Uncanny X-Men #129

[iamrman]

Girl Boss and Brat of the X-Men.

Kitty being dramatic. Then again, teenagers gonna teenage.

Comments

[scorntx]

The start of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
Even for Claremont, there was a lot going on in this issue.
And it's pretty much peak Claremont.

Much as Kitty would become... a lot when she actually joins the X-Men, here she's a perfectly normal teenager.
(Not even a mention of how she's also actually a super-genius.)

Funnily enough, this issue has a legitimate case of Professor X actually being... y'know.
After he got bored hanging around with his sexy alien girlfriend and her bird-jerk civilisation, he decided to come home and be a jerk to his students.

(Though if anyone's being jerks, it's the Prydes. Said it before, but if your daughter's home early and talking about a recurring headache, and you find them lying on the floor, maybe your first reaction shouldn't be "darn kids these days!")

Between becoming fast friends over one ice cream and her 'friendship' with Jean where they've hardly ever exchanged conversations, starting to think Ororo just latches on to people super-fast.
(Still, at least right now it's just friendship, and not the slightly creepy clingy pseudo-mom attitude she gets later.
*sigh* Claremooont...)

... wait, Kitty mentioned the fight with Proteus. So it wasn't forgotten about!
So if some freaking rando kid from Chicago is bringing it up, why does no-one else?

[mazway_75]

I did like the bit of Xavier trying to run the team like the original X-Men and Cyclops trying to argue they are a team, just not the same way.

[mazway_75]

My first full X-Men story and hot damn, the run here....

[dan_ingram]

Whatever happened to Kitty's mom, anyways?

I know the dad was nuked on Genosha

[iamrman]

I'm not even sure if she was ever seen again on-panel.

[iamrman]

I did like the moment when Xavier tried to give Wolverine demerits and he was like "naw, bub. Ain't gonna happen."

[beyondthefringe]

The parents got divorced and the mom was um.... *shrug*

So yeah, the introduction of the greatest X-Man of all time and the first teenage crush for many a young reader and... anyway.

One thing that I've always found odd is how we'd get these storylines about the X-Men and Hellfire Club racing to be the first to indoctrinate/recruit these mutants that popped up on the radar/Cerebro/whatever... Kitty, Dazzler, Blob, etc, but at the same time over the years, dozens and hundreds of mutants just manifested, grew up and went about their lives. Some appeared as grown villains, some as civilians, and sometimes we'd get an explanation like "Xavier gave them the speech but they refused" or "Xavier kept tabs on them but didn't feel like recruiting them." Over the years, entire teams and communities of mutants would appear...

But it makes stories where both sides absolutely have to have someone like Kitty feel a little unusual.

[jkcarrier]

I remember these issues well. I liked Kitty right away, and thought that perhaps her introduction indicated the series was going in a more optimistic direction. Ha ha, how wrong I was...

[mastermahan]

"Good to meet you, Professor. And by meet, I of course mean it's wonderful to see you again, my dear army buddy who I asked to be my best man. "

That was not one of Claremont's smoothest retcons.

[zylly]

There’s definitely a shift starting about just how numerous mutants were. Particularly in the pre All New All Different era, each individual mutant was treated like a major deal who could tip the balance of power.

And then you find out there’s an entire civilization under the streets that Cerebro somehow missed.

[scorntx]

And then that entire country built on the back of Mutant slave labour...
(How exactly did Cerebro miss that?)

[scorntx]

And then Scott tried telling the Professor that.
"Yes, you're right, Scott. This is your fault!"
"Whu-?"

(And before Scott can go any further, Cerebro going off interrupts him. So it's Kitty's fault the Professor's a jerk! QED!)

[scorntx]

Professor X seems to have the secondary mutation of generating clumsily retconned relationships.
(Tessa, Sebastian Shaw, Gabrielle Haller, Magneto, Dani's grandad, Amelia Voght...)

[icon_uk]

I blame crappy cell reception for the Morlocks staying off grid. Yes, in 1983.... ot's the MU, Reed Richards and Tony Stark probably had the internet by 1966 but didn't tell anyone (Reed just forgot he'd invented it, and Tony was waiting for the best moment to launch it)

Later retcons would link the Morlocks existence to Dark Beast, so he might have come up with some shielding tech.

[icon_uk]

Did post-transformation Mutates register on Cerebro, I wonder?

[icon_uk]

He suffers from "Jessica Fletcher Syndrome", an affliction common to many characters in long running episodic series whereby they can unconsicously produce, by multiversal manipulation, best friends and even relatives that they have never mentioned before, but who were pivotal to their life... for 45 minutes, or three issues, then they vanish back into the foam on the shores of causality.

[icon_uk]

IIRC Kitty being a supergenius was one of the things which tore the Claremont Byrne relationship apart. Byrne was VERY much against making Kitty a genius of any sort (still less something like computer science and engineering), despite the fact it would make her the first (and possibly only) attendee of Xaviers School for Gifted Youngsters, who was a "gifted youngster" outside of their mutation.

[scorntx]

Given it's Professor X, wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility he was just using his powers to make people think they were his besties.
Maybe just because he's feeling lazy.
(And if any of the darker parodies haven't done that...)

[icon_uk]

Perhaps appropriately, Jean does pretty much exactly that at the end of this story, in one of the first manifestations of her power making her believe she was above human morality.

[scorntx]

Wait, what about Beast?


(I think... I can kind of see where Byrne's coming from there, actually.
ohh, agreeing with Byrne... doesn't feel right...)

[icon_uk]

Good point, I'd forgotteen about Beast! :)

[zylly]

I'd actually forgotten that particular retcon, which has never made a lot of sense. But I could certainly have seen him doing something to make mass detection more difficult.

[zylly]

Another very good question!