I deliberately chose a huge-ass picture for the extra emphasis it implies.
So what's the deal with Kitty anyway? First of all, I’ve always loved the name. Simple as that. Cats are cool, pride is definitely not a bad thing, combine the two and presto! You get a name that’s definitely going to get the audience interested in a character. Or just me, anyway. But wait, there’s more; Kitty has one of the best mutant superpowers ever, she can “phase” through any solid object, and can use her power to float, which is almost as good as flying. Through the use of her powers, she can also short-circuit electronic equipment and knock people unconscious.
Kitty is also a trained ninja, and is proficient in both martial arts and sword-fighting. Not to mention that she once punched that despicable bitch Emma Frost on the face.
She’s also one of the smartest people in the Marvel universe, up there with Reed Richards, Doctor Doom, Tony Stark, Peter Parker and the rest. It’s also important to note that she’s the only woman who belongs in that group.
Also, by comic book standards, she’s not that much hotter than the average female, I mean, have you seen most superheroines? Kitty’s a lot more realistic.
Last but not least, she has a pet dragon, ‘nuff said on that. Pedants would argue that Lockheed is an alien being resembling a dragon, but if it looks like a dragon and breathes fire like a dragon, it’s a fucking dragon. So as far as superheroes are concerned, Kitty fulfils all the “cool” aspects.
But being the English graduate that I am, my fondness of Kitty is also owed to her value as a literary character. Let’s not get carried away, we are still talking about comic books here and not literature of the Victorian era, so I’m not claiming that Ms. Pryde is anything beyond a really cool comic book character.
That being said, she’s a lot more important as a character than your usual superhero, even when compared to the most high-profile ones, such as X-men mainstrays Cyclops and Wolverine, Batman and definitely Superman. Fucking boyscout. At any rate, what separates Kitty from the aforementioned heroes is the fact that she is not as well defined as them.
Superman will always be the boyscout, Cyclops will always be a born leader and little else, while both Batman and Wolverine are brooding loners, for example. These, among many others, are a few defining characteristics that have not changed and will not change as long as they are around. Not only that, but they don’t really age either. While Wolvie does not age like a normal human does, and Supes just doesn’t age period, Cyclops, Batman and many many others are as old now as they were when they were first introduced, perhaps 5-10 years older tops, but usually that is not reflected in their storylines. They may have changed somewhat over the years, but their defining character features are the same.
Not so with Kitty. While she has aged slower than a normal human being (she should be in her late 40’s now instead of her early to mid 20’s, but my math is usually off) she has still aged, and that is really visible in her character. When she was first introduced, she was a shy, timid, trusting 13 year old, completely lost in the new world of super-beings that was laying ahead of her. Who wouldn’t feel lost, really?
Then as the years passed, she grew older, and inadvertedly, became more confident, more outspoken, yet also less trusting, more jaded, more dark. Little Kitty became a Cat. And us, the readers, grew older alongside her (as it goes, I read my first X-men story when I was 13, and it was one of the first stories to feature Kitty) and we can still relate with her, we can relate to her new fears and frustrations as they are pretty much our own.
In the first issue of the current-running volume of Astonishing X-men there is a beautiful segment where Kitty comes back to the Xavier Mansion after a long absence, and takes a “trip down the memory lane” as it were by reliving certain scenes from older X-men comics, but she’s not alone. We too are reminded of earlier times, when we were reading those same stories. Too mushy? I’ll stop, you get the point.
This is what makes Kitty Pryde such a great character, arguably one of the deepest that can be found in comic books. She’s still too perfect to be completely realistic; superhuman powers, incredible intellect and martial-arts prowess? Not that common in real life.
But over the years she has become much more than that. Good writers like Josh Whedon that get her character know this. She can be a wise-ass and a cynic, yet sometimes as timid as when she was a young girl. She can save the rest of the X-men team from certain death through her actions, yet she can also be frightened to death at times. She has changed a lot over the years, yet she’s still the same person she was when she first joined the X-men.
That’s what makes her so real, she’s complicated, her character doesn’t have to conform to any pre-determined behavior patterns. In a sense, Kitty reflects the readers themselves, growing older alongside them, changing her perspective of things as years go along. And she’s often the voice of reason, in a universe that sometimes makes little sense to the average reader (Emma “Uberbitch” Frost as an Ethics professor? Are you kidding me?)
So yes, Kitty Pryde, she’s cool.
And yes, in case you’re wondering -and I’m sure you are, I did have a crush on Kitty as a kid. Don’t tell me you didn’t have any meaningless, childish crushes on fictional characters when you were younger, I’m not buying it. And if you really didn’t, you may want to look into that. You may be too normal for your own good.
I’ve ranted enough for now, and I have a paper to return to. If you want to know more about Kitty, check out this really detailed article from Uncanny X-men.net.
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