Exceptional X-Men #13 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #13
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Kitty Pryde fleeing down an alley. This isn’t directly to do with the content of the issue – it’s a pastiche of the splash page from X-Men #131 (1980), Kitty’s third appearance.
This is the final issue of Exceptional X-Men before “Age of Revelation”, when it’ll be replaced by Expatriate X-Men for three months.
PAGES 1-2. Kate wakes up in Deerfield.
Kate was sent back in time by one of Reggie’s wormholes in issue #11; the kids followed with his help last issue, and were followed by one of the three Wolfpack Sentinels who attacked the dance studio. Presumably, with Emma’s help, Reggie was able to target the same point in time as the original portal, so they arrive more or less simultaneously. Emma is able to contact Kate through the portal as well, although the kids had lost touch with her last issue – presumably, she’s been able to re-establish contact now that the Sentinels are taken care of.
By the way, I suggested last issue that there had to be some reason for the Sentinels to suddenly attack the dance studio, but, well, none is suggested in this issue. You’d have thought that the Sentinels attacking the studio would be a big deal going forward, but if so, it’s not something that this issue finds time to deal with.
As in the previous issue, the time frame for this flashback is… confused. We’re told later that this is a “couple of months” before Kitty discovered her powers, which was in X-Men #129. That issue is cover dated January 1980, though it actually came out in late 1979.
We’ve got references to pagers and VCRs. This is a rather baffling choice, since it doesn’t fit either with the time of original publication, or with the sliding timeline – both were overtaken by other technology twenty years ago, but neither of them had really taken off with a mass market by 1980. In continuity terms you can rationalise a lot of things in terms of the sliding timeline; the current line is that the sliding timeline is literally real in the Marvel Universe, which means that stories exist in their original form, their present day form and everything in between, and if you want, you can rationalise that everyone immediately adjusts to the version of time that they’ve arrived in. But creatively, it’s a mystifying time frame to go with.
PAGES 3-8. Young Kitty and the kids deal with the Wolfpack Sentinel.
As already noted, Kitty first used her powers in X-Men #129.
Stevie Hunter was Kitty’s dance teacher in Salem Center once she joined the X-Men; she debuted in X-Men #139 (1980).
Axo tries using his empathic powers on the Wolfpack Sentinel with no effect. He seems uncertain about whether his powers will work on them, but then appears to believe that the immunity is something to do with the dog’s trip through the portal. The kids do immediately recognise what the dog is, presumably because of their public appearance in New Orleans over in Uncanny X-Men #9-10 – at any rate, it’s unsurprising that the kids have been taught to look out for these thing.
Kitty effectively defeats the Sentinel by instinctively phasing when it jumps at her; since she disrupts electronics when phased, that leaves it as easy prey for Bronze. Kitty immediately complains of a headache, as she did when her powers were emerging in X-Men #129. However, she seems to take the whole thing immediately in stride, perhaps because there are other superhumans right there for her to talk to.
PAGES 9-13. Bronze finds the present day Kitty.
Bronze refers to Kitty “finding” her in issue #1, though it was more a case of stumbling across her.
Kitty was complaining in issue #11 that she shouldn’t have been a teen superhero at all. Bronze responds to that by offering to alter history by encouraging the young Kitty not to join the X-Men. She seems pretty untroubled by the knock-on effects for the timeline, despite Kitty pointing out the situations where she found Bronze in issue #1, and Melée and Axo in issue #2. The assumption seems to be that changing Kitty’s history would simply result in a timeline where they never met, and so the kids never got in touch with the X-Men. While that’s logically rather questionable, given the number of other things that change if you remove Kitty from continuity, it’s kind of where the focus has to stay in order for the scene to work – this is meant to be about Bronze offering to sacrifice her options in order to give Kitty the choice that (she feels) she was denied.
At any rate, Kitty is appropriately proud of her young charges and doesn’t want to give up having known them.
Bronze rightly points out that Kitty only talks about her time with the X-Men as formative and never talks about her home town at all. Kitty acknowledges that she thinks of her life beginning when she met the X-Men (and indeed, writers have generally agreed with this view of Kitty’s back story – she has almost no pre-debut flashbacks, despite being around for over 40 years).
Bronze is perhaps excessively impressed by young Kitty, who didn’t really do anything other than stand there and get jumped through. But she’s trying to encourage older Kitty and, besides, she probably sees the younger Kitty through the lens of the older one. She knows Kitty is smart already – she doesn’t actually need to see the younger version demonstrate it.
PAGES 14-15. Another Sentinel attacks the Pryde house.
Apparently the Sentinels from this period are monitoring the same frequencies as the modern Wolfpack Sentinels. Okay then. In continuity terms, this is also a bit wonky – Stephen Lang’s Sentinels were destroyed in X-Men #100 (1976), and the Project Wideawake version didn’t debut until Uncanny X-Men #151 (1981). So there really shouldn’t be any Sentinels running around at this point. Perhaps it’s a stray from Lang’s batch. Um, which just happened to be in the area already.
PAGE 16. Reggie brings Kitty back to the present.
The art seems to have her just blinking back into existence, rather than actually emerging through a portal.
PAGE 17. The kids fight the Sentinel.
Bronze and Melée are effectively doing a more gentle version of the Fastball Special, with Bronze simply lifting Melée into place.
PAGES 18-19. The kids are brought back to the present.
Much as I like this book, this ending is very odd. The idea seems to be that Reggie manages to bring the kids back to the present just in time to save them from being obliterated by the Sentinel. So… um, who stopped the Sentinel from killing young Kitty? Even if we assume that it keeled over moments later from the damage that Melée did to it, or that Kitty herself phased it into oblivion, that still leaves a bloody great Sentinel lying outside young Kitty’s house. And… wasn’t it a major plot point last issue that some sort of disaster could ensue if Kitty met Emma or Bobby early?
Are we meant to take it that the timeline just sorted itself out? Or that history is changed but Kitty joins the X-Men anyway (which would seem unlikely, since it would basically rewrite massive chunks of X-Men #129). It’s to stop questions like this that you throw in a line of dialogue from Ironheart along the lines of “And my sensors say the timeline has healed itself”, you know!
Anyway… Kitty gets to endorse Emma as a teacher and thank the kids for reminding her that she wants to be an X-Man, and we end the book with her finally having the phone call with Rogue that she was refusing to take in early issues.
…well, this was certainly a bunch of nothing, wasn’t it.
I was expecting a little more introspection given Kitty’s year-long whining about her life and history: instead we get *one panel* talking about ehhhh, maybe being an X-Man was fine, whatever. Her father was alive at this point, you’d think she’d want to see him. Past Emma was skulking around preparing to snatch Kitty up, you’d think it would’ve been interesting for adult Kitty (or the new kids) to actually see who the White Queen used to be. But no, there’s no point to any of this.
What a continuity mess. Feels like between this and the Giant Sized series they feel fine just saying “and then all the things we did were undone” at the end but doesn’t that just ruin the stakes of these sort of time travel stories? There should be some level of threat that even in winning the day you might change something but if the narrative convention becomes “if you win, then it’ll all go back to normal” it defeats the purpose of having people “not change too much”.
Regarding the Sentinel- Shaw proposes Sentinels to a Senator in Uncanny X-Men 135 and this takes place shortly before Uncanny X-Men 129. So if you assume Shaw built a couple of prototypes before he proposed it, then it’s possible that this is one of his prototypes. (Which just happened to be in the area.) Of course, if this is one of Shaw’s Sentinels, then that introduces the additional problem that Shaw should have known about Kitty before Uncanny X-Men 129.
Agreed with Paul that the ending made no sense. And agreed with Diana that this would have been much more interesting if the kids (or Present Emma) met past Emma.
It does seem like Storm, Magik and Exceptional had to rush to finish their plots before Age of Revelation. It’s too bad there wasn’t someone, like an … editor, who could have told them when the crossover was coming in advance.
I wonder how “last minute” Age of Revelation was and if it was a panic button hit by Brevoort when he realized that almost the entire line needed to be cancelled before the end of the year. There was the announcement of the Jeph Loeb AOA mini to celebrate the anniversary. Then, suddenly, there was the surprise announcement of another AOA anniversary project in July. It doesn’t seem Brevoort was originally leading up to AoR. Another possibility is that plans changed with Hickman requesting Xavier for the new cosmic line which changed the crossover that was originally planned.
There are a lot of things I like about Exceptional, but the way it keeps bringing up high-stakes conflicts only for them to be resolved effortlessly is not one of them. As an occasional beat, sure. But not all the time.
@Chris V- Breevoort described the genesis of Age of Revelation in an interview at AIPT today:
“As we started to plan for 2025, one of the things that came up internally at Marvel more than anything else was it being the 30th anniversary of Age of Apocalypse. We should do something for that. And we had a couple of different notions that kicked around — more than one of which has actually ended up coming to fruition, which has its own problems and makes things a little more confusing. But coming out of those conversations, I again went back to the X-crew and went, “Hey, this thing is coming up, they’d be interested in us doing something to commemorate this in some fashion.” And at that point, Jed MacKay said, “Well, I think I have an idea for a thing.””
“So very quickly, that became Age of Revelation. It was a nice-sounding name and similar enough in its construction to Age of Apocalypse, where you stop all the books, go to a different place, all the characters are in weird spots, and it’s interesting to see what’s happened to everybody and how this is all going to shake out. But it wasn’t just doing the same story again, where the Age of Apocalypse mechanism was Legion goes back into the past and accidentally kills Professor X, changing X-history and turning the present into this awful dystopia ruled by Apocalypse. Our take was we’ll move 10 years into the future and see what has become of the world that we’re in now, which still lets us get kind of the same sort of experience that you had from Age of Apocalypse, without it just being the same thing all over again.”
“And then, of course, at the same time, I started talking to Jeph Loeb about doing an actual Age of Apocalypse follow-up. And for a bit, it looked like that might not happen or might not happen fast enough, because Jeph was working on a bunch of other things. That’s one of the reasons we first started talking about Age of Revelation. I think I said maybe we do it for a month, which was crazy and stupid of me. Everyone got enthused about it, and we thought if we’re going to do this, we should commit and go big with it in the same kind of way they did with Age of Apocalypse.”
My guess is that originally Breevort was planning for a one-month event- maybe in December- but when it became a three-month event they had to rush a few series to finish their plots early. Hence, the two issues of Magik in one month.
Yeah, with regards to the whole time travel aspect of this storyline, it’s a massive load of nonsense. Not the least of which is the part where altering Kitty’s timeline proves catastrophically different for the X-Men and the world, especially if she never even became an X-Man at all (or at a later date). This is going straight into “What If… Kitty Pryde Had Never Joined the X-Men” where their first major confrontation with the Hellfire Club probably winds up with multiple deaths, blah blah blah…
Even generously, this should have resulted in changes unless Future Emma wiped a few memories.
(You know? FUTURE Emma having to go back in time to meeting the early Kitty and having to reconcile her future self and her past actions would have been an amazingly interesting story.)
I’d almost pay to see a single page epilogue showing the TVA coming in to do a quick cleanup of all the loose threads.
And Ayodele explains in this issue that the problem was uncertainty about the launch date:
https://www.cbr.com/xmen-murewa-ayodele-rogue-storm-interview/
“Yes, if memory serves me right, Editor Tom Brevoort had informed me about ONE WORLD UNDER DOOM and AGE OF REVELATION before I wrote the script for STORM #1. But the thing about events is that the launch date is hardly ever set in stone until it is ready to be announced. The schedule and availability of the creative teams that will bring the event to life, and other variables that are above my paygrade to be privy to play major roles in deciding a launch date.”
“So, as you have rightly pointed out, as a writer, you have to plot your overall story, add enough seeds (and Easter Eggs) that you will harvest in the AGE OF REVELATION timeline, while also having a contingency plan in case your series is cancelled before any of the major milestones which you are not even sure of their launch dates. How was I able to balance this? Well, the honest answer is, I wasn’t. I was blazing through my ongoing story – planting all the seeds necessary for AGE OF REVELATION along the way, but I didn’t have any contingency plan for if the series got cancelled early. Each story arc of the STORM series just gets so freaking exciting that I can’t help but plan for them even before I get the green light for them.”
On the plus side, it took this series 13 issues before we got a bad one.
Ever since at least Fall of X, no one in the X-Office can figure out how to pace comic book releases and communicate effectively with creative teams. I can’t remember there being so many rushed wrap-ups in any other era of Marvel, including comics edited by Breevort.
Based on the way this issue wrapped up, I don’t expect Exceptional to return after Revelation. The final panel called it “the end”, and I assume Kate returning Rogue’s call means she’s shifting over to Uncanny, where she can appear in three panels and get one line per issue like the other X-Men appearing in the Outliers book.
@John- My guess is that they’re going to do a new school book combining the Outliers and the Exceptional kids, since Breevoort admitted that they have been getting a lot of complaints about the Outliers taking page space away from Kurt and Jubilee.
I wonder if there is meant to be a closed time loop going on with the sentinel dog in the past signaling its spatiotemporal location and that being the thing that summons the sentinel dogs in the future.
Kitty saving the entire Earth from a giant space bullet seems like a good thing to keep in the timeline.
Wait, wait … are you saying that a story featuring time travel has glaring plot holes? Unprecedented!
“My guess is that they’re going to do a new school book combining the Outliers and the Exceptional kids, since Breevoort admitted that they have been getting a lot of complaints about the Outliers taking page space away from Kurt and Jubilee.”
Which would actually be a shame. Because we’ve had decades of these characters as heroes, but seeing the older generation of X-Men as teachers and substitute parents has some mileage as a concept. Rogue and Gambit as the team mom n’ dad, Logan and Kurt as the wacky uncles (one’s sunshine, the other’s grumpy), Jubilee as big sister.
Yes, I know they’ve been teachers off and on for a while, dating back to the Morrison and Academy X eras, and Wolverine’s whole stint as a headmaster, but this feels more like found family rather than a strict school setting. (I’m reminded of Kurt’s brief time mentoring the Technet back in the Excalibur days, lol.)
I’m actually -less- convinced as to the effectiveness of Kitty, Emma, and Bobby as mentors for their lot, though. That feels more like two young adults trying to mentor teens and failing miserably while Emma snarks in the background and fails to rise to her long, long career as a teacher.
(Okay, so Emma’s first team (Hellions) mostly all died horribly, her next team (Generation X) suffered casualties, her Genoshan students were all murdered, and most of the Academy X kids were depowered and/or exploded, so maaaaaybe we should keep her away from any more kids.)
So let’s fold in the Exceptional kids into the Uncanny atmosphere but keep the less formal setup instead of mansion+danger room…
@The Other Michael: I think the problem there is that Emma works best as a teacher when she has someone pushing back against her methods, whether it’s Xavier in the old days or Banshee with Gen X. Kitty’s not much use on that front (especially because she and Emma have a much friendlier relationship than they did during, say, Whedon’s Astonishing). Storm would’ve been much better-suited to the role, certainly more than Iceman.
I think some level of reorganization is needed, Expectational was promoted as the mutants in training book, but it was very slow and Uncanny also ended up as the same concept, With the outliers taking the lead in most issues. Even adjective less has 3 trainee’s on site though they are very background. If the Outliers move to Chicago then we could have one training book, one adventurers book and strike force book, like we were told FTA would give us.
@Diana- Kitty and Emma still could have worked if Emma decided in the wake of Krakoa that she needed to be harder on the kids, for example, and Kitty objected to it. But instead, the main problem was Kitty’s PTSD.
Alastair-I think the purpose of so many trainees was to eventually get back to the mansion setting. Brevoort tried to push this rivalry between the Uncanny team and the X-Men team, which still makes no sense, and we saw Kitty wanting to disavow her past with the X-Men, that was settled in this issue. All of which gave a reason for the teams to be scattered. So, now the different teams could come together and establish a new school. Brevoort is probably working up to that as the next big event after AoR.
Am I the only one wondering whether this story meant to revisit the nature and levels of Kitty’s powers by having Melee expose her to intangibility before Kitty’s own powers fully developed?
This may be perceived as a closed time loop, with Melee nudging Kitty into trying her own intangibility powers and Kitty returning the favor years later.
But it can also establish retroactively that Kitty’s powers are a specific configuration, and without Melee’s nudge she might have developed some other form of mutant powers. Which may well lead into widening her repertoire if she only thinks to consider what other powers she might unknowingly have or develop if she tries to.
Goodness, this issue clunked like a writer being told that their next 6 issue arc gets only one issue before cancellation. Kitty’s girlfriend subplot doesn’t get touched, Sentinels don’t get explained, and most of the issue feels like “this could be part of a longer story if there was time.
I hate to agree with Liefeld about anything, but the problems may be higher than Brevoort.
@Woodswalked – What did Liefeld say?
You can parse through it for yourself:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/rob-liefeld-says-marvel-is-broken-and-his-appearance-delayed-deadpool/
Basically, he makes some good points which are kind of obvious. Some of his points seem to be a misunderstanding of the current comic book market. Some of it seems kind of ironic coming from Liefield. Then, it gets laughable when he says that the X-Men comics should be “like GI Joe”.
This was my favorite of the From the Ashes era. As an ’80s child, I knew the VCR and pager comments were too early for when Kitty was introduced. The “the end” isn’t encouraging, but the letters page says we haven’t seen the last of the kids… so hopefully the rumored Academy X/school book comes to fruition post AOR
I agree with Rob a lot there but there’s definitely been at least a dozen characters more well known that Jeff the Land Shark since Deadpool. Ms Marvel and Miles Morales chief among them. I suppose he said “original characters” and you could claim Miles and characters like Kate Bishop or the other Young Avengers as “derivative” but c’mon.
I think it’s one of Liefield’s ironic comments though because of what Image was supposed to represent, and the way that the creation of Image has changed the comic book field for creators. It seems to be widely accepted now that the most talented creators are saving their best creative ideas for creator owned work at one of the indy publishers, so they can own their creations. Meanwhile, the creators go to Marvel or DC to a.)get extra money so they can afford to work on their own creations or b.)have fun writing the legacy characters they grew up reading without treating the job too seriously.
It’s kind of ironic for Rob Liefield, one of the creators who said that Marvel stole his characters (Cable, Deadpool), and who decided to help found Image due to this very reason, to now claim that Marvel doesn’t create new “breakthrough characters”. Why would a talented comic creator want their best characters to be stolen by Disney?
Which could explain why the major characters created since the late-‘90s at Marvel have been characters like Miles Morales or Kamala Khan. Characters that creators wouldn’t be able to create outside of Marvel.
“Meanwhile, the creators go to Marvel or DC to a.)get extra money so they can afford to work on their own creations or b.)have fun writing the legacy characters they grew up reading without treating the job too seriously.”
Ehh.. I’m not so sure about the fun with legacy characters part. I think they do it mainly for a) money, like you said, and, b) exposure. Doing work-for-hire jobs for Marvel and/or DC is the best way for a creator to become known and to hopefully cultivate an audience that might actually follow them over to their creator-owned ventures.
@Moo
I don’t read Bleeding Cool. Might in the future though, this is not a diss. Their article only shows all of the reasons why I would never feel comfortable agreeing with him.
This link is not the source I was referring to, but contains the same quote.
“Man, I can’t make folks go on the record – but I can tell you, based on my DM’s, that comic book professionals en masse agree about the train wreck the X-Men office is. Sad. Was once the GOLD standard of comic book storytelling.
The guys at the top of the executive suite in publishing have to go – Buckley, Bogart, Gabriel. These guys have no new moves, they are spent and tired and it shows. Start over. ”
“The Marvel QuotaVerse is what is crushing publishing. Always a slew of new #1’s with limited life, quick cancellation. We are closer to all new #1’s each month, every month.”
https://www.comicsbeat.com/rob-liefeld-calls-out-marvel-executives-and-the-quotaverse/
My agreement is only that he may be right in calling out the executives above the editors.
Maybe Rob would feel better if they have more of the characters wearing extra-large should pads and belt/chest/thigh pouches.
@wwk5d
Nah, then he’d just claim they were ripping him off again. 🙂
I seriously don’t know who this book is meant for. While the artwork is nice, the story is plodding, directionless and inane. It is not connected with the other X-books. The book reads more like a Shadowcat and her friends book. I’m sorry, but you can’t base an ongoing series around Shadowcat. She just isn’t a big enough draw.