, but really it was Wolverine who did it, and really he is an immortal who can’t be killed anyway.



But I wonder why this issue wasn’t called “Daughter of the Demon.” Obviously “Daughter of the Dragon” nods to the duo of Colleen Wing and Misty Knight. Kitty does have a dragon, but she’s the mother in that relationship, not the daughter.

We talked about the artist Paul Smith yesterday. What about the writer, Akira Yoshida? Hiring a Japanese native to tell this Tokyo story sounds like a smart idea. Unfortunately, “Akira Yoshida” was just a pseudonym used by C.B. Cebulski. He faked a whole backstory for his pseudonym and even gave a fake interview with Comic Book Resources when this series was being published.

He was also violating then-Marvel policy against editors also being writers. So Cebulski’s elevation to Marvel Editor-in-Chief in 2017 was met with mixed reactions. I actually thought it was a weird coincidence for a comic book writer to be named after two famous comic book characters (Yoshida being the surname of Wolverine’s girlfriend Mariko). My instinct was right! Too bad; getting Japanese writers for Marvel Comics (especially for a Japanese story) sounds like a good idea.

Kitty Pryde: Shadow and Flame #4 “The Five Swords of Secrets” (November 2005)



The Story: Nao shows off the Path’s treasure, a katana named Kurokaze (the Black Wind). Kitty agrees to steal a second super-sword, Ginrei (“The Silver Spirit”) from Silver Samurai to win the freedom of Lockheed and the other dragon. Silver Samurai (Kenuchio Harada) catches Kitty in the act of theft and is surprisingly mellow about the whole thing compared to his murderous appearances in the 80s. He agrees to an honor duel with Kitty, with the victor getting his sword. Kitty loses on swordplay skills but wins with phasing powers, dodging Kenuchio’s killing blow with a phase, and then snatching his heart from his chest. She apologizes to his corpse and claims the sword. But back in Tokyo, we learn that Nao plans to betray Kitty to increase the Path’s stature.



My Two Cents: Did that really happen? Kitty murdered him so that she could claim his sword? One certainly hopes that some big-league trickery is in play here to justify all this very un-Kittylike behavior.



Again a wordless fight sequence makes up a huge part of this issue.



Nao says that “The Path of Destiny’s sole agenda is to regain the place of power and respect we once enjoyed in the secret shadows of Japan.” Oh, is that all? Just to have power in the shadows? Yeah, that sounds really tempting to Kitty!

The “five swords of secrets” do not exist outside of Marvel Comics. In fact, they do not exist outside of this Marvel mini-series, and we only hear of two of them. Too bad. I thought maybe “Yashida” (Cebulski) was going for a Saberhagenesque mythology of swords with specialty powers. Indeed, the Wolverine series that began in 1988 started with a story about Logan and Silver Samurai and two magic swords, one being a “black blade” which seemed modeled on Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer and the like.

X-Men Unlimited #36 “This One’s For You!” (July 2002)

The Story: College student Kitty Pryde reflects on all her dead friends: Doug Ramsey, Peter and Illyana Rasputin, Pete Wisdom, Magneto, and all who died in Genosha, including her father, whose death she watches repeatedly on closed circuit video footage. On the way from home from her side job as a bartender, she rescues a family of bigots from an apartment fire. (Comic books seem to have a lot of apartment fires, usually when a hero is walking by.) 



The next day, she gets sent to the dean’s office after punching a student promoting the “Purity” anti-mutant group. Academic probation and mandatory psychological counseling are meted out.



My Two Cents: The X-Men Unlimited series allowed a different writer/artist team to spotlight a different solo X-man one-shot story every month, which was quite a good idea. This one by Chris Claremont serves as prologue for his Mekanix limited series, showing what Kitty Pryde is up to as a student at the University of Chicago. Regarding the issue's title, repeated as its last line of dialogue, I’m not entirely certain what “one” she means when she tells the image of her dead father, “This one’s for you.” Herself maybe?

I wish the University of Chicago school of engineering really was named after Heinlein, but this is just Claremont’s fancy. Too bad!

It is something of a shock to see Kitty sexing herself up as a skanky Coyote Ugly-style bartender in a leather belly vest, tight pants, an arm tattoo, and four piercings in each ear. Would she go through a tart phase while grieving for her father? Maybe. Would a super-genius resort to sexing herself up to earn more tips as a bartender? Ehh… more likely she’d get a work-study job on campus. Apparently one of her professors is expecting her to repair a particle accelerator, a job which falls far outside of the expectations on a typical undergraduate. She will later describe herself as her teacher’s “gearhead.”



If there's at least some plausibility to her appearance in the interior art, the cover is another matter. I don’t know who that buxom pouting girl is on the cover, but it’s not Kitty Pryde, the most famously flat-chested, non-Lolita young female character in comic books. Who is Joe Chiodo, and why did he inflict this image upon us?



Kitty has a Pokémon folder and a “Toy Story 2” folder.



Kitty says that she got a “special dispensation” to live off-campus. Does she need one? Does the University of Chicago normally require its students to live on-campus? My alma mater (Rice University) required all freshmen to live on campus so they could get to know each other, but not upperclassmen. Between Kitty’s classwork and her bartending job, she won’t have much time to make friends.

Mekanix #1 “Targets” (December 2002)



The Story: After a night of bartending, Kitty Pryde has her first psychotherapy session as part of the terms of her academic probation after assaulting a mutant-hating student. She sits in the office of Dr. Maureen Lyszinski for a full hour without saying a word. But a photo of the Lyszinski family gets her thinking about her own dead father, and she cries all the way home.




Xi’an Coy Manh shows up at Kitty’s bartending job that night, and the two reminisce. They talk at a table, and Xi’an twirls Kitty’s hair absently. Back at Xi’an’s apartment, they tuck in Xian’s siblings and then drink and chat for a while on a chilly patio.





Elsewhere in Chicago, a telepathic/telekinetic mutant named Shola Inkosi is haunted by memories of his mental (but not physical) presence at the Genosha extinction event which killed his family.

Still elsewhere, Jeff, Alice, and Tom, three university students and members of the anti-mutant group Purity, plan distribution of their species-ist fliers. Jeff is particularly sore about having been punched by Kitty back in X-Men Unlimited #36. They have a scheme to expose mutants on-campus: when a physics class flips on their new particle accelerator, something goes terribly wrong…



My Two Cents: Unlike Kitty, Xian’s younger siblings do not appear to have aged much since their introduction in the early 80s. We see their Catholic devotion, praying with Xi’an at bedtime. Kitty regrets that the Xavier School is “isn’t really an option” for Xi’an’s siblings if they are mutants. Why not? Over in Grant Morrison’s concurrent run on New X-Men, the school is full of students.



Claremont is known for building off of the ideas of other Marvel writers, and his interplay with Grant Morrison is an example. Morrison wrote the destruction of Genosha but didn’t really show us any effect it had other than returning Emma Frost to the X-Men and apparently killing Magneto. (Then later, Morrison killed Magneto for realsies.) In interviews, Claremont seemed both inspired and exasperated by Morrison's knack for dropping plot bombs and then not sticking around to explore the ruins.

Claremont, more than any writer alive (or dead), has an instinct for knowing how events would affect each member of the X-Men cast. Even a new member like Shola Inkosi, whose Genoshan citizenship makes him a target for revocation of his student visa, on grounds that Genosha is a rogue state, until the incineration of Genosha causes the U.S. State Department to send him a form letter extending his visa indefinitely. This is just good world-building.

All twelve members of Professor Benes’ physics undergraduate class have names and headshots on the Purity website, and one of the twelve makes them all T-shirts as a joke. Surely this would qualify as harassment and generate an official university response. These are the “targets” mentioned in this issue’s title, and Kitty is one of them.