Exceptional X-Men #12 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #12
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER. Kitty and the kids get sucked through a wormhole; this doesn’t exactly happen in the issue, but close enough.
PAGE 1. Reggie panics about Kitty’s disappearance.
This picks up directly from last issue’s cliffhanger, when Kitty vanished into one of the portals in the park. The passers-by were also in the final panel of the last issue, where at least some of them seemed to be reacting with surprise, but here Reggie seems to be the only one who’s noticed (or at least the only one who cared).
Last issue, Reggie was preoccupied thinking about how to text Trista, and it seemed to be just coincidence that he was around when the portals opened. This issue explains that he’s a mutant too and that they’re created by his mutant power. Ironheart’s AI, NATALIE, told us last issue that the portal has “a precise set of emotional signatures bound up with its temporal emissions” and “will draw in people who are temporally sensitive or people with a connection to it”. Kitty was presumably drawn to it simply because of her experience of such weirdness as a member of the X-Men.
Reggie hasn’t been directly implied to be a mutant before now, but with hindsight it’s obvious why he told Trista in issue #4 that it was her right to keep quiet about being a mutant. That issue also involved a monster coming through a portal to attack them both, which had nothing to do with Reggie – it was a tie-in to X-Force – but which he might reasonably have assumed was something to do with him.
“Doesn’t know how to break the fourth wall yet.” The core cast routinely break the fourth wall to address the reader directly in this series, though only in a way that would more conventionally be done in narration. As a supporting character, Reggie doesn’t yet get this privilege.
PAGES 2-9. Ironheart takes Reggie to the X-Men, and Emma decides to send the kids back in time.
Iceman is taking on the kids 3-on-1 as a training exercise, and actually manages to lose. Admittedly, he’s probably not going 100%.
Axo’s empathic powers have no real value in this exercise, but his gymnastics seem to be coming along nicely.
As in the previous issue, Melée immediately identifies Reggie as “Trista’s crush” and clumsily covers for it. (By “creative friend” she presumably means that they’re both into drama, as seen in issue #4.)
“Maybe this group is at a point where we should keep our locations on with one another?” Trista has a point – while the adult X-Men are hardly likely to want to be easily traced, the kids really do need a way of contacting them in an emergency, particularly if Kitty is going to keep yelling at them for not getting help. It’s come up before in issue #8 and (arguably) in the last issue.
Nina. Iceman’s guess that Kitty might be with her is actually pretty good (not that it’s a massive leap of imagination) – Kitty was with Nina immediately before she stumbled into the portal. Nina doesn’t know about the X-Men, hence Iceman’s clumsy attempts to come up with a pretext for asking where Kitty is.
“She was frustrated when she left…” When they last saw Kitty in the previous issue, she walked out on the group after arguing with Bobby about whether she should have been made a teen hero at all. Of course, we now know that this is a time-travel story involving young Kitty, so presumably part of this will be about her coming to terms with that part of her past, and deciding that the premise of this book is OK after all.
“Excessive friendship from Iron People is ill-advised.” Emma is referring to her romance with Tony Stark from Gerry Duggan’s Iron Man and X-Men runs, though it’s not like it went that badly for her. She probably just means that Tony can be very annoying.
“We know.” This is an odd beat – it’s played as if Reggie is ashamed of being the last mutant present to come out (and ought to be), rather than as everyone expressing agreement. And Trista only made her mutant powers known to Reggie because they were attacked. Trista seems a little aggrieved that Reggie wouldn’t tell her about his powers once he knew about hers, which is perhaps fair enough – but then again, he was trying to pluck up courage to text her last issue. With hindsight, it’s possible that this is what he wanted to talk to her about, and maybe he wasn’t actually reciprocating her crush at all.
Reggie has weird markings on both arms, the significance of which isn’t immediately apparently. Somehow, by reading his mind, Emma is able to identify that his “swirls” are space-time portals, and his blackouts are “minor bursts of time travel”. Perhaps she can simply recognise them when she sees them in his memories, but somehow or other she’s able to tell that Reggie’s portal has sent Kitty back in time. If Reggie doesn’t know that, it’s really quite hard to understand how Emma can figure it out by reading his mind… but somehow she can.
“I did that once! Not terrible. Although hard on the knees.” The only story that springs to mind where Ironheart travels back in time is from this year’s Free Comic Book Day 2025: Ironheart / Marvel’s Voices one-shot, but it doesn’t involve much kneeling.
“You and I are both important to the trajectory of young Katherine’s life…” Okay, this really doesn’t make much sense as a way of getting the kids to go on their own meeting. We’re meant to be tracking the adult Kitty who’s gone back in time – nothing’s come up so far to suggest that there’s any risk of meeting the past Kitty. I mean, they’re going to, but how does Emma know that? And since this is going to be before young Kitty joins the X-Men, why can’t Emma just wipe her memory? Oh, and if the ideal candidate is both experienced and unknown to Kitty, why not ask Ironheart to go? She’s standing right there.
(Or… you could ask Magik. She can time travel. But that’s getting into “Why don’t they just call the Avengers” territory, which breaks every book if you start to allow it as an objection.)
PAGE 10. The kids unveil their time travel costumes.
Not unreasonably, the aim is to blend in in… whatever decade it is we’re going to. We’ll get to that.
PAGES 11-13. The kids head back in time.
Ironheart gives them a device to get back. We’re told that it’s very important not to lose it, so obviously they’re going to lose it. We’re also told that they should avoid interacting with people and follow Emma’s mental guidance. They won’t be getting that.
Melée is surprisingly keen to vouch for Emma’s teaching skills (though admittedly she has an incentive to persuade Reggie to send them back in time.)
PAGES 14-15. The Sentinels attack the dance studio.
Despite telling Kitty last issue that the kids are ready to be X-Men, Iceman is apparently close to tears at the thought of having to send them into battle alone.
The Wolfpack Sentinels. These are the Sentinel cyborg dogs created by the Graymalkin prison over in Uncanny X-Men. Quite what they’re doing here is unclear. They surely can’t be patrolling Chicago routinely, since Axo wouldn’t be walking around openly if that was the case. We’re told that they’re drawn to the portal’s energy signature, but their arrival seems remarkably quick. Besides, why are they interested in time travel portals? There has to be more to this.
PAGES 16-18. The kids arrive in Deerfield, Illinois.
Reggie’s portals are apparently not very pleasant to go through. Since the portal itself had to be closed while fighting the Wolfpack, the kids are left without direction.
Deerfield is, by reputation, one of the wealthiest places in the midwest. A lot of companies have their headquarters there; Kitty’s father was meant to be in banking.
“How are you supposed to find people without the internet?” Melée has no ideal how to find anything in the past; Bronze has at least heard of the phone book. However, there are obvious questions here about when this is meant to be given the sliding timeline. You could argue that Melée is just lost without access to the mobile internet – which Bronze is trying to use too – but… I mean, the iPhone’s been around for 18 years now. Let’s be generous and assume that the kids mean they don’t have any access to the internet because their phones aren’t compatible, and they’ve either never heard of internet cafes or there just aren’t any around.
Kitty Pryde shows up as a teenager at the end of the issue. She’s dressed exactly as she was in her debut, X-Men #129 (aside from the fact that her Star of David necklace isn’t visible, but it sometimes wasn’t visible from a distance in that issue either). The first panel of this scene seems to be intended to show the same street where Kitty appeared in her first panel – it’s not exact, but there are enough similarities to make the intent clear. On that basis, this Kitty is meant to be 13, “going on fourteen”.
This suggests that we’re not just going back in time but getting something in the margins of X-Men #129. Since that story involves Emma Frost, it might be a rather better reason for Emma to avoid visiting. This Kitty hasn’t met the X-Men yet, but seems remarkably unfazed by Axo’s appearance.
I’m sorry, but it is getting harder and harder to get through this book. The fact that this book has little connection to the rest of the line is a hindrance, not a plus. Maybe things will change after AOR, or maybe not.
“That issue also involved a monster coming through a portal to attack them both, which had nothing to do with Reggie – it was a tie-in to X-Force – but which he might reasonably have assumed was something to do with him.”
I think that we’re supposed to assume that the monster coming through the portal WAS Reggie’s doing. Moses Magnum might have sent the monster to attack the Statue of Liberty, for example. and Reggie was thinking about the Statue of Liberty and accidentally teleported the monster to himself.
“Nina doesn’t know about the X-Men,”
Which is odd, since Kitty’s real identity is supposed to be public knowledge at this point.
“If Reggie doesn’t know that, it’s really quite hard to understand how Emma can figure it out by reading his mind… but somehow she can.”
Maybe Reggie knows it subconsciously.
“Quite what they’re doing here is unclear. They surely can’t be patrolling Chicago routinely, since Axo wouldn’t be walking around openly if that was the case.”
It’s mentioned in Uncanny X-Men 9 that Ellis sent the Dog Sentinels to Chicago, Merle and New Orleans to watch the X-Men.
You’re right that Bobby not being able to go back in time even though the kids can go back in time makes no sense. Part of. the problem is that Ewing seems to think that Bobby had a major role in Kitty’s early years as a superhero. In reality Kitty and Bobby had almost no interaction until after Excalibur broke up and Kitty, Kurt and Peter returned to the X-Men. (Bobby visited the mansion in Uncanny X-Men 145 but Kitty was ill and bedridden and they didn’t meet. They were both present in a couple of stories where dozens of heroes get together but they had no meaningful interactions.) So Ewing’s idea seems to be that if Young Kitty meets Bobby it will affect her interactions with Young Bobby when in reality she had almost none.)
I can think of two things that might come from this trip back in time. One might be to explain how Kitty knew about Trista’;s powers in issue 1. The other would be that the kids see Young Emma killing or torturing someone and that impacts their relationship with present-day Emma.
How will we be able to live in the long ago age of 2018 when the only technology they had was the yellow pages?
These kids today. It’s weird enough hearing about everything being so different in the 1980s (when I was a kid), nevermind hearing teenagers freaking about the world of six years ago (by sliding timescale).
Which is insane, in and of itself, that a comic published in 1980 would now be considered as having occurred in the 2010s. Everything from the Dark Phoenix Saga to pre-Hickman has been jammed into less than a decade. Then, Krakoa happened. I still think that Marvel should have used the excuse of Franklin Richards playing with time so that his family and their friends could be immortal. Somehow, no one in-universe notices. The Vietnam War and all of it happened as originally written, but unbeknownst to those affected by his power, they have only aged a few years over those decades. It makes more sense to me than “all those events leading to Xavier agreeing to help found Krakoa occurred in only this amount of time”. As we get further from 2021, Krakoa will have only existed for a few weeks. Yet, this is supposed to account for topicality issues in the Marvel Universe.
Thought this was on the better end of this books general quality, at least if I wasn’t thinking too hard about the whys and whatfors
I like how Ewing writes the characters, but the plot of this issue is a lot of yadda-yadda in order to have the newer characters meet young Kitty.
The appearance of the dog sentinels could have been explained in an editor’s note. I don’t know why modern comics’ creators are so reluctant to use them.
@sagatwarrior: I prefer this comic to be separate from the main X-titles as it gives the characters room to develop. To each his own.
I finally figured out what’s going on with that cover by zooming in on it. At first, I thought Kitty was wearing a red belt. I’m still not totally sure what is going on with that leg though.
@Chris V – It’s never going to be perfect, but your Franklin Richards solution sounds like it would be more problematic and confusing in practice than how you imagine it. Yes, shoving all of Marvel’s published stories into such a short period is wonky and, among other things, you have to wave away things like the heroes reacting to 9/11. But you can get away with the sliding timescale provided everyone is on the same page.
I thought X-Men: First Class did it reasonably well enough with bits like changing the old beatnik cafe Cafe-A-Go-Go to the Intenet cafe Cafe@Go-Go. But Ewing doesn’t appear to be on that same page.
“I did that once! Not terrible. Although hard on the knees.”
While I doubt this was the intended reference, I am put in mind of Ncuti Gutwa’s stated reason (one of them) for leaving Doctor Who–the role is reportedly hard on the knees because of all the running and stopping. Time travel, eh?
While we don’t want every book to get into “why don’t we just call…” Illyana is like, the most logical, and appropriate person to call, as Kitty’s longest, bestest friend, and it would have also been a nice callback to when she and the New Mutants had to rescue Kitty (from Emma!) way back in NM 16. I suppose Illyana’s just busy at the moment with the events of her own series though.
I find it best not to dwell upon actual passing of time in comic books, otherwise you wonder how Krakoa could have had multiple Hellfire Galas in such a short period, or how Spider-Man has experienced 60 Christmases in 15 years. Whenever writers try to compensate, it becomes an immense confusion. Comic book time lasts exactly as long as it needs to, and everything else gets waved away.
And yes, that means that sometimes, time travel takes you to when the characters were starting out in the ’60s, or the ’80s, or the 2010s.
DC did have a nice thing going with that series a few years back–was that Generations?–where it was established on one version of Earth that certain major characters and their related cast aged much slower as the world progressed around them, but for whatever reason no one actually noticed. But as far as I know, that idea was almost immediately forgotten.
I still find the Siancong War incredibly stupid. No matter how much Kurt Busiek tries to sell me on it. I will buy a lot of things from Busiek, but even he can’t make me take that seriously.
To be fair though, Marvel needed a sliding timeline conflict to take the place of real world conflicts tied to so many of their characters’ backstories. (Reed, Ben, Tony, Xavier, Juggernaut, Punisher, to name a few.) Even saying “Middle East conflict” runs the risk of being too topical.
(Bad enough we still have characters expressly tied to World War II like Captain America, Magneto and Nick Fury, who require increasing narrative gymnastics as time passes… at least Cap has the excuse of suspended animation. Fury was around and active for all that time. Infinity Formula be damned.)
Unless you’re talking about the explanation behind the War as established in The Marvels, which was kind of silly. And yet appropriately comic booky.
Yeah, The Marvels did not help.
It’s the fact that Marvel replaced the Vietnam War with a meaningless comic booky war. It’s the same as replacing Magneto’s back-story with a mutant genocide in Central Europe during the 1970s. Maybe it would be considered more offensive, but as with changing the Vietnam War, it doesn’t carry the emotional weight behind it like a real-world tragic event. So many Marvel characters were affected by the Vietnam War because the Vietnam War was a transformative moment in world history and the American psyche for a generation. Saying, “Yeah, the Siancong War did all that in-universe for these Marvel characters too.”, it just doesn’t work.
Yeah, but you’re an old fart, Chris. Barring any unforseen circumstances, these characters are going to be around for a long, long time and having their histories anchored to specific dates is going to be less viable as the years roll on. Future readers yet to be born will just find it odd that these characters are attached to events that should make them 100+ years old. Marvel’s going to replace all of this stuff with made up countries and fictional conflicts eventually. It’s only a matter of time.
But on the bright side, all of us here will be dead, so we won’t have to worry about it.
That’s true. I think that’s why Marvel should back away from using real-world events in their stories. Granted, maybe in the 1970s, the creators were still thinking, “Eh, these characters won’t be published anymore in the far future of the 1990s.”
If Marvel wants to commemorate 9/11/01, do it in a special non-canon back-up story.
If a Marvel writer wants to make a topical political point, use an allegory instead of an actual real-world event.
Don’t use real-world presidents.
I will admit that Marvel seems to have begun to wise up about this…no Covid stories. No Biden or Trump II references.
I hear some people complain that Marvel’s 2025 output doesn’t accurately reflect Trump being president in the US. I think that’s wise because Disney wants fans to discover current comics decades from now, and while Trump may still be president then, making the comics less tied to our 2025 and more universal is a positive idea.
When did the Secret Empire occur in the sliding timeline these days? Podcasters would’ve had a field day with the whole “the president killed himself when Captain America discovered he was running a secret supervillain organization” bit.
Ha! It must have been sometime in the Obama administration at this point.
I was musing over how easy it is for me to accept Marvel Comics history, “it’s 2025, seven years ago it was 1983” does not take me much effort to believe.
And then I realised. That’s actually how I feel about real life. It’s literally easier to believe that 1983 was seven years ago than it is to believe there are adults who have never known a time when there were no Iphones.
Oh dear.
@yrzhe- Whenever that story has been referenced, such as Avengers Forever 2, the head of the Secret Empire has been described as a “highly-placed government official”.
I just try to pay no mind to any mention of specific years. Today is simply today, and ten years ago was ten years ago. Ewing would’ve done better to leave out that “no Internet” line because all she did was draw attention to the wonkiness of how time works in comics (which she’s apparently oblivious to). Just have them show up in “The Year Kitty was Thirteen” and don’t have the characters say anything or react in a manner that would date it.
Has anyone blamed Breevort for something yet in this thread? That’s a rule or something now, right? So, I’ll blame Breevort just for the sake of keeping up the precedent.
Marvel fans don’t like Crisis or Flashpoint style reboots so we have this weird hazey sliding scale that dates back to rotary phones instead.
Brevoort* not Breevort. Sigh. I can’t even blame the right guy.
I’m so sick of Brevoort moving the vowels around in his name.
At least you didnt spell it wrong g in a book where you interviewed him. 🙁
Emma has a lot of experience training mutants in their powers so there’s no reason she couldn’t be better at interpreting Reggie’s experiences than he’s been. Especially since Marvel generally assumes everyone actually has photographic memory they don’t know how to access and that even without speed or enhanced cognition powers mental/ psychic time can proceed much much faster than physical time.
And since there’s an emotional aspect associated with the warps and the people they’re connected to, it’s possible that she could feel the connection to younger Kitty either directly or in Reggie’s memories.
It really would make sense to contact Magik, rather than send amateurs back in time. “Illyanna, darling, sorry to be a bore but we’ve accidentally sent your best friend back in time a teensy bit. Would you mind fetching her for us, or should I try to walk these eager though clumsy children through a spatio-temporal rescue attempt remotely?”
“I’m so sick of Brevoort moving the vowels around in his name.”
Nah, see, on Earth-2, the Golden Age version was named Breevort, but the Earth-2 Silver Age version is named Brevoort. It’s a small but crucial difference.
Both far better than the Earth-3 version, where he made some very wrong decisions and became the Voortrekker (the less said the better). That version really put into perspective the importance of Brevoort giving huffy answers to internet fans.
You know, I’ve been to Earth-2, actually. Even checked out the Earth-2 version of House to Astonish while I was visiting. Only half of the regulars there were named either Michael or Mike, so it was a little less confusing than it is here.
I think contacting Illyana is something Kitty and Emma would only consider as a last resort, given that their agreement stipulates that they train young mutants to use their powers but keep them out of superhero battles. Involving Illyana would mean getting involved with Cyclops’ group, which is currently the most active faction in the mutant world.
Nowadays, for someone who was part of the X-Men, a rescue involving travel through space and time is simply routine. There’s no need to bother anyone else.
Has anyone actually used the Sincong War other than Busiek? I’m on the lookout for it, as I too think it’s silly, but it’s not really being referenced.
I mean, I’m not reading all that Marvel publishes, so I might be missing stuff.
Somewhat on topic, in the new – and interesting – Zdarsky Captain America series Steve is unfrozen years after 9/11, with a new ‘picked up the cowl while Steve was gone’ Cap signing up for military experiments specifically in response to the attack.
I think Eve Ewing is writing her characters with some nice but perhaps unusual subtleties that may be going unnoticed.
Reggie’s power may be targeted by emotional significance and therefore actively pursue trouble. It is not coincidence that weirdness keeps happening to his portals. Emma may have learned that telepathically and realized that it is best that she does involve herself further in the weirdness (and does not run into her and Kitty’s own past selves).
Emma is not criticizing Tony or Ironheart “per se”; she is expressing her dislike of having been reacting to someone else’s plot for a significant period of time. Her entire persona is built on the expectation that she will be a mover and shaker and consistently acknowledged as such.
The “we know” scene seemed quite sincere and spontaneous to me. Everyone who is there with Reggie at that moment wishes they had the choice of a simpler, less difficult life. It is nice to have even a single moment of being allowed to admit as much.
Nina may well have noticed that there is something that Kitty is hiding; she may be fully aware of her story for all we know. But they are attempting to start a relationship and it is bad etiquette to bring up subject matters that the other party clearly wants to avoid for now.
@Chris V: There was an in-universe explanation for the sliding timeline in New Ultimates which, if I understood it correctly, arguably provides a justification for either “Kitty joined the X-Men about seven years ago” or “Kitty joined the X-Men in 1980” depending on what the writer feels like… sorry, I mean the specific form of time travel, probably.
@The new kid: The DC Crises only do so much to solve the same problem. We still have the Golden Age heroes hanging around at the age of 110 with the vaguest of handwaves, and writers keep insisting their favourite stories still happened. Death Metal even did the opposite: declaring “Everything from the past three ‘main universes’ now happened on Earth-Prime, and any problems with that will be dealt with as they come up, unless we can keep ignoring them.”
FWIW, I didn’t object to the Sicong War as such, although I totally get why people did, but I did sigh deeply when I read on the Marvel Wiki that, because Frank Castle appears in one issue of the comic literally called The Nam, that must have been the Sicong War as well.
The Marvels felt like an attempt to bring the idea that this location and its war doesn’t have the resonance of Vietnam or Korea, but it’s trying to in-unverse. Whether it succeeded, or indeed whether suceeding would even have helped, is another question.
@Kryzsiek- Waid used it in his History of the Marvel Universe.
@Daihbid C- The original explanation for the Golden Age heroes was supposed to be Ian Karkull. The problem is that doesn’t explain their spouses or their villains. Which is probably why Solomon Grundy and Vandal Savage wound up becoming the two most prevalent Golden Age villains- as a zombie and an immortal there’s no need to explain their lack of aging.
IIRC, when they did the pocket universe Ragnarok to write out the JSA, that included their families.
I really don’t need an in-universe explanation for topical references in comics. Any attempt at providing one just makes things worse. All the explanation I need is “they’ve been publishing this stuff for 60 or 70 years,” and maybe a little effort by the writers and artists to avoid calling too much attention to the stuff that’s wonky.
Or maybe just publish JSA stories set in the 40s amd 50s? I presume that’s what JSA year One thar Lemire is writing will be.
@ChrisV, nobody in their right mind takes Jonathan Hickman’s Krakoa Era datapages 100% literally, not even JH himself , so you shouldn’t either . The sliding timescale , based on the newest Captain America series , now says that Steve Rogers was revived AFTER 9-11 , so at the most , Marvel Modern-Era time now arguably at least 20 years minimum , 24 years maximum (after 2001) , is reasonably no longer 15 years . So , the kids going back in time would be either the 2nd Bush Jr term or the 1st Obama term , not the 1st Trump term , and modern smartphones had just appeared , so not everything was as already wired together then as they are now
@Jdsm24- The current Captain America series is supposed to take place many years after 9/11. There are two major references to history in the series. First, Steve runs into a veteran who did two tours of durt in the Gulf and has become deranged. This is clearly supposed to take place several years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, General Ross assigns Steve to work with David Colton who joined the army after 9/11 and has been in the army for many years at this point. So the Captain America series takes place long after 9/11.
Ah, but how old is Kitty Pryde (which is what I was basing my estimation upon)? She was going on 14 years old then (as the annotations make clear). I believe Kitty is meant to be roughly 22 years old today. That would be around eight years ago that they travelled back in time, putting the story squarely around the year 2016.
…sure, if Kitty is supposed to be 22 years old, as you believe.
I believe she is at least 28 years old. I don’t have any math backing it up, it just feels like that’s more or less how she’s being written.
Also Franklin Richards got to be a teenager, Artie and Leech are still little kids and Danielle Cage has been an infant for 20 years. None of this works and pretending there’s a system that makes any kind of sense is in itself insane.
@Krysziek- In Franklin’s case time travel was said to be involved. But yeah, none of the ages are consistent.
Yeah, but Kitty has always been written older. Warren Ellis wrote her as seeming like a woman in her mid-20s, but she was supposed to be sixteen. Which…yeah, it caused problems if you want to accept that age for her.
Morrison wrote that Emma Frost was 27 during his run. She can’t have aged more than four years since New X-Men. There’s no way that Emma is only three years older than Kitty.
Editor Jordan White has also said that he considered Scott as being 28 years old during his time editing X-Men and Krakoa. Again, there’s no way that Scott was still a teenager when Kitty joined the team.
Although, you are correct that none of it really makes sense or there is a set system. Marvel released a statement at one time that the Marvel Universe will always have started fourteen years before the present date. They don’t want Peter Parker to ever age above 30 years old, apparently. If you want to believe any of it it or discard it all or whatever, sure, because that works just as well.
*Morrison wrote that during their run. Sorry. I just woke up and am discombobulated.
@Chris V: I took Emma Frost claiming to be 27 as a joke on Morrison’s part- she’s somewhat desperately claiming to be young and/or act like the plastic surgery is natural. I laughed at that line, anyway.
Marvel time is screwy and impossible. For me, “It’s just a show, I should really just relax” applies.
I took Morrison to be joking also. Emma’s always going to lie about her age.
There’s no definitive answer to your question, Chris. I guarantee you that if yeu were to get a bunch of X-Men writers and editors, past and present, stick them in a room together and ask them what year it was when Kitty joined the X-Men, you’re going to get a lot of, “Who are you?!? Why have you kidnapped us?!?”
One of the features of resurrection on Krakoa was that people could change their age (among other things), right?
So any mutant could be any age now, and you’d have an in-story reason for it. Scott and Kitty could both be 28.
I mean, Scott is probably in his mid-40s, once we add in raising Cable in the far future.
I think the last time his age was given on page was in the 90s when Jean cuts him off as he’s saying he’s twenty five, somewhere in the Lobdell run, I believe.
This, like much of Marvel’s X line is pretty week. I like the characters but the writing is lacking. I feel like editorial is keeping Ewing’s hands tied. We know she’s a great writer.
The Grant Morrison line may have been a joke (although, didn’t Morrison also write something about Magneto as being in his 30s after being deaged, even though Magneto seemed to be portrayed as in his 50s in the stories?), but I took it as serious because the terrible Emma Frost solo series published around the time of Morrison’s X-Men showed that Emma was close to the same age as Scott and Jean (she was around high school age, might have been 18, and was watching the 05 X-Men on the TV). So, if Scott is given the age of 28 by Jordan White, I assume Emma can’t be older than 30 now.
However, after Thom’s comment, we know that Emma is 25 years old after Krakoa because that’s just how she is…
Speaking of Morrison’s scene with Emma and the Cuckoos, I thought it would’ve been hilarious if afterwards the Cuckoos all dyed their hair red and began presenting themselves as mini-Jeans from that point just to piss off Emma even more.
pre Crisis, Supes and Bats were always said to be 29. I guess that’s the age that’s still appearing young to kids as they’re aren’t an over the hill 30 year adult.