Thoughts
When Paul McCartney delivered one of his unashamedly populist catchy crowdpleasers to the Beatles, John Lennon would dismiss it as his granny s**t music. It wasn’t satirising or sneering at this stuff. It just wanted to please.
Issues like this strike me as being Claremont’s granny music. The sort of stuff that comic fans who want to be seen into edgy and gritty stuff would vocally hate. The stuff that doesn’t have any satirical agenda, nor meta double meaning. It recognises that comics have a history of being silly and twee and embraces it.
And I really like it. It’s fun to be wrong-footed by a comic. To pick up any issue that does something you don’t expect and takes the title somewhere you never thought it would go. Genre TV, especially in the wake of Buffy, was to embrace this idea. Indeed this almost feels like the X-men’s own version of “the musical episode”.
It’s a format that Cockrum seems to love – fantastical and swashbuckling storytelling, while allowing fun new revisions of the look of the main characters.
Fun Panel
In the ongoing saga of Nightcrawler versus Wolverine, Nightcrawler clearly wins the battle of the cute fancy mini-versions. The Bamfs were to return far more in future.
Any Googling
Kitty’s t-shirt clues the audience in to the type of story being told here. Elfquest being a big independent comic of the time. Created by Wendy and Richard Pini, Claremont ackowledges the influence not just with Kitty’s shirt but the appearance of a sprite called Pini in the story. A few years after this issue, Marvel was to start publishing the title, although the Pini eventually took it back to publish independantly.
Searching the internet revealed the titles long history, and also gives an idea of quite how its style fitted with that of this story’s fairytale. Even better, most of the early issues are available for free from the Pini’s themselves on their webpage. And while I don’t think the title is really for me, I had a very enjoyable time down that rabbithole.
It Was A Product Of Its Time
Ok. Ever since Kitty joined the title there has been something of an elephant in the room. Or rather a Colossus in the room. Namely this thirteen and a half year old girl’s obvious attraction to the older Colossus. It’s hidden at first, we discover from Kitty’s internal thoughts that she finds Colossus cute. But as the issues develop, this attraction is more explicitly stated by Kitty. And seemingly reciprocated by Colossus.
Even the Days of Future Past story seems to push the line that this romance is real and true. That one day they will be married. And while the comics themselves are still playing with the idea that their attraction is cute and chaste, the fact its out in the open in the X-mansion and not a single one of the X-men has any misgivings about it is really striking.
In part that can be rationalised by the fact that everyone does see it as being cute and chaste. Wiser heads might even be basing their silence on the fact that nothing will likely pull these two together more than trying to make a big deal of it or forbidding it. But nobody on the title seems to be having
that conversation.
It’s interesting that in a few years time, when the couple break up in the comics, Claremont never writes them back together again. Within that context its easier to deal with. It was a teenage crush, handled awkwardly but that would have reflected the time it was written in, and the world of the
characters in the comic. But once that teenage crush is broken , its seen as being just that. And the characters can develop separately.
Only post-Claremont has the idea returned to the franchise that
Kitty and Peter have a forever love. That they are characters that belong together. And that is when this gets a bit more uncomfortable. Wheedon writing their “consummation” scene as romantic has aged appallingly, much worse than the original Claremont comics. Where the presentation of these feelings come across as awkward, twee and convincingly teenage. Even if none of the adults in the room are being adult about it.
The X Marathon 