Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Kitty Pryde and Wolverine

Greetings true believers, I am 3-D MAN! In the 1950's I defended
America's shores from alien ... uh ... alien ... whoa, sorry, but if you could just see what you look like. You're coming right at me! It's amazing!
Anyway, I was a Roy Thomas creation from the pages of Marvel Premiere, and ever since ... dude, okay, serious, I just happened to look at the TV over there. It's totally freaked out! It's, like, not just colors, but its all, like, wheeeeeeoooooo, wheeeeeeeeo.
Sorry. So, in the 70's .... No WAY! Come check out this wallpaper! It's totally like FLOATING off the wall! Dude, come here, I wanna check out that old plaid shirt I got last Christmas from my aunt Edna. WHOA! Check it out! It's totally like it's all freaked out! This is insane! Who needs television, man, when you got 3-D glasses. Shit. This is totally fucked up.

Uh ....

Oh yeah, here's this month's G&F ...

Let me set the stage for you.

I'm 19, just entering college, and like a lot of kids that age I've grown disillusioned with comics. So I drop by the local shop with a longbox or two full of books for sale - including every X-Men comic and spinoff they'd produced since I was in short pants.

The shop owner was happy, gave me a good price, and therefore I was happy too. Walking out of the store that day, I carried only two things: a check worth a couple months rent and living expenses, and a bag containing the six-issue miniseries Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, which the owner declined to buy.

"No problem," thought I, "It's an X-book. I can sell it eventually."

Anyway, it's damn near ten years later and here it is. I can't GIVE these issues away - literally; every Halloween I give out comics as well as candy to the neighborhood kids, and some of those little shavers have REFUSED this book.

Once I'm done with this article, I'm gonna light these issues on fire.

If you were anything like most readers of this crappy miniseries, you spent every month waiting for the next issue - - - so Wolverine could do something COOL! Apparently, that happened in issue seven. As for the first six ...

Okay, the back story. KP&W was one of the first few X-Men related miniseries - I believe it was preceded by Magik, Wolverine and X-Men/Micronauts, the latter of which sounds like I made it up, but I didn't. This was back in the day before EVERY comic on the stands was an X-Men spinoff, so it actually seemed kind of special.

Magic words were provided by longtime X-Men scribe Chris Claremont and, boy, can you ever tell it. Claremont's trademark "hiccuping dialogue" peppered the book. "Are you hurt, punkin?" New balloon "No" new balloon "Only" new balloon "my pride" I wish I could talk like that.

Art was inexplicably provided by longtime Marvel staffer Al Milgrom, who I guess wanted to buy a houseboat or something; back in those days, a Wolverine or Batman miniseries or one-shot was a veritable Golden Ticket, considering the going page rate and commission. So, even though Al's style is … well, let's be kind to him (After all, the man's a hell of an editor and
cleanup inker) … unsuited to the fan-favorite, industry leading X-Men,
his brush gets to brutally assault two of Marvel's most popular characters.
I'm assuming he pulled some rank.

Claremont's often serpentine plotlines were never so impenetrable as when he indulged his Wolverine-as-Samurai angle, and - oh goody - guess what the plot of this series was? Goes something like this --- but only "something like" …

Kitty Pryde - perennial perky phantasmic pre-teen (sorry, she's "thirteen and a half") of the X-Men and one of Marvel's more popular mutants - returns to her home in Illinois for a Winter break and a heartfelt musing over her current, dire situations. To start with, she's a mutant, and in the Marvel Universe that seems to be most mutants' major problem: you know, being hounded and hunted and hated and such. If that weren't bad enough - and for many of Marvel's underdeveloped legions of homo superior, it has to be - add the fact that her parents are getting a divorce AND that her long-time love interest Colossus - the Russian X-Man and statutory rapist six years her senior - apparently finally fell in love with someone his own damn age.

This means Kitty is free to choose between Bill Wyman, Jerry Lee Lewis or Jerry Seinfeld.

Anyway, Kitty's banker father falls behind on a loan from the Yakuza, and gets kidnapped to Japan. Kitty follows the nefarious stereotypes to their headquarters, only to eventually be captured by Ogun, an ageless, supernatural samurai who once was mentor to Marvel's number one marketing tool, Wolverine.

So while Ogun is hypnotizing Kitty into being his ninja-slave-assassin, Logan comes to Japan to join in the fray. And if Wolvie is in Japan, that means one thing and one thing only - absurdly convoluted cast of supporting characters and backstory! Let's go!

So there's some evil samurai and Yakuza, Logan's old fiancee Mariko and her adopted daughter, plus olvie's old dorobo flame Yukio, plus some plotlines presumably from the Wolverine miniseries, but even research couldn't penetrate the smoky veil of this story.

The end result is that Kitty Pryde goes grim(mish) and gritty(ish) in the guise of ShadowCat (for some damn reason) which she still holds this day, and Ogun is defeated and Kitty's dad is … I don't know, I couldn't make heads nor tails out of the embezzlement/money laundering plot. In any case, it's also obtusely hinted that Wolverine was in fact the famous Japanese ronin Miyamoto Mushashi. Which makes him something like four-hundred years old, Japanese, and dead.

Which is what I wish these comics were. BURN! BURN!

KP&W is universally the most loathed of all X-men books, especially to judge by the survey results which list it as the NUMBER ONE comic most folks wanted to see here. Green Team
came in second. A distant second.

•One of the thematically bisected covers for this crap
•Kitty stabs Wolverine through the heart, and makes Al drop his brush
•The sacred blade is drawn ... poorly.