Emma Frost Pushes the Issue for Kitty Pryde’s Accidental New Team

It is interesting how there are always so many standard plot points that just always come up in comic book stories, and the trick really is to see HOW said plot points are executed. In other words, so many comic book team titles are about putting together a handful of superheroes together so that they form a superhero team. Everyone knows that inherently that HAS to happen, so as a writer, the struggle is to pull off a story that the audience knows HAS to come, and yet do it in an interesting way. In Exceptional X-Men, Eve Ewing is doing a nice job with having Kitty Pryde do everything she can to AVOID forming a new X-Men team, and she just can’t help but still form one, as a group of young mutants decide to essentially form a team AROUND Kitty…until Emma Frost steps in.

Exceptional X-Men #2 is from the creative team of writer Eve Ewing, artist Carmen Carnero, colorist Nolan Woodard, and letterer Joe Sabino), and it continues Kitty Pryde’s attempt at dropping out of the world of superheroes to just be a bartender in Chicago. In the first issue, Kitty saved the life of a young mutant, and the mutant is now Kitty’s biggest fan, and in this issue, Kitty adds two more followers as she can’t help but make a difference in the lives of young mutants.

The Adventures of Kitty Pryde, Seriously Not a Superhero. Seriously!

Kitty is so averse to conflict that we see that even at the bar where she works, she does her best to AVOID fights at the bar. This is a woman who is one of the most talented martial artists in the world, and she would prefer to spend her time keeping drunk jerks from getting into fights over baseball at a bar. If you’ve heard the term “The lady doth protests too much,” then that really is Kitty Pryde trying to convince herself that she wants nothing to do with the world of mutants.

However, while she is pretty clearly not being true to herself about her willingness to get involved with the mutant cause, one thing she DOES seem actually legitimately interested in is getting back into the dating world, as we see her finally go on the date she never got a chance to go on in the first issue, thus showing us Kitty’s first date with another woman in the comics. As I noted in my review of last issue, Kitty being bisexual is pretty much a given by most fans, but hey, it’s one thing to be something that everyone just accepts as being true, and it is another thing to actually see it written into a story, so it is still quite notable to see.

At the soccer game, we meet two other new mutants, one of whom is a member of the soccer team, and the other one is just a high school student trying to support his friend, who is on the team. One of the things that Ewing has done the best at in this series is to highlight the fact that the world of mutants is so much larger than Krakoa, in the sense that for every mutant who embraced life on the mutant nation, there were at least two or three who have never left their hometown, and can’t even FATHOM the idea of going to a place like Krakoa. It’s sort of like during the hurricanes, where people are all, “Why didn’t you evacuate?” and there are many people where they can’t AFFORD to evacuate, as they have nowhere to evacuate TO. People’s circumstances are different all over the world, and Ewing does a great job with that with the three new mutants at the heart of the series.

In the first issue, we saw how the young mutant that Kitty saved, Bronze, really doesn’t know ANYthing about being a mutant, and we see that continued in this issue, where Axo, whose mutation makes him unable to “pass” as an ordinary human, just wants to try to live his life as best as he can, and doesn’t know anything about being a mutant, either, while the soccer player, Melee, knows JUST enough about mutant life that she knows the secret “I’m a mutant” hand signal that was introduced during “From the Ashes,” and yet when she flashes Axo, he just thinks she is trying to recruit him into some sort of gang.

We often get this sense that kids are plugged into every fad imaginable, but there are plenty of teens who are just in their little midwest bubble, and where Melee thinks she is trying to build some mutant unity with Axo, Axo just thinks that Melee is weird. However, when bigoted humans try to force a fight, Kitty has to step in and save Melee and Axo. She puts them into contact with Bronze, thinking that that will get them all out of her hair, but in reality, it just makes the trio even more determined to seek out Kitty’s counsel…and that’s where a bored Emma Frost steps in, as she sees Kitty accidentally recruiting some new mutants, and Emma wants in, whether Kitty (or the young mutants) want her to be involved at all!

Emma’s introduction at the close of this issue was outstanding. Carnero has done a great job with the character work in this series. Kitty is clearly going to be forced off of the sidelines by Emma Frost’s actions, and it will be fascinating to see her interact with Emma over the lives of these young mutants.

Source: Marvel