One of my favorite characters, and no doubt a favorite of many who remember reading Claremont's X-Men work, is Kitty Pryde. So I'm delighted to see her making a return, with Claremont doing some of his best writing in years and with new artists Juan Bobillo and Marcelo Sosa providing some very nice visuals. I'm a little nervous about some of the non-Kitty stuff going on in the issue, which could turn this into more of a super-hero romp than it should be, and I'm puzzled by some of the marketing decisions going into the book, but this was a pleasant reunion with a character we haven't seen enough of in recent years.
Kitty Pryde was, for a long time, a character who didn't change. No matter what, she was the kid sister of all the X-Men, a member of the team by chance who could just as easily have been a senior New Mutant instead. That changed when Warren Ellis turned her into a full-blown woman in the pages of Excalibur, and though she regressed somewhat when Claremont returned to the X-Men, the Mekanix series seems to meet somewhere at the halfway point between fully-realized adult and forever-child. Kitty's off at college, working a job to make ends meet and working in a lab, where her intelligence has always sort of belonged. And she's left the super-hero life behind, except that anyone who reads comics knows that someone who has really left it behind won't have comics made about them anymore.
The changes in Kitty's characters are at times a little odd, but I can buy into most of them. The explanation for how Kitty wound up in a Coyote Ugly knockoff bar is a believable bit of coincidence, and given her outgoing and friendly personality, not to mention natural agility, it's a career which suits her. I also enjoy that along with her gentle and sweet nature she's been given a bit of worldly wisdom, as she seems to be one of the older and more experienced members of her lab team. And her reunion with a New Mutants member in this issue, not to fight a villain but instead just to talk about old and new times, was a great bit of characterization.
Where the story starts to lose me is when it deviates from the college life stuff into the more super-heroic elements. The shift is important, lest this become a pale copy of the X-Men Icons: Chamber mini-series exploring similar ideas, but I'm nervous about all this characterization and setup disappearing, to be replaced by a stock super-hero plot for the rest of the mini-series. The attack on the boat in Canadian waters is intriguing, though, and the tie-in of a Genoshan mutant stuck in the U.S. fits right in with the death of Kitty's dad, so my worries may be for nought.
One of my worries that did turn out to be nothing was about the artwork. You see, I can't stand the cover art, which has a definite style but seems an odd choice for this type of series. Fortunately, the interiors are by Bobillo and Sosa, with strong and believable character designs and a good grasp of the normal. Their detailed work on Belles of Hell, the El, the campus and other Chicago landmarks (fictional and not) really help to set the stage for the series as Kitty living a normal life, and I love the way they draw clothing, faces and other everyday important elements as well.
While I enjoyed this first issue, with a few reservations, I'm still having trouble figuring out one thing: Why Mekanix? It gives absolutely no indication what the series is about, and it's not helped much by the cover art. Given that this is a spotlight on Kitty Pryde, and one that focuses largely on the normal life she's leading outside the X-Men, perhaps a more distinctive title that had something, anything to do with that lead character might have brought in the target audience a little better?
