I’m not really a variant cover kind of guy, but this week I faced the temptation to get the variant edition of Uncanny X-Men #522 featuring Kitty Pryde riding a bullet. This image is undoubtedly an often imitated homage to the classic film Doctor Strangelove in which one of the main characters rides an atomic bomb like a bucking bronco. The only thing missing from the cover to Uncanny is Kitty waving a cowboy hat around.
Aside from the awesome variant cover, the issue itself is a real nail-biter since you know that Kitty’s returning, but the buildup is pretty intense. In the last issue, we witnessed Magneto meditating with a severe nose-bleed and eventually discovered that all this time he was attempting to reverse the course of the giant space bullet Kitty has been trapped in since the conclusion to Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run. That was an ending that will make you a little weepy eyed now that Kitty is a genuinely likable character thanks to Whedon’s characterization. I can appreciate that instead of merely killing her off, which would lead to an inevitable resurrection, we got an open ended conclusion with the character pitted in a personal Hell so that when she did return it wouldn’t be such an eye rolling affair as some character returns have been (I’m looking at you Steve Rogers and Bruce Wayne.) Of course, Kitty’s return comes with a twist which I won’t spoil for you but it’s something that has happened to her before.
All in all, Matt Fractions run on Uncanny has been something I can’t help but follow, and it’s really the only X-book I follow with any real consistency. I loved the idea of Magneto meditating like a zen Buddhist in an act of pure altruism. And yeah, maybe I do have a little bit of a Kitty Pryde crush, so I’m glad she’s back. I just hope that future writers can continue to make her as interesting and multi-dimensional a character as Whedon made her. Keep up the good work Fraction.
-Jim
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Jim and Kitty sittin’ in a tree,
P-H-A-S-I-N-G.
First comes love, then comes marriage.
Then comes Kitty trapped in a deep-space baby carriage.
Is the twist you mention that when she returned time has passed differently for her, so she’s in her mid-40s again, like in Days of Future Past and the original Belasco storyline (adjunct: Ilyana Rasputin’s later miniseries) and that one X-Caliber issue? Because if that’s the case, let’s make it permanent this time. We’ve seen a couple hundred characters come back younger and stronger (not to mention the permanent time lag inherent to the comic universe/real universe conundrum), but we never get a character who is the same age in the comics as they would be in the real world. And that would be awesome if she was changed as much outwardly as inwardly by her years of isolation in the “Space Bullet”*. She could achieve so much more if she wasn’t always saddled with the burden of being the lovestruck/wounded teenager.
Space Bullet is the best Silver Age hero we’ve never seen. He’s mentally linked to an orbiting gun platform, and can call down the fire on his earthbound foes. By day he’s a stockboy in a corner grocery owned by his aunt and uncle, by night he is Space Bullet, Blaster of Evil.