Revamping Kitty Pryde

The centrepiece of Chris Claremont’s 1st issue of Revolution is a revamped Kitty Pryde, with the author cultivating a more mature incarnation. But there’s some inconsistencies in the portrayal & some potentially problematic issues in the handling of Kitty’s sexuality. #XMen 1/10

This idea of progression is welcome, especially for a character who can easily get lumped into a state of perpetual adolescence in the eyes of the readership, something that Claremont might be commenting on directly in Kitty’s dialogue: 2/10

“What do you want from me, Peter? To be the girl I was when we first met? Reboot your system, baby. ‘Cause time only goes in 1 direction. You all have this vision of sweet little Kitty…that you want to freeze in amber…I walk through walls – between rooms & between worlds!” 3/10

Nonetheless there are issues that undermine this evolution. For one thing, it ignores the pre-existing continuity of Kitty Pryde as a character. Kitty was already (somewhat artificially) aged up during Warren Ellis’s run on Excalibur. 4/10

Ellis portrays Kitty as an adult, up to and including having a clearly sexual relationship with Pete Wisdom. But to be fair, if we’re critiquing Claremont for not reading Ellis, we should likewise note Ellis clearly hadn’t done his homework with other Excalibur characters. 5/10

Equally damaging, however, is the extent to which Kitty is subjected to the male gaze in the scenes that unfold. What could be an earnest declaration of sexual agency can become something a little dehumanizing by the presence of cheesecake in the accompanying imagery. 6/10

Sexual empowerment could likewise be an interesting character (re)development, except the next scene immediately renders Kitty in a state of incapacitated, non-consensual bondage – something with clear sexual connotations in the corpus of Claremont. 7/10

All of this could be bad luck – some poor minor choices that have larger consequences. But Revolution was an opportunity for Claremont to reclaim & redefine an iconic character who was once the centrepiece of his narratives, and his new Kitty didn’t really land for readers. 8/10

Claremont’s strategy can be seen to exist in a bizarrely longstanding tradition of authors seeking to advance Kitty’s character through her sexuality specifically, a tradition that (arguably) can be traced all the way back to Claremont himself in the pages of Excalibur. 9/10

Simply put, there are important questions in play here about how Kitty functions in the sexual imaginary of generations of comics readers and how explorations of that sexuality can either positively or negatively impact her cultivation as a character. 10/10