The Comicon Advent Calendar: Day 8 – Merry Christmas Kitty Pryde!
by Richard Bruton
It’s Comicon Advent Calendar time again – with another seasonal comic delight for you! This time it’s Demon from Uncanny X-Men #143, by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin, possibly the finest Kitty Pryde moment there’s ever been and the final issue in the absolutely classic Claremont, Bryne, Austin run…
It’s a spectacularly good episode in a brilliant run, one that still holds up today, even though it’s massively exposition and dialogue-heavy (Claremont’s whole run was like that, but hey, that’s what comics were like that years back).
But this is a genuine classic of a Christmas episode, with a bummed-out Kitty Pryde finding herself alone in the X-Mansion at Christmas, no-one around, no family… but it all starts with Kitty being taught just how to fire up the X-Men’s Blackbird (because hey, that’s what you do with a 14/15-year-old, teach her how to start up the world’s fastest jet).
So, just your average X-Men sort of starter really, Wolverine gets angry, loads and loads of dialogue and characters thrown in, something slightly dubious about the whole Colossus / Kitty thing. All designed to leave Kitty alone in the X-Mansion…
So, Kitty Pryde, youngest of the X-Men, gets stranded in the mansion, and just happens to run into a nasty old demon, one of the N’Garai… Ho Ho Ho Kitty Pryde…
Cue a mad dash through the X-Mansion, destroying a load of really expensive looking equipment in the process, with Kitty desperately trying to outwit the monster…
And of course, it all ends up in the control room for the Blackbird where young Kitty can put that all-important Blackbird training from the start of the issue to good use (handy that!)
And Kitty gets to finally relax, waiting for the huge fallout from the adults when they come back. Or maybe a visit from child services? At the very least you’d expect the fire department to be called out, right?
Of course not. It’s the X-Men, so we end with a Claremont bit of wonder, with the comics equivalent of the grown-ups rolling their eyes with a, ‘What’s this girl like?’ sort of look.
So yes, Merry Christmas Kitty Pryde, Merry Christmas to all of you!