{"id":11388,"date":"2025-09-10T21:28:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11388"},"modified":"2025-09-10T21:28:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:28:06","slug":"exceptional-x-men-13-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11388","title":{"rendered":"Exceptional X-Men #13 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #13<\/strong>
\nWriter: Eve L Ewing<\/strong>
\nArtist: Federica Mancin<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Nolan Woodard<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> 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\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #131 (1980), Kitty’s third appearance.<\/p>\n

This is the final issue of\u00a0Exceptional X-Men<\/em> before “Age of Revelation”, when it’ll be replaced by\u00a0Expatriate X-Men<\/em> for three months.<\/p>\n

PAGES 1-2.\u00a0<\/strong>Kate wakes up in Deerfield.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #129. That issue is cover dated January 1980, though it actually came out in late 1979.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0literally real<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-8. <\/strong>Young Kitty and the kids deal with the Wolfpack Sentinel.<\/em><\/p>\n

As already noted, Kitty first used her powers in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #129.<\/p>\n

Stevie Hunter was Kitty’s dance teacher in Salem Center once she joined the X-Men; she debuted in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #139 (1980).<\/p>\n

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\u00a0do<\/em> immediately recognise what the dog is, presumably because of their public appearance in New Orleans over in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #9-10 – at any rate, it’s unsurprising that the kids have been taught to look out for these thing.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #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.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-13.\u00a0<\/strong>Bronze finds the present day Kitty.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bronze refers to Kitty “finding” her in issue #1, though it was more a case of stumbling across her.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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 Mel\u00e9e 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.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Kitty is appropriately proud of her young charges and doesn’t want to give up having known them.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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<\/em> Kitty is smart already – she doesn’t actually need to see the younger version demonstrate it.<\/p>\n

PAGES 14-15.\u00a0<\/strong>Another Sentinel attacks the Pryde house.<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em> #100 (1976), and the Project Wideawake version didn’t debut until\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #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.<\/p>\n

PAGE 16.\u00a0<\/strong>Reggie brings Kitty back to the<\/em> present.<\/em><\/p>\n

The art seems to have her just blinking back into existence, rather than actually emerging through a portal.<\/p>\n

PAGE 17.\u00a0<\/strong>The kids fight the Sentinel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bronze and Mel\u00e9e are effectively doing a more gentle version of the Fastball Special, with Bronze simply lifting Mel\u00e9e into place.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong> The kids are brought back to the present.<\/em><\/p>\n

Much as I like this book, this ending is\u00a0very<\/em> 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 Mel\u00e9e 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?<\/p>\n

Are we meant to take it that the timeline just sorted itself out? Or that history\u00a0is<\/em> changed but Kitty joins the X-Men anyway (which would seem unlikely, since it would basically rewrite massive chunks of\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0X-Men #131 (1980), Kitty’s third appearance. This is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11390,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11388\/revisions\/11390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}