Kitty and Storm sort out their differences...
Originally Published April 1984
We begin with Hang Time.
Yes, Professor Xavier has regained mobility to the point where he can capably play a game of one-on-none. Just as long as it doesn't leave him feeling a little horse. That's all the basketball jokes I've got right now.
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| Wait, who did they play in 72-73? |
We are told this return of mobility occurred in a recent issue of New Mutants, although I was fine with just accepting that Charles would get back on his feet eventually as the story had been inching in that direction for some time. It's fitting that he rushes right to the court, since longtime readers of this blog will know - and as Charles himself reflects - he was quite the sportsman in his youth, giving up his place on various school teams because of the unfair advantage his mental abilities (somehow) provided.
Some good they do him now, as he is once again struck by that alien scanning wave that has been pestering him these past few months.
Hearing the Professor cry out, Storm arrives to see if he is okay. Once the pain passes, she shifts the conversation abruptly over to something more pressing: herself. She is bothered by Kitty's reaction to her change in appearance and temperament; the latter, she notes, comes out anytime she has fought Callisto, whom she has repeatedly been willing to kill despite previously having sworn never to take a life. Callisto jisust has that effect on her, I guess.
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| Plus, now she's like, super into the Dead Kennedys |
She worries that she might actually be insane, and the Professor reassures her...
This actually comes off as a sweet, playful moment, a crack in Xavier's normally distant facade that shows the humanity and even warmth we sometimes sense beneath the surface... until you turn the page and Xavier notes that this was only a surface scan and requires more time if she wants a complete diagnostic, and it's like damn Charlie, you had to go and ruin it. I thought it was just a fun little joke, but you actually went and probed her mind without her specifically consenting. Gross.
Especially coupled with the fact that, as Storm talks Xavier is given a wholly unnecessary and gross thought bubble wherein he notes that Storm's new attitude causes him to think of her as a woman for the first time, and attractive. Like damn Charlie, it wasn't okay twenty years ago with Jean, and it's not okay now!
As we leave off with Storm ambiguously resigned to continuing her journey of personal growth, we switch over to Kitty, who is at an arcade with her friend Doug. You know Doug, right? He's very quiet and enjoys puzzles.
After getting a score so high it glitches the machine, the tweens are thrown out and told not to come back, since they have a habit of spending a whole day monopolizing a machine on a single quarter. They hie hence to the nearby McD's, where Kitty vents her spleen about - what else - Ororo's recent makeover.
Yes, we've heard this song before, about how it's so personal to Kitty that Storm would change her appearance, but remember it's not just about how she looks, it's about her entire persona. She really isn't the nature-mother-goddess Storm we knew for years. She's harder, yet more passionate, and discovering this layer of her friend and surrogate mother figure is scary to Kitty, who revered her in her old way. Why couldn't Storm have thought about Kitty's feelings before developing an entirely new personal philosophy?
I get it, but it would be pretty insufferable, immature and self-centred coming out of the mouth of a character older than 14.
Doug, meanwhile, has some news of his own - he's got an interview with the Massachusetts Academy, and since Kitty was briefly enrolled there, maybe she would like to come along on the interview.
I'm trying to think, don't we know someone who works at the Massachusetts Academy?
Oh, right. Emma Frost and the Hellfire Club. I keep forgetting.
I like the idea that Doug - who obviously has age-appropriate chemistry with Kitty - is just using this as a premise to spend more time with her, since why would you ever invite someone to something like that?
Speaking of, back at the Mansion, Colossus is taking some frustrations out on a tree.
Pete has had a rough few weeks. Not because he almost died - that happens two or three times a year - but because of Kitty. Specifically, her decision to marry Caliban and live with the Morlocks forever is troubling to him.
Wolverine arrives to share his thoughts. The way he sees it, she was prepared to give herself to the Morlocks to save his life, an act of love for Peter if Wolverine has ever heard one (and he has quite the romantic side you know - he once murdered his girlfriend's father for her.) But Piotr is down on himself, feeling he is no competition for Doug, who is smart, well-versed in American popular culture, and age-appropriate. Okay, he doesn't say that last part but we're all thinking it.
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| Bro, you're jealous of a 13-year-old. |
Honestly, I love Piotr - he's humble to the point of borderline self-loathing, and his doubts ring true even if it's clear Kitty does not have feelings for Doug.
Elsewhere, we see Storm visiting a botanical garden, where she has donated her former plants, which like so many other aspects of her former identity, she is done with.
But before she can get too deep into navel-gazing, she hears cries for help, turning to see a gang of street thugs roughing up an old couple. Jeez, what has the world come to when you can't even take a stroll through a botanical garden without fearing for your life??
Storm dispatches the muggers with ease, using that magic 80's Judo, only to find that the would-be victims are just as afraid of their rescuer as they were of the group of violent men who attacked them.
I'm going to chalk this one up to racism, actually.
At Professor X's summons, Storm returns to the mansion, whereupon Kitty informs the group that Doug has asked her to come to the Massachusetts Academy and, despite her recent horrible experience at that institution, she feels more than comfortable going along - enthusiastic even.
Kitty gives a rundown of the facts as she sees them: Frost was in a coma the last they saw of her, and if Kitty gets into trouble she can mentally call on the rest of the X-Men, (because surely Shaw wouldn't be foolhardy enough to take on the whole team by himself.)
This all seems wildly naïve to me, but hey, I've only read a hundred and fifty or so of these comics, how am I supposed to know what might happen?
The Professor notes that the Mass. Academy might be interested in Doug because he's a mutant with a power to know languages - human, computer, you know, whatever. Sign, presumably. Body, maybe. Love, perhaps. In any case, it's a "Quiet" power, so the Prof is uninterested in inducting him into the X-Men, since, you know, the only people who would need to harness their abilities, or even know they have them, are those who walk through walls or shoot lasers out of their faces. Everybody else can just live their merry little lives, none the wiser. Not like there are any killer robots out there that can sense who is a mutant and kill them indiscriminately, ho hum.
Storm reluctantly agrees to Kitty's plan to walk into this obvious trap, since it seems to account for every contingency (specifically: if there's trouble, call the X-Men.) With that, the group meeting is called to a break, and Storm whisks Kitty away against her will to have a long chat, in the highly stressful environment of a localized updraft she has created.
While it is completely valid that Storm should try to avoid having that creep Xavier prying into her beeswax as much as possible, I would find it hard to pay attention to an important conversation my best friend and mother figure was trying to have whilst essentially trapped in a neverending skydive. At the very least, it would be prohibitively hard to hear what she is saying with all that wind blowing around, and also, the mental distress it would put you in would probably be a red flag to Xavier anyway. It may also not put me in the most accepting of moods.
So anyway. Kitty and Storm hash it out, as Kitty asks why, exactly, Storm has changed her whole persona, and worse, into this cool countercultural badass thing she now has going on, which scares meek suburbanite Kitty who has probably never even heard of the Sex Pistols, let alone Richard Hell or Siouxsie Sioux.
Storm explains that the longer she had remained an X-Man, the more she felt the conflict between her superheroic duties, and her conception of herself as a goddess protector of life. First she thought the two roles could coexist within her, but then she became leader and found herself having to make tough decisions and sacrifices. Now, she states, she could match Wolverine for ruthlessness (just ask Callisto.) And she really didn't know what to do with that side of herself, how to express or process it, until she met... (wistful sigh...) Yukio.
Kitty protests - gosh darnit, why do things have to change so much all the time? First my parents, now this. And Storm says Well, I've been afraid of changes because I've built my life around you, but time made me bolder, and children get older, and I'm getting older too.
I mean, not in so many words, but that's the gist of it: That change is a constant and while many people will walk by our side in life, ultimately we walk our own paths, and this is Storm's.
In the end, they hug it out, and Storm is relieved to note that for the first time in her life she feels free to laugh or cry and not be the emotionally reserved goddess figure she thought she was. And bonus, she's not walking around causing hurricanes all the time like she thought she might just because she had a good cry. So it's win-win.
A week later, Kitty - dressed in an identical outfit to the one she had been wearing but in opposite colours for some reason - joins Doug on the Massachisetts Academy's private jet for an all-expenses paid trip to beautiful Boston (they had to drive the 50 minutes to LaGuardia for that?)
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| A whole week? that's 7x as long as she was enrolled there before! |
Kitty is distracted by the icy farewell she gets from Piotr, but on the jet has more to worry about. As she steels herself that her plan ("Call the X-Men") prepares her for every contingency, she is taken by surprise when she sees...
So, just to get this straight - Kitty's plan prepared her for "every contingency," as she, the Professor and Storm all specifically agreed. but somehow "every contingency" did not include Emma Frost not being in a coma anymore??
Is it their first day, or what?
Kitty justifiably sounds the panic alarm, but unfortunately the X-Men are not around to hear it. No, they've driven directly from LaGuardia to Manhattan, where the Professor has at long last determined the source of the crippling scanning wave he has been experiencing these past few weeks. It turns out to be emanating from a ginormous weirdo alien structure that has mysteriously appeared in Central Park without anybody noticing.
So, you know, the X-Men do the sensible thing and traipse right in to see what it's all about.
Now wait just a damn minute! I thought we were all crystal clear, the entire crux of letting Kitty go to Massachusetts was because the X-Men were going to be there to back her up if and when - and it was definitely going to be when - things went pearshaped. And the very first thing they do is stroll right into a completely different obvious trap?? You're killing me, Smalls!
As noted above, this story is to be continued, in like, a bunch of different places.
Further Thoughts:
Because it will receive very little explication here, I want to explain this whole deal with the alien structure. This is the lead-in to the Marvel Comics Secret Wars, the original universe-spanning crossover that saw all of the major name (and most marketable) Marvel heroes pitted against their most iconic bad guys (and the Molecule Man) on an alien world for the amusement and edification of the enigmatic alien being known as The Beyonder. The entire point of this was to promote the action figure line of the same name, and of course, to sell a shit-ton of comics by featuring every hero at once.
To Marvel Comics readers in 1984, the top name heroes pop away for a bit (by entering these highly suspicious alien doorways) and return the next month with minor tweaks to their characters, the explanations for which would be found in the Secret Wars mini-series that was then-ongoing, so don't miss it. It is a fantastic example of merchandising and marketig synergy and a terrible example of how to write good comics, thanks to the typewriter of increasingly power-mad Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. Thankfully, besides the fact that it exists and the X-Men were in it, it's completely skippable for our purposes.
As to the actual content of this issue, while I've recently praised stories that de-emphasized action, here we see you really need a strong throughline to carry you if you're going to go that route. Most of this issue is made up of proselytizing about Storm's mental state, Kitty's feelings, or the Professor's own developments, as well as some hastily-done setup for the next clash against Emma Frost. The fight between Storm and the gang - at a motherflicking botanical garden, that famous hotspot for criminal elements - defines obligatory, as if someone looked at a blank spot between scenes are realized nobody punched anybody in this whole issue. Mostly, I would rather not a single punch be thrown if it's going to be such an unnecessary one, but the rest of the issue's material didn't quite stretch that far either.
As to Storm's conversation with Kitty, it was revealing for sure. I absolutely cannot argue with the content - it's part of the appeal of these comics that they treat the characters so seriously, giving their emotions and character developments such serious weight, and relatively clearly and realistically depicting tweenage Kitty's take on Storm's changing nature (pun not intended but not deleted either.) For many years wordiness was a point of derision for these comics but it helps them resonate years later as having a depth and emotional honesty that, say, something like Secret Wars doesn't.
I just wish it hadn't taken the form of a three-page lecture, which is a little clumsy and not that exciting to read since it's not like we were dying to know what Storm is thinking - it's been well seeded throughout the story for several issues, as we have watched her grow toward the change, and reckon with it afterward. All this dialogue is largely for Kitty's benefit, not as much ours as the reader.
That said, there's some use there, because to readers in 1984, Storm has changed drastically and it's hard to acclimate to the idea that she is not the same as she has been for years leading up to this. She could theoretically have kept leading the X-Men as the swimsuit-wearing emotionally-reserved goddess figure, but the book's direction pushed her away from it, and managed to "organically" (and I hate that word because everything is done by creators, but it connotes a certain authenticity) get to the Storm we have here.
Reading this comic in 2020, I feel Storm resonates strongly. We see that reality is more complicated than vowing to never take a life (although that's still laudable) and that navigating a complex world that wants you dead requires great strength and resolve as well as empathy for those around you. This Storm is a character I am proud to be reading.
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