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Doug Centers
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 February 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 5487
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| Posted: 16 February 2018 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | 1
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Holy crap! How many monikers did she go by?
When I left comics she was still Sprite, when I see her that's what pops into my head first. Then I think Kitty second.
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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4557
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| Posted: 16 February 2018 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | 2
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Sprite, Ariel, and Shadowcat are all I remember. I suppose Polaris was a while getting her codename too. I hadn't realized that for some reason until The Hidden Years. I had X-Men #49 and 50 and could've sworn she would've been Polaris in them. As it turns out we were lucky Magnetrix wasn't foisted upon her/us. :^)
Kitty Pryde could've been my generation's Peter Parker by Ditko! John Romita Sr. didn't fill him out until he'd had around forty appearances as skinny Peter; Kitty started getting overly perky and self-confident after fewer issues. They did throw her for a loop with #151-152 though, getting transferred to the cross town school for bad mutants, they (Chris Claremont I guess) could've really stretched that out and made more of it.
Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 16 February 2018 at 8:25pm
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Michael Roberts
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 14816
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| Posted: 16 February 2018 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | 3
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I liked Kitty and Colossus as a teen couple.
——
When she was 14 and he was 19? She was too young.
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Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
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| Posted: 16 February 2018 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | 4
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The New Mutants made a lot of hay out of the two school's rivalry with one another and the constant threat of transfer between the two. Kitty was with the New Mutants throughout an extended storyline in which Emma Frost mind-controlled the kids' parents into arranging for everyone to be students at the Massachusetts Academy and members of the Hellions.
I don't think there was any idea Claremont had from which he didn't get considerable mileage, so much so that he'd leave everything open and not wrap anything up so as not to lose any possible story directions going forward.
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Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
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| Posted: 16 February 2018 at 11:05pm | IP Logged | 5
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As for Kitty and Peter getting married, wow, I cannot wait until they have to "One More Day" this sales event off into a cornfield. "Everyone remember that big mistake we had to fix a few years ago? Let's make it again!"
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 4789
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| Posted: 17 February 2018 at 8:37am | IP Logged | 6
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ITEM: From her first appearance, I never liked Kitty as a genius. Y'know, it's NOT binary - one is not either a genius or completely average intelligence. Yes, we have our Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, Henry Pym, etc. that set the gold standard. But the rest of the heroes aren't necessarily completely average. I'm thinking of Ben Grimm, Steve Rogers, Scott Summers, Matt Murdock, and others who don't have 200 I.Q.s... but who are still experts in difficult technical fields or areas. A person can be smart without reinventing a flying car.
ITEM: Kitty started as a thirteen year old.. she obviously was supposed to be young and learning and a relatively typical teenager. The original X-Men were typical teenagers, except for Angel being rich... and even that was ex post facto. The X-Men were mutants, heroes, and students - all young and LEARNING. That seems obvious from the first dozen books or so. Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, even Dazzler, were very obviously NOT students... the focus was on the super heroics, and training - but not exactly learning as teenagers do. Returning to form seemed like a good hook and great idea. Sure, Kitty could have become a pseudo ninja,... after months of training with Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Instead, she's just... just mystically TRANSFORMED? What a load of dung.
ITEM: Thank goodness that Chris Claremont didn't realize that Kitty, as a 13 year old Jewish girl, might not yet have been bat mitzvah'ed... or he might have had to create an epic to rival, or surpass, FF Annual #3. COROLLARY: There's a very nice mini-issue of Marvel Two-In-One in that story... The Thing and the X-Men vs the Mole Man. But no, because Stan and Jack were such failures and hacks.
ITEM: When I was 13, I had several crushes on the distaff half of our population... the vast majority of whom were far older than I. And they arrived and left pretty quickly. I can see that happening with Kitty, with her crush on Peter turning into a deep friendship, and even a brother-sister type relationship. Of course, in several years, it might have turned deeper... but not for dozens of issues. Mr. Claremont occasionally seemed to have... unusual proclivities about inter-chracter relationships (e.g., Rogue and Ms. Marvel.) This might just be me getting something out of the books that weren't there... but I saw it.
I feel that I really would liked to have seen Mr. Byrne's Kitty Pryde for more than half a dozen panels.
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Brian Miller
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 28 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 30906
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| Posted: 17 February 2018 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | 7
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Which of the mutants are more or less ordinary apart from their powers? Maybe Iceman...?
**********
Bobby Drake was a top notch accountant.
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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4557
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| Posted: 17 February 2018 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | 8
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I don't remember Hank McCoy being a tech-wiz originally. He was mister word-play and large vocabulary, which was unique among a lot of characters who sounded all Brooklyn and Queens. Not that characters aren't allowed to develop skills over time. His brain scrambler helped them fend off an enraged Dark Phoenix.
I wonder if The Phantom Stranger, The 'Alien' alien and Popeye got wedding invites? :^D
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 4789
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| Posted: 18 February 2018 at 8:52am | IP Logged | 9
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Ms. Jansen - and if you go back to X-Men #1 (because, sure, I know you have a copy... :), you'll see that the Beast's original speech pattern was more a match for Ben Grimm's. But as the series continued, I believe that Stan found the dichotomy between "beast" and "wordy" a fun challenge.
I'll also have to plead ignorance on your last line. I can tell there's a joke there... but I'm afraid I don't get it. Except that the Phantom Stranger goes wherever he's needed... :)
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Robert Bradley
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 September 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 4830
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| Posted: 18 February 2018 at 9:21am | IP Logged | 10
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ITEM: Kitty started as a thirteen year old.. she obviously was supposed to be young and learning and a relatively typical teenager. The original X-Men were typical teenagers, except for Angel being rich... and even that was ex post facto. The X-Men were mutants, heroes, and students - all young and LEARNING. That seems obvious from the first dozen books or so. Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, even Dazzler, were very obviously NOT students... the focus was on the super heroics, and training - but not exactly learning as teenagers do. Returning to form seemed like a good hook and great idea. Sure, Kitty could have become a pseudo ninja,... after months of training with Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Instead, she's just... just mystically TRANSFORMED? What a load of dung
* * * * *
"...but it's very, very special because, if you can see, the numbers all go to eleven."
It's the quickest way to make a character you're writing more interesting (I suppose). It's been far too often lately (Amadeus Cho, Riri Williams, Lunella Lafayette, Valeria Richards, Shuri).
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132349
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| Posted: 18 February 2018 at 9:30am | IP Logged | 11
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ITEM: Kitty started as a thirteen year old.. she obviously was supposed to be young and learning and a relatively typical teenager. The original X-Men were typical teenagers, except for Angel being rich... and even that was ex post facto. The X-Men were mutants, heroes, and students - all young and LEARNING. That seems obvious from the first dozen books or so. Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, even Dazzler, were very obviously NOT students... the focus was on the super heroics, and training - but not exactly learning as teenagers do. Returning to form seemed like a good hook and great idea. Sure, Kitty could have become a pseudo ninja,... after months of training with Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Instead, she's just... just mystically TRANSFORMED? What a load of dung•• As some of you know, I created Kitty in response to Shooter unleashing his Whim of Iron in the form of an edict that the book was about the "students of Charles Xavier," as it used to say in the top copy. Chris and I argued agains this, saying the important line there was "feared and hated by the world they are sworn to protect." But Shooter would have none of it. SCHOOL! SCHOOL! SCHOOL! So I came up with the idea of a second team, kids, students, with the existing characters functioning more in the role of teachers. Kitty was the first of these, with Caliban lurking in the wings. The Whim of Iron erupted again, and declared these were the "Legion of Substitute Mutants." The idea was rejected -- for a while, at least. (When royalties started to flow a few years later, Shooter brokered a verbal agreement between Chris and myself, by which I abdicated all claims to THE NEW MUTANTS and Chris did the same with ALPHA FLIGHT.)
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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4557
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| Posted: 18 February 2018 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | 12
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If the original comic had emphasized students learning too much it would've gotten boring. They were supposed to be young and capable of making mistakes as opposed to the billionaire playboy super scientist type scenario.
The New Mutants seems a good idea to both keep the original situation going while the older characters are let loose from it (it did seem silly to have young adult X-Men being treated like students with the demerits... "Wolverine don't jump through hoops for nobody"), and to bring in new characters, like the British tv series The Tomorrow people had to do even if only because actors age or leave. I'm glad they kept up the Hellions (and that they had members who could be won over just as Kitty was lost to them for a story). I always wondered why they phased out the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants in the early X-Men (only of course to bring it back). Some things just work, and if you have nothing to replace it with that is equal...
I bet Jim Shooter could be a real pain to work for/with, but I have to say some good things came out of that (although let's kill so-and-so or so-and-so has to die got way overworked, and he seems to have had that as his trademark back with The Legion Of Super-Heroes drawn by John Forte). I saw him at a convention in the '80s once and he seemed a somewhat menacing presence. :^D
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