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.