KPW #6: "Honor"

(Ninja wallflower)

Comments

(Since UXM #192 explicitly takes place after the conclusion to this series, we may as well get it finished.)

At last we come to the end of Claremont's second double-header miniseries.  His first, of course, was Magik: Storm and Illyana, and it's worth remembering the structure of that previous book as we sum up this one. After all, consider the truly impressive number of similarities.  A long-standing member of the X-Men (Storm/Wolverine) is called upon to deal with a murderous villain who has harmed them, but from whom they have learned (Belasco/Ogun), and who has now found a girl/young woman (Illyana/Kitty) - associated with the X-Men but currently in a strange land outside their protection - who they have corrupted by giving them new powers (dark magic/ninja skills), which the elder team member must help them to control. At the climax of the story, the girl/young woman must head the wisdom of their older colleague and shake off the villain's influence without killing them and thereby losing their innocence.

That's a truly remarkable list of similarities.  Anyone wanting to call it self-plagiarism wouldn't get much of a fight from me. Indeed, part of me wonders why the sudden suggestion in this issue that Ogun planned to take Kitty's body as his own  - something not mentioned at all in the previous five issues - was a way of shaking a familiar formula up a little (if so, it failed, serving to do nothing but weaken some of the book's earlier themes). In some ways, this can be forgiven if we think of KPW as being an attempt to improve on the earlier story.  And some improvements can most certainly be identified.  The world of Japanese crimelords and ninja assassins was a lot less tapped out when this was written, coming as it did before the '90s strip-mining of such ideas, and strikes me as a stronger location to set a story than the shifting nonsense that was Limbo. Related, KPW avoids the problems I have with Claremont's use of magic, which, for those who haven't heard my rants on the subject, is too staid to be interesting and too random to provide either strong story foundations or coherent metaphors.  Lastly, for all that I'm not a fan of Kitty Pryde during her pre-Shadowcat days, she has been developed enough to pin a miniseries on, which really wasn't the case with Illyana Rasputin.

(Also, no rapey Nightcrawler, so bonus points there.)

But if we are to look at this series as an attempt to improve upon a formula, we run into one major problem; KPW has a central crisis that MAG avoided entirely. Let's talk about the one major difference between the two stories. In Limbo, Storm knows she is almost at the end of her life. Whatever else she is, Illyana is her last chance to strike against Belasco before the end.  There are complexities here, but essentially, we're talking about a passing of the torch.

On the other hand, after Wolverine has finished training Kitty, he has to go on being Wolverine.  This causes a major problem, because where Magik and Storm fulfilled different roles in their story, Kitty and Logan are sharing the same space in the narrative.  Both of them need to beat Ogun, and in a story obsessed with the Japanese ideals of honorable combat (or more to the point, Western  notions of Japanese ideals) only one of them can.

This is no small concern. It guarantees someone is going home without their cathartic release.  If it's Kitty, that pulls the rug out from her entire narrative in the miniseries, because she goes from overcoming Ogun to prove herself to needing Wolverine to bail her out when things gets rough - exactly what Logan argued a couple of issues earlier would be a terrible result for her.  In terms of the miniseries itself, Logan can probably get away with having Kitty defeating Ogun, but long-term problems creep in instead - you can't have Shadowcat doing Wolverine's job without it damaging Wolverine's status in the narrative (you can bypass this problem by letting Wolverine's status shift, but it'll be a little while until his boat is rocked so far as that).

Perhaps inevitably, the choice is made to poorly serve Shadowcat, and it's Wolverine who gets the chance to take Ogun down. You could, of course, colour an argument that this is the more sensible choice, since Kitty really only needed to prove she could stand up to Ogun, not beat him (indeed, beating him would have the effect of making him seem rather less than the unstoppable ninja killer he's been made out to be).  The problem with that theory is that Kitty stands up to Ogun in issue 5, meaning she's pretty much treading water here whilst Wolverine gets all the actual action.

There's some evidence that Claremont understood this.  Towards the end of the issue, once Wolverine has defeated Ogun, he offers Shadowcat the opportunity to murder her tormentor and gain revenge. This at least brings her choices back into the story, but of course Heroic Actions 101 means there's never any doubt as to which way she'll jump.  When she refuses to do the deed, Wolverine reveals he was testing her, and that killing Ogun would have condemned herself to be like him.

Can we please stop with this shit?  When Illyana refused to kill Belasco it was aggravating, but at least all the mystical crap about damning her soul should she give in to the darkness was based around magical rules which whilst entirely arbitrary can't exactly be called wrong. Here it's much easier to call foul. "Killing makes us no better than them" is possibly the absolute worst cliche in comics that doesn't involve implicit or explicit bigotry (David Brothers over at 4thletter! has been walking this beat for a while now too). I'm not even faintly interested in listening to someone telling me that there's no moral distinction between a man who violates the minds of children and murders for profit and a girl who kills a man who violates the minds of children and murders for profit, particulary when said man is so deep in the Japanese underworld there's every reason to believe the authorities won't dare give him more than a slap on the wrist.  I'm especially not interested on this theory coming from Wolverine of all people.

And all this becomes even more of a problem when seconds later Oyun grabs a blade and tries to kill Kitty, at which point it's immediately fine for Wolverine to stab him through the heart, even though by shouting at her to phase, he ensures she's in no danger whatsoever, and knowing Ogun can't get through his healing factor. I refuse to accept that there is some kind of airtight moral rule by which it's a grotesquely corrupting act to kill an unrepentant multiple murderer in-between killings, but doing so whilst they're in the middle of an attempted killing that cannot succeed, that's all fine and dandy.  It's clear Ogun is dead because we're at the end of the story and he needs to be gotten rid of.  This is kind of a problem in and of itself, but attaching it to some holier-than-thou lecturing about the importance of avoiding killing anybody compounds the problem.

So that's that, then.  Two admittedly interesting storylines that can't function properly in the same place, and end up being both being annoyingly familiar and finding new ways to be problematic.  We're a long way from the focused triumph of the original Wolverine mini-series.

Still, Kitty is less annoying as Shadowcat than she was as Sprite.  This much, I cannot deny.

Clues

This issue picks up directly from the previous one. The majority of the action is condensed into a few minutes.  It's not clear whether the epilogue takes place on the same night or not. The wounded Wolverine has found time to change, but Kitty has not.  It might be Wolverine did so immediately so as to get out of his costume. On the other hand, it seems a little late to be taking Akiko out for ice-cream, so we'll assume the epilogue takes place on the following day.

Date

Sunday 4^th March to Monday 5^th March, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+3 to X+6Y+4.

Contemporary Events

Three times Oscar-nominated actor William Powell passes away at the age of 91.

Iran accuses Iraq of having deployed chemical weapons during their war (which would continue for a further four years).  The United States gets very annoyed about this nineteen years later.

Standout Line

"Actions have consequences, and an honorable man takes responsibility for his deeds." - Carmen Pryde.

KPW #5: "Courage"

("When last we met, I was but the learner...")

Comments

Ah! At last the purpose of this mini-series swims fully into focus. This is the story of how Sprite becomes Shadowcat, and how Wolverine shifts from being her protector to being her sensei. That doesn't entirely clear up the rather schizophrenic nature of the series, but it does justify its existence, and handily gives me a hook to discuss what's going on.

Given the insistence in giving Kitty and Logan equal billing, there are two questions to be discussed here: how wise and successful is Kitty's transformation, and does Wolverine's new role do anything for his character.

The sudden upgrade of characters in superhero comics is a trope which does not, to put it mildly, have an unblemished record. All too often it's an admission of failure, a confession that a character isn't working for some reason.  Such things happen, of course, in long-running storylines, but even if one is unwilling to write that character out (or under editorial mandate to keep them in circulation), slapping on extra laser-beams or psychic shenanigans seems the laziest method possible of sparking the creative fire, with the possible exception of killing off a family member.

There are, as I've already discussed, problems with Kitty's transformation into Deadly Ninja Kitty (TM); it's too fast, too unpleasant, and it removes too much of her agency. All that said, this issue does confront these problems by focussing on Kitty's inner monologue, in which she makes clear she sees the future not as a choice between fighting Ogun and forever running in fear from him (which was Logan's framing, and which never really made sense), but between living a normal life in the suburbs, and risking her neck employing her mutant ability. Her horrific treatment at the hands of Ogun and the resulting new skill set stops being the focus, and becomes just a single part of a larger puzzle, that of how to regain agency in the wake of being utterly shafted by life.

This is a powerful theme of course, familiar to essentially everyone in the world, and it ties directly back to the central metaphor of the X-books. I don't mean to imply here that being a mutant is in itself to have been shafted, simply that to be a mutant in a culture so thoughtlessly and dangerously hostile to your nature counts as a fairly major crimp on your day.  Seeing characters navigate that seemingly immutable fact is central to the mutant story.

All this also folds back into the one idea in the story of Kitty's treatment by Ogun that I really liked; deconstructing the tired old training-by-montage trope by having someone gain their abilities immediately and only afterwards to actually earn them (it might seem that idea is somewhat contradicted by how difficult Kitty found her post-ninja training, but I think that's just a case of her having the skills but not the stamina).  The end result is a young woman no longer willing to justify her self-absorption as part of her age, and starts wondering about how to become a woman. The process is perhaps a little overwrought - "I like the shadows a whole lot more than the daylight" - and comes bolted to a rather worrying scene in which she paints dark slanting circles around her eyes and announces herself indistinguishable from a Japanese teenager (?! And !! ?!, I say!), but it does the job. Plus, Shadowcat is one of my all-time favourite superhero names. so there is at least that.

Having made her decision to become Shadowcat, and to christen her new identity in Ogun's blood, her next port of call is to Marijo's penthouse, where she (correctly) assumes Ogun will try to reacquire her. This results in her defending Wolverine's former fiancee and his adopted daughter from his evil ex-sensei.  It would be tough to make it any more obvious that she is filling Wolverine's role here. Even the format is reminiscent of Wolerine's initial mini-series.

So where does that leave Wolverine himself? Well, that's the thing. Whilst Shadowcat is quite literally crossing swords with Ogun, Logan is doing nothing but heading off to help out, whilst taking some time out to call Caremen Pryde on his bullshit decisions. Which, fair enough, dude needed to be slapped around, but it's not exactly classic Wolvie, is it? He shows up in the final panel, once Kitty has stepped through the traditional spirited-but-ultimately-doomed combat with Ogun, because that's how final panels are supposed to be, but once again, for at the very least the third time, this title has proved to not be big enough for both title characters at the same time.

Maybe the final issue will finally confront this head on. As I said above, Logan seems to be moving from the role of protector to that of sensei, which almost by definition requires he takes a back seat - though that itself seems to be in tension with where this issue finds itself - but it's becoming hard to see how Wolverine justifies his inclusion in the title for any other reason other than to generate more money.

Clues

Kitty mentions it has been a few days since she left Wolverine to hunt down Ogun. We'll therefore set this issue two days after the last one.

Mariko mentions that Akiko was only orphaned a few months earlier (in UXM #181). By our timeline, it's been around a month and a half, so that more or less works.

Date

Sunday 4^th March, 1984.

X-Date

 X+6Y+3.

Contemporary Events

Ai Iwamura is born. Sixteen years later, she appears in Battle Royale for all of five seconds, an achievement I will never be able to match.

Standout Line

"No place -- nobody -- is safe from a ninja." - Kitty.

And just like that, thirty-seven thousand '80s and '90s fplotlines are haphazardly generated.

KPW #4: "Rebirth"

(Three men and a stupid baby.)

Comments

There's a strange moment on page 6 of this issue, when the narration tells us:

I'm Wolverine. This is my story.

The reason this qualifies as strange isn't particularly difficult to see.  It's right there in the title. At best, Wolverine should be sharing equal time in this story with Kitty, if not taking second billing.  It wasn't particularly surprising that Logan took centre stage in the previous issue, what with Sprite suffering from barinwashing (though that doesn't address the wisdom of sidelining your main character like that in the first place).  Here, it's harder to understand, and it gets us into a rather fundamental problem.

The overall plot of this issue is pretty simple: Logan wants to free Kitty from Ogun's unpleasant influence, and he figures the best way to do that is to train her properly, rather than by evil info-dump.  This feels partially like the old idea of earning something instead of being given it for free - Kitty might think Logan doesn't look the part, but there's a definite Empire... "quicker, easier, more seductive" idea going on here - but mainly this is an exercise in having Kitty reclaim her identity. If she can't unlearn what Ogun has given her, she can at least contextualise it - if she has ninja skills and goes through ninja training, it shouldn't matter too much which of the two came first.

That's a perfectly fine idea, and were we seeing it from Kitty's perspective rather than Wolverine's, I might have left it there.  The problem is that in getting Logan's view of the situation, we end up with three men - Logan, Ogun and Kitty's father, Caermen Pryde - fighting over how a young woman should spend the rest of her life.

At first blush, this might seen at least a little unfair.  Logan, at least, is insistent at every point that Kitty has a choice here.  Whilst Ogun clearly doesn't have any interest in Kitty's opinions, and Carmen seems unable to think about his daughter in any context beyond sulking over her refusal to speak to him, Wolvie at least wants Sprite's input.  But consider what that choice is, in Logan's framing. Either Kitty spends weeks having her body banged up or being thrown into freezing water, or one day Ogun will come back and that, to all intents and purposes, will be the end of her - unless she wants to run back to Xavier and hide behind him forever.

That, to me, is too close for confort to telling Kity she has to do what Logan wants, or she has to do what Ogun wants - with the only options giving herself over entirely to Xavier's largess, or  to do what her father presumably wants and burying her head in the Illinois snow. It's not hard to understand why Wolverine believes the pressure is necessary given previous events, but that just makes the problem structural.

The issue salvages itself somewhat towards the end when we return to Kitty's internal narrative. First she belatedly figures out Logan's angle - re-running Ogun's approach but with the option to quit - and then extrapolates that by deciding to face Ogun down rather than run back to the States. And in truth this does fit into the larger idea this series seems to be playing with - contrasting Logan and Kitty begore actually making them more similar.

The problem is that the agency in on Logan's part, and the changes on Kitty's.  It's a surprising choice to tell a story of personal growth and change from a man who - in this issue - does neither.  I'm hardly unsympathetic to the idea that Logan is a fundamentally more interesting character than Kitty - in their mid '80s incarnations, that is - but that's exactly why I wouldn't have paired them together as title characters and brainwashed the junior partner.

Clues

The narration during Kitty's attempts to become the new Wolverine mention that "days pass" as she trains.  That gives us plenty of leeway to work within.  Ordinarily we'd interpret this to mean as short a time as possible - perhaps as little as a week - but such an alternative isn't open to us here. Xavier's phone-call informing Logan of Storm's loss of power and James Hudson's death force us to extend the time-period significantly, since the latter occurrence explicitly takes place at the beginning of March.  I could try and move forward the whole of KPW to compensate, but that causes problems with this story having clearly begun in midwinter three issues earlier.

There's also the fact that Logan mentions Kitty having been in Ogun's clutches for a week.  This directly contradicts earlier issues, in which Wolverine arrived in Japan the night after Kitty, and crosses swords with her the night afterwards.  That said, I think the longer period makes more sense - to the extent that's a quantifiable quality when discussing mind-washing techniques to make people ninjas.  We'll therefore assume Kitty spent one week with Ogun, and two and a half weeks with Logan as shown here.

Date

Monday 13^th February to Friday 2^nd March, 1984.

X-Date

X+5Y+343 to X+6Y+1.

Contemporary Events

The 1984 Winter Olympics are held in Sarajevo.

Standout Line

"You're too tall -- an' too darn ugly -- to be Yoda."

KPW #3: "Death"

(The space between us.)

Comments

We're now halfway through this mini-series, and as Logan heads for his rendezvous with Kitty only to find it's a trap with her serving as both bait and blade, our focus remains on figuring out what makes this title dare to believe it deserves to exist.

After three issues, something along those lines does indeed seem to be forming,  The key observation here is that sixty-plus pages in, Kitty and Logan have still yet to talk to each other (yes, Logan answered Kitty's trans-continental phone call, but she hung up immediately). This is a story about two characters interacting without an interface.

The result is interesting.  The two characters are essentially sketched out by the absence of the other. This is not always a wise approach, hence why it's a relief this series can't be subtitled "Mooning Over Colossus", but it seems to work perfectly well here.  In part, that's because the relationship between Kitty and Logan is sufficiently complicated and interesting - note how it's still being explored almost thirty years later - that it can withstand being deconstructed in this way.  It heightens both Sprite's vulnerability and Logan's disassociation from the world.

Admittedly, the former is less interesting than the latter. There's a lovely line in particular here about how Wolverine's general dislike of cities doesn't apply to Tokyo because he understands what its doing, because its attempt to generate order from chaos mirrors his own internal struggle.  Not an attempt to replace the chaos, so much as to compartmentalise it to the point where it no longer reigns supreme.

(One almost sure-fire way of doing this, by the way, is to become a parent, or at least so it seems to this childless writer.  Having children doesn't require that the mad, scrambling, explosive rush of youth be discarded, merely that it be set aside until a reliable babysitter is found. So, anyone know of somebody who could fulfil that role for Wolverine?)

As for Kitty's vulnerability, well, it doesn't look much like that's going to be an issue for a while, does it? Under Ogun's tutelage/mind control, she's become an assassin lethal enough to take down the mighty Wolverine himself, stabbing him through the chest in a manner that I'm sure would be very concerning were we not well aware of his healing factor.  Then again, Logan is somewhat off his game, made vulnerable by, I assume, his concern for Kitty.

This means our two title characters are not merely defined by their separation, but also by how that separation had led to them becoming more like each other. That close couples (platonic or otherwise) tend towards a central point is an obvious realisation, of course, but it's interesting to see it here in this strange half-separated situation.  I'm not sure it fully works - the outside pressure and compressed time involved in ninjafying Kitty cuts against my reading of the comic's intent - but it does give us a plausible hook for the second half of the series.

Clues

This issue takes place over a single night.  Logan states that this is the night after Kitty tried to swipe money from a cash machine, but this is flatly impossible unless both Wolverine's flight and Ogun's ninja brainwash process both take no more than a couple of hours.  We'll therefore place this story the day after KPW #2 concludes.

Date

Monday 6^th February, 1984.

X-Date

X+5Y+343.

Contemporary Events

Euro Tunnel is given the grant to build the... well, you can guess, I'm sure.

Standout Line

"I've always loved [this temple's] garden, the elegant simplicity of the pattern formed by the arrangement of rocks and stones... creating harmony from diversity, order from chaos.

A man's spirit, it's said, can be shaped the same way..."

KPW #2: "Terror"

(Rank ninjustice.)

Comments

Last time we dropped in on this miniseries I suggested it was struggling for a clear purpose.  After reading this issue, things aren't any less murky. Not because there's no sense of what Claremont is trying to do, but because there's so many possible themes here that I'm struggling to figure out which one we're supposed to be grabbing hold of.

It now seems that the sturm und drang surrounding Kitty's dumping by Peter isn't going to feature as much as I'd already assumed.  By this point, Kitty is just tagging it on to the end of reasons why her life sucks, as oppose to it informing her actions in any real sense.  Indeed, this may be where we stumble onto what's really going on here.  Claremont may be suggesting this is an opportunity for Sprite to mature somewhat.

This is a plausible conclusion given events, but we should note that Claremont has chosen an odd vehicle for the idea.  In this issue Kitty is captured by Ogun (one of the Japanese gangsters she saw pressuring her father in Illinois, and who reminds her of Wolverine enough to make it clear this is not a dude with which to be fucked), and is brainwashed into becoming a deadly ninja.

I admit it makes some sense for someone to think Kitty would make an excellent assassin; she's small, light and athletic, and she doesn't need anything so prosaic as doors.  Quite how Ogun knows this ahead of time I'm not sure - maybe he doesn't, and indoctrinating teenagers is just how he rolls in general - but fair enough.  But it's worth noting this isn't the only time Claremont uses the plot-line of a sinister Asian villain brainwashing a western woman into becoming his private assassin.  The fact that this of all things could become a recurring theme is... interesting, to say the least.

We'll deal with that in more detail when the idea resurfaces with Psylocke ("Lady Yellowface", as Abi calls her), though.  For now we'll focus on what this developments suggests.  As I say, it can feed into the idea of Kitty growing up, though the idea this is happening due to a malevolent external pressure causes of all sorts of problems with that as a metaphor.  It's one thing for characters to mature through adversity.  It's quite another to do through experiencing what is quite clearly abuse.  The potential problems of a character arc that can be summed up as "now that adult male has physically and psychologically dominated me, I no longer mind about my teenage crush dumping me" surely need not be stated.

On the other hand, perhaps something else is happening here.  The shock reveal at the end of the issue is that Ogun reminds Kitty of Wolverine because her friend was actually trained by Ogun as well.  Perhaps this is as much about Wolverine's past as it is Kitty's future.

Of course, that carries its own problems.  Kitty's mind-domination is a problem if she's the heroine of the story, but it's no easier to deal with if it's there simply to give Wolverine something to react to.  We're in refrigerator territory, here.

Ultimately, though, this is a second issue of set-up.  Which isn't necessarily a problem in a six-book series. Kitty and Wolverine are in place, and with Logan threatening Ogun's associate Shigematsu with death if he doesn't secure the release of Kitty, and Ogun himself ordering Sprite to murder her former friend, it's not hard to see what shape issue #3 will take.

Still, though.  Where is this all going?

Clues

It's difficult to tell how long this story plays out over, since there's no indication of how much time Sprite spends being taught to become a ninja.  Clearly it's all going on in her subconscious, since she can't literally have been turned back into a toddler and raised as an assassin, but the necessary time-frame needed for the brainwashing is unclear.

On the other hand, it seems likely Wolverine's appearance towards the end of the issue takes place soon after he arrives in Japan.  That, combined with Kitty saying she spent the night in a sewer, suggests this all happens the day after Kitty's arrival in Japan.

Date

Sunday 5^th February, 1984.

X-Date

X+5Y+342.

Contemporary Events

Argentinian soccer star Carlos Tevez is born.

Standout Line

...Yeah, I got nothing.  There's nothing here that's good enough to note, and the weirder stuff has that whole psychological abuse thing hanging over it.

Kitty Pryde And Wolverine #1: "Lies"

(The Cross Time Zone Caper.)

Comments

For those keeping score, this is the fourth X-Men miniseries to date, all of which were released within the same three year period, and all but one of which were written by Claremont alone - the fourth being a collaboration with Bill Mantlo.  The X-juggernaut (if you'll forgive the phrase) has well and truly begun rolling.

As usual with these minis, then, the most immediate question is: why?  With two slices of Claremont action per month already available, what can we find here that we can't get elsewhere?  The three previous miniseries each had an answer, even if in the case of X-Men vs the Micronauts it wasn't really anything more than uncamouflaged commercialism.  Magik: Storm and Illyana filled in a back-story that one could at least make a strong case for being worth telling, for all that the end result left me cold.  Wolverine did best of all, being a brooding, exquisitely-presented tour through Wolverine's character, with added ninjas.

So what does this title bring to the party?

The first clue, as one might expect, comes in the name.  This is not Wolverine and Kitty Pryde.  Even in the mid '80s, with Wolverine-fever still far from peaking, giving Logan second-billing is a very notable choice, particularly since it was he who headlined the first X-Men spin-off in history (if we exclude the Dazzler ongoing, and for these purposes I think we should).  This is a story about Sprite, first and foremost.  Indeed, in this first issue, Wolverine hardly appears at all; literally being on page for a single panel and thirteen words of dialogue.  This is Kitty's time to shine. 

Not that she's all that interested in shining, what with Colossus having broken her heart.  This is our second clue as to what is going on here.  Claremont is using this opportunity to explore Kitty's response to being heartbroken, in a way he'd never have the space to do in either UXM or NMU (though he has the sense to skip the first week of endless weeping). That's a strong rationale for a character piece, for all that I have comparatively little love for the character in question, and for all that Claremont isn't really the writer I'd choose for the role (hyperbolic teenage rending of garments being a topic that desperately needs a writer stronger on dialogue and implication).

Note that I say "character piece", not "six issue limited series".  If the main thrust of this book is to explore Kitty's emotional fall-out, then it's reasonable to ask how long we could possibly take the results.  Claremont is walking a fine line here.  Too much melodrama and the whole thing will collapse, too much skipping around Japan fighting ninjas and there's a risk the whole exercise become superfluous; something we've all seen before.

Oh, did I mention Kitty's skipping around fighting ninjas?  That seems to be the basis of the plot here: Kitty discovers her father has been extorted into selling the family bank to the Yakuza - small Illinois banks being prime targets for Japanese gangsters - and is being shipped off to Japan to meet his new boss, and she surreptitiously tags along.

In this first issue, it's tough to know where this is headed, though of course no-one gets any prizes for figuring out this story is Nippon-bound so as to tie into Wolverine's past (his only appearance here is answering Kitty's international phone call for assistance).  It's not clear how returning Wolverine to the grimy world of Tokyo assassins will work alongside Kitty's domestic problems - certainly Sprite would have been horribly out of place in the previous Wolverine mini - but we'll figure that out further down the road.

For now, Claremont's interest is in putting Kitty through the wringer; without cash or sensible clothes, Kitty quickly ends up soaked in Tokyo rain and trying to steal money from cash machines in order to get a place to stay.  In the process she trips an alarm, leading to her being chased by the cops, featured on the Japanese equivalent of Crime Stoppers, and fighting a nasty (and ridiculously quick-developing) case of the flu.  Plus, she finds her father just in time to see him agree to funnel laundered money through his bank.  She even loses her favourite pair of skates.

Is the plan to try the patented "strip everything away from a character" approach here? It's too soon to tell.  Right now, all we really have are questions.  Which is fine; there's five issues for this to crystallise. Whether or not it does, of course...

Clues

This issue begins a week after Kitty and Peter's break-up in UXM #183.  Since that would make it a Saturday, though, and hence unlikely to be a day the bank is open in the late afternoon (actually, maybe US banks do that, I couldn't say), I'll knock things back to the Friday.  The flight to Japan presumably takes us into the following day.

Date

Friday 3^rd to Saturday 4^th February, 1984.

X-Date

X+5Y+340 to X+5Y+341.

Contemporary Events

The first transfer of embryos from one woman to another resulting in a live birth is announced.  Republicans across the US start planning ways to use this to prove women love getting things inserted into them under all circumstances.

Standout Line

"Traffic's lousy, as usual. The airport is jammed, as usual.  The cabby gets lost, as usual."

Maybe I wouldn't have picked this line if I wasn't flying to France next week.  But I am, so I did.