X-Men #25: Just A Steel Town Girl On A Saturday Night, Lookin’ For The Fight Of Her Life…

I don’t know if you caught that Hellfire Gala last week, but this after-party is off the #%^*ing chain! Mutants, especially those who were of the nation Krakoa, are no longer welcome on earth. ORCHIS’ attack has placed all of the blame for the deaths of the humans who were in attendance this year on the mutants; they’ve finally unleashed their plan to activate the laced Krakoan flower medicines, causing those who took it to take their own lives, while also forcing mutants that are still on earth into forcibly “curing” them, effectively stripping them of their mutation.

Whew. That’s a lot for 40 pages of a story,…

So after the Gala that set the social media universe on fire last week, Gerry Duggan and Stefano Caselli are here to deliver this next chapter for our not-so-merry mutants, setting up the new status quo. Still, the story starts at the beginning of the Krakoan era, where Kitty visits her rabbi, searching out guidance on who or what she is since she’s unable to walk through the Krakoan gates, forcing her to determine who she is. This scene was one of my favorites from this book simply because we don’t see this kind of representation in a lot of our comic books. 

After decades of seeing various characters having issues with their faith, speaking to priests or other leaders of faith, we have never seen a Jewish character interact with their rabbis. It’s bad enough that we don’t see enough Jewish characters in the medium that was built on the backs of the Jewish creative community, it’s disheartening seeing the lack of representation for a group that was so instrumental in crafting this medium, yet we can’t even garner a Voices special from the big two. This scene gives hope, but much more needs to be done for the Jewish community. 

While the majority of the story is about Kitty, who is a dark horse during this era, since she’s the only mutant in the universe that can travel via the gates, we also see some of the other renegades who are a part of the X-Men’s plans to take down ORCHIS, that includes Synch, Talon, Rasputin IV, and Ms. Marvel, as they continue to build a coalition, using the Morlock Tunnels as a haven., though not sure if this was intentional or not. Still, the Morlock Tunnels are a blackout zone for systems like Cerebro and other mutant detecting systems, so if they find them, assuming it’s because of Stasis’s memory…unless that particular memory was exorcized from his memory, which would probably work the best, but this is comics, so, of course, they’ll find them.

This issue was a vast improvement from the last, both in story and art, and it was great to see Kitty in a role we’re not used to seeing her in, something that she was on the road to becoming in the 80s before being shipped off to England, and helped form Excalibur. She’s a fighter. She’s a ghost in the machine. She’s one of the best hand-to-hand fighters the X-Men have, but she’s been pigeonholed into her original state, that of the good Jewish girl next door. Snappy wit, mixed with the teacher for the next generation of X-kids. It’s going to be fun to see Kitty and the creators involved with Fall of X to mine this somewhat forgotten aspect of her personality, showing her fellow X-Men and the human haters from ORCHIS that she’s a force to be reckoned with.