X-Men Gold #26-30 – “‘Til Death Do Us Part”
Bait and switch marriage issues seem to be the thing this year for superhero comics. Not that I’m complaining too much; the Batman issue works as a story even if it makes the hype look insincere, while X-Men Gold seemed to be on the verge of marrying off Kitty and Peter for no particular reason beyond the fact that it seemed like an X-Men-y sort of thing to do.
How many of today’s X-Men readers actually are invested in the idea of Kitty and Peter’s relationship, I wonder? It’s something that gets referenced from time to time, but the actual meat of it stems from Claremont stories back in the early 1980s – it was in the past even by the time I started reading. The marriage we actually get in issue #30 seems like one that far more readers are likely to care about, so if anything, it’s a switch that many fans will see as a trade up.
But inevitably, these issues have to spend more time pushing Kitty and Peter’s relationship, and so we get some flashbacks to their highlights, rather nicely done by guest artist David Marquez, with a sensitive colouring job by Matthew Wilson – they echo the art style of the original issues very convincingly without being too showy about it. And to be fair to writer Marc Guggenheim, the story proper goes right into Peter and Kitty talking about how their relationship has, until very recently, taken an awfully long time to go precisely nowhere.
You can’t fill five issues with people talking to the caterers, though, so issue #26 spends most of its time on the X-Men capturing Mesmero in South America – something that also serves as an excuse to get Rogue and Gambit back into the cast – and then . Again, the story wisely avoids putting too much emphasis on their return; they’re just there, albeit used prominently so that they’re firmly established as available for the final issue.
After that, we’re on to a four issue storyline with Alpha, the “sentient nanotech cloud” Sentinel from a few issues earlier, and good old Lydia Nance, the book’s signature villain. It’s very much the sort of thing that would benefit from not being billed as a part-X-of-five storyline, since the structure is, once again, more of an open-ended ongoing serial. There are the usual juggling subplots – Rachel is acting oddly thanks to Mesmero’s meddling, which will come to something in the next arc; Storm can’t seem to get rid of her ersatz Mjolnir, which gets us a footnote to the hyper-obscure X-Men: To Serve & Protect #3; and Iceman is defending his decision to put the new Pyro on the team.
The A plot, though. Alpha and Lydia kidnap Peter because they think his bloodstream contains traces of the Legacy Virus which can be used to wipe out mutants. There’s a mildly interesting idea with Alpha that subverts the normal “AI out of control” tropes: Alpha agrees that he is himself a mutant, but rather than going into a logical tailspin, he simply acknowledges that once he’s killed all the other mutants, he’d better shut himself down too. In fact, Alpha regards himself as further evidence of how dangerous mutants are – after all, he’s absolutely murderous.
So all this is basically a backdrop for Kitty to put aside her hesitations about the marriage and focus on rescuing her man from the baddies. Of course, it also helpfully separates her and Peter for most of the arc. Very conveniently, it takes Alpha only an issue or so to come up with a virus and produce it in quantities sufficient for the whole planet, which seems excessively easy for a genocidal weapon in this day and age, and so we get some running around in space while the X-Men try to stop the weapon in its tracks.
These things are always basically false peril, because we know perfectly well there’s no prospect of all mutants being wiped out at the end of the issues. Unfortunately, Guggenheim gets himself a bit tied up in knots here; having pitched the threat at “seemingly unstoppable”, he doesn’t really have a very convincing escape route by which to stop it, so we get lots of people running around zapping bioweapons as they fall from the sky. And that doesn’t seem like it would be an entirely effective method of containing something as dangerous as the plot previously required the virus to be.
But that leaves us with an issue still to go – the wedding itself. Having covered Peter and Kitty’s highlights in chronological sequence up to this point, the opening flashback suddenly loops back to their break-up after Secret Wars, which is a neat touch. And after some merely okay art from other creators in the earlier issues, it’s a pleasure to see Marquez get to do the whole of issue #30; he’s a great artist who really brings some grace and lightness to a very talky story.
The turning point is a scene with Kitty and Illyana, playing off their long-discontinued status as best friends, with Illyana not being able to hide her doubts about whether this is really such a good idea. That’s essentially for the reasons most readers would give (“if you two were meant to be together, it would’ve happened by now”). It’s also rather out of character for Illyana in terms of the way she’s been written in recent years – she’s torn between not wanting to ruin Kitty’s evening and not feeling able to dodge a direct question about what she thinks – but you can probably rationalise it as Kitty being unusually well placed to cut through Illyana’s usual emotional blockade, if you’re so minded.
Obviously, this being melodrama, Kitty can’t just no show the wedding; she has to panic during the ceremony. Visually, this is a lovely moment – Peter tries to put the ring on her finger and his hand passes straight through her. It’s beautifully done. Sure, it’s a little odd to have them putting on the rings before doing the vows. But the visual is worth it.
The pay off is a late night heart to heart between Kitty and Peter where she tells him that she loves him but can’t commit to marrying, followed by Rogue and Gambit suddenly deciding to take advantage of the available rabbi to get married on the spur of the moment themselves. (Can you do that in New York state? Maybe in the Marvel Universe, I guess.) While they’ve been reintroduced into the cast during the arc, this really does come out of nowhere so far as X-Men Gold is concerned; if you’ve read the recent Rogue & Gambit miniseries, however, then it’ll feel like a reasonably plausible development.
The Kitty/Peter material is largely good. The busy work in the middle issues with Alpha and Lydia is rather more middling stuff. But the artwork on the flashbacks and the final issue is definitely worth your time.
Why people say that Batman 50 works, as a story? It’s a boring splash page after splashpage, snorefest. Reasoning is very childish, and cliffhanger feels like a Knightfall 2.
1) The ring bit was a truly great visual.
2) I don’t read this series, but to be clear: [SPOILERS] Iceman lobbies for Pyro to join the team and very quickly has sex with him? Does this seem problematic to anyone?
As an X-Men child of the ’70s and ’80s, and a longtime shipper of Kitty/Peter, I’m relieved they didn’t go through with it. Reed and Sue notwithstanding, superhero relationships in comics are either doomed to fail or doomed to be an on/off thing interminably. Marriage doesn’t prevent this. It only complicates it. That’s Rogue and Gambit’s problem now.
I’m very excited for the Mr. & Mrs. X book. The Rogue & Gambit book as an absolute delight.
Dazzler – nothing about the Iceman/Pyro hookup works. For one, Pyro is completely a blank slate as a character, personality-wise and physically. When we see them in their underwear together in the latest issue, I couldn’t even tell them apart.
Further, even if he’s an adult man, Pyro (can’t remember his actual name) is greener than even students at the school, yet he’s out in the field, vulnerable, and Iceman is OK with sleeping with him? Very weird.
Do I like that we’re at a point at Marvel where two male characters can casually be shown quite so intimately? Absolutely. I just wish I had a better sense of the characters.
[quote]”Rogue and Gambit suddenly deciding to take advantage of the available rabbi to get married on the spur of the moment themselves. (Can you do that in New York state? Maybe in the Marvel Universe, I guess.)”[/quote]
Near as can tell, no. They’d need to show up for a marriage license and then wait 24 hours before having the ceremony. Plus they’d have to actually convince the rabbi to go through with it.
Then again, they have a powerful telepath on hand so all of this can probably be finessed if need be.
Maybe I am just misinformed, but would not a Rabbi expect the celebrants to be at least nominally adherents to Judaism?
“Eh, I was going to marry an atheist who’s been legally dead twice and his sister is the devil. Marrying a criminal to an Avenger is frankly a relief. I’ll overlook the religion and legal bit.”
I’m having trouble recalling something here. There was the Batman/Catwoman marriage that didn’t happen and the Kitty/Peter marriage that didn’t happen, right? Which marriage didn’t happen because the bride changed her mind after something her blonde best friend said to her?
Lol! rabbis can do secular ceremonies, if they want to. It won’t be ‘legal’ until they get the license, which sounds like ‘something that happens off panel’ type of thing. I could see the MU being more lenient about rules for marriages, given how ‘the universe could destroyed at any second,’ happens regularly, people have reason to get things done quicker. 😉
Hm…blondes are troublesome…
Huh, post vanished. Anyway, rabbis can use reform secular ceremonies, if they want to, don’t know how common it is.
Ugh, dumb autocorrect… my post was supposed to say ‘rabbis can perform secular ceremonies, if they want to’
Moo – if I recall correctly, it was the wedding where the brunette bride had a cat-themed codename.
On second thought, that is quite reasonable.
People in the MU would make all sorts of unusual arrangements when dealing with known superheroes. The celebrity factor alone would ensure that. It helps that so often people would be in fact dying if the heroes are kept busy without a very real need.
Besides, the Rabbi would presumably have a reasonable familiarity with Kitty at the very least, and we can assume that she would vouch for Remy and Rogue. Since apparently Peter was not converting to Judaism, it is safe to assume that it is a fairly liberal Rabbi, as well.
Yes, I can entirely see it happening under the circunstances. And yes, I definitely am overthinking it. I should probably have dealt with the matter of ring exchange coming before voicing vows first…
How many of today’s X-Men readers actually are invested in the idea of Kitty and Peter’s relationship, I wonder? It’s something that gets referenced from time to time, but the actual meat of it stems from Claremont stories back in the early 1980s – it was in the past even by the time I started reading
There should be a term for this: when a superhero comic pushes a nostalgia button for something that happened too long ago for most readers to be nostalgic for it, but which, because of their encyclopedic knowledge of the backstory, they nevertheless are able to identify as nostalgic.
I’m not too sure that this is such a strong example of the phenomenon, because an awful lot of X-readers, although too young to have read it when it came out, probably did after becoming X-readers delve into Essentials (and now, Unlimited), imbuing themselves with Claremont nostalgia.
But if it does apply, I think it probably applies to Kitty in general — I have a feeling that Kitty, since her revival as a major part of the X-books at the beginning of this century, may have never been a character who wasn’t to a significant extent defined by “She used to be this naive ingenue figure, and now look at her.” Whedon, Bendis, Guggenheim – certainly those three versions of Kitty are all about her ‘80s past.
Who wrote the Secret Wars tie-in that had married Kitty and Peter in a Sentinal controlled death camp, because that was the first time I’d seen anything for years that had anything about them being a couple.
Marguerite Bennett — and arguably that particular miniseries (Years of Future Past) is a special case, because the whole point is to use Secret Wars to do a riff on a super-famous Claremont story. It existed alongside another miniseries that was all about Kitty and Peter Quill as the real OTP, after all.
I believe that the last time before then that the Kitty and Peter relationship was a thing was 2011. So, yes, there’s a good 4-year gap in there, and given that Years of Future Past is a special case, I think you could probably argue that the relationship hasn’t been part of the X-books since around the time of Schism until Guggenheim decided to bring it back.
So…Rogue and Gambit are Jewish now? I’m so confused….
@Dazzler and Mikey – When you couple the Iceman/Pyro thing with Bobby’s recent date with former (albeit, briefly) student/ward/whatever Rictor…well, Iceman is starting to come of as rather predatory
Of note: Guggenheim intended for Kitty and Peter to follow through with the marriage. It was changed by editorial mandate after someone at the last editor/writer summit–one rumor is that it was Donny Cates–suggested the bait and switch as a twist.
TL;DR: this wasn’t a deliberate deconstruction of nostalgia on the part of the writer, but rather a mechanism for storytelling stimulus on the part of editorial.
Personally, the Kitty/Colossus pairing doesn’t make sense to me in light of that time he showed up on Muir Isle and beat Pete Wisdom to a pulp back during the Ellis run on Excalibur.
Pete Wisdom. Pete Wisdom. Oh, you mean Warren Ellis– who wrote himself into Excalibur as a character so he could have sex with Kitty and who had Colossus imposed on him by editorial and so immediately had him go full on lunatic. That story was essentially just a cock-block at the expense of Peter’s character.
I don’t see Pete Wisdom as an analogue of Warren Ellis, in the slightest. For one, Wisdom didn’t look anything like Spider Jerusalem.
I always took it that Pete Wisdom was meant to be a John Constantine archetype. Ellis seemed to have a fixation with wanting to write John Constantine around that point in time.
He also introduced an even more blatant John Constantine archetype during that run.
Luis-I’d guess we’d have to question Kitty’s judgment if she would vouch for Remy and Rogue getting married.
Do you really think anyone in their right mind would agree that Remy and Rogue were an ideal couple to get married?
“Do you really think anyone in their right mind would agree that Remy and Rogue were an ideal couple to get married?”
I suppose that’s where the story is.
Granted, this idea is just insane enough to work….
Whether Ellis imagined himself as Wisdom or not, he plainly wanted to continue running with the Pete/Kitty relationship and he did have Colossus forced on him. He obviously wanted to make it clear to readers in no uncertain terms that there was not going to be any love triangle subplot or a renewal of the Colossus/Kitty relationship, which was his prerogative. I just think he could have roped those possibilities off without kicking Colossus in the nuts.
To be fair, he did a lot to redeem Colossus. Colossus was already written really out of character in the X-books with that whole “siding with psychotic Magneto” character-arc.
I think Ellis was the first writer to get Colossus after that whole misfortunate character assassination.
So, I don’t blame Ellis for how he had to write Colossus at that point.
I think by the end of his run, Ellis had gotten Colossus back more towards being a workable character.
Aren’t most X-relationships kind of played out at this point?
— Rogue/Gambit: My personal preference aside (but really, ugh) they’ve been on-again, off-again for what now, 20 years? Marriage is what crazy codependent couples turn to when the thrill of their dramatic relationship isn’t enough anymore.
— Kitty/Peter: Besides the fact that their relationship rekindled out of the blue, what is the story utility in having them together? I don’t see them as a couple beyond the nostalgia factor. Peter barely has a personality lately, much less character development.
— Jean/Scott: Breaking up is probably the most interesting thing this couple did for years before they both died. Better apart than together.
— Emma/Scott: Quickly went from contentious and naughty to boring and chaste. And he’s still dead, so not great boyfriend material at the moment.
— Jean/Logan: Never really happened, wouldn’t really work, was recently confirmed as not happening anytime soon.
Someone with new ideas needs to start playing with these toys. Tom Taylor is killing it on X-Men: Red (IMHO) — maybe it’s time to put him (or someone like him) on a flagship book to revive this tired, old franchise and stop rehashing these same relationships over and over again.
If I were the rabbi I’d hang around for sheer entertainment value, that’s a story she could tell for awhile (and hang in case kitty needed spiritual guidance of some kind, lol, official job capacity there.)
I’ve never been one to think that long term relationships or even-gasp-marriages, automatically make characters/stories boring, so I’m interested in where this could go.
While normally I might be in agreement that Rogue and Gambit really don’t need to be married, I *do* think that the marriage we’re getting here is basically the only way it could happen – as a spur of the moment, arguably very stupid decision that neither of them have time to talk themselves out of.
Rogue and Gambit’s relationship has always been pretty clearly shown as one that their *hearts* want but their *heads* keep getting in the way, so by just jumping in with both feet before they get a chance to talk themselves out of it, suddenly you have a tweak to the status quo that has the potential for springboarding into some interesting stories. This was, IMHO, a good call.
I came into comics pretty much with Ellis’s Excalibur run, so my association with Kitty/Piotr is when Piotr shows up and beats Wisdom to a pulp. I enjoyed that issue for the melodrama too! I preferred Kitty/Piotr as a couple who were teenage crushes, who are still very fond of each other, but have moved on. This issue works for me in that regard. Agree it’s slightly odd that Illyana is hesitant to deliver the killer line, but it fits enough.
And Rogue/Gambit is so spurious and spur of the moment, it works for them! Plus it can always be dismissed as a shotgun wedding if required down the line.
Thom H.: Aren’t most X-relationships kind of played out at this point?
It’s less that than the places left to go with those relationships violate the “illusion of change” genre convention by maturing the characters past Marvel editorial’s comfort zone.
For example, there are plenty of potential Jean/Scott stories left to tell–I can think of several off the top of my head–but they involve moving the characters forward as a 30-something/middle-aged married couple and perhaps as parents. There’s no shortage of material there for angst and drama (and comedy, for that matter), and, contrary to the opinion of some, it could gel just fine with the fantastical superhero/mutant elements, but it would grow the characters outside Marvel’s narrow range of vision for them.
Similar issues are at work for Kitty/Peter, Gambit/Rogue, et al.
The problem isn’t the relationships; it’s genre convention combined with limited creative vision and aversion to change.
Incidentally, is it just me, or does everyone else picture Jean and Scott as being in their mid 30s?
“There should be a term for this: when a superhero comic pushes a nostalgia button for something that happened too long ago for most readers to be nostalgic for it, but which, because of their encyclopedic knowledge of the backstory, they nevertheless are able to identify as nostalgic.”
@voord99: I think it may be a thing that everyone has their own worst case they can name it after, but for me, I’ll always think of this as “The Barry Allen.”
I think of Jean and Scott as my age…early 40’s.