In this feature, I spotlight storylines that have been, well, left unresolved. Click here for an archive of all storylines featured so far.
Today, we take a look at how Kitty Pryde disappeared in an issue of X-Men and was never actually "Found"...
In Chris Claremont's first issue in his return as the regular writer on both X-Men books, X-Men #100, he intentionally evoked the last X-Men #100 he wrote, the story of Jean Grey sacrificing herself to save her teammates in an escape from a space station.
In X-Men #100 (art by Leinil Francis Yu and Mark Morales), it was clear that Claremont had some real plans for Kitty Pryde in the revamped X-Men team, as he gave her a new hook that she had kept some of Wolverine's bone claws that had been broken in battle and she was now using them as her own personal blades.
She, along with the rest of her squad of X-Men, had gone undercover on a repair mission on a space station along with a bunch of other scientists and astronauts. Kitty had struck up a relationship with one of them but it went poorly...
After a not-so-surprising foray into Kitty in bondage...
She escaped and kicked some butt...
However, the evil Seth had sabotaged the space station. Luckily, the X-Men worked together to save everyone, only Kitty had to stay behind to enable the others to get to the escape craft. Again, this was an intentional homage to Jean Grey sacrificing herself in the original X-Men #100 (also written by Claremont).
Kitty, though, had another way off of the space station...
In the next issue, Rogue notes that they will go looking for Kitty...
And Forge gives them some info in X-Men #103...
But then that's it.
It was not until the end of his aborted run, in X-Men #109, that he next addressed Kitty, and it wasn't much of an address...
She shows up in the next issue (written by Scott Lobdell) to spread Colossus' ashes (after he seemingly sacrificed himself to cure the Legacy Virus) and tell Professor Xavier that she is done with the X-Men...
(You have to give Claremont a lot of credit for his adaptability, as he later wrote a nice Kitty Pryde mini-series using that set-up).
As I detailed in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, Claremont had intended to address her whereabouts, but editorial overruled him...
My idea was to establish Kitty as a subplot that would run through the conclusion of the Neo arc, around (X-Men vol.2) #104-105, and then move center stage. Then, (the X-Men) go after Kitty. When the arc structure got nuked by the editorial decision to reunite the two books and teams in July, to coincide with the movie, the Kitty arc was shifted over to a stand-alone mini-series (X-Men: Shadowcat – Captains Courageous) which would cast Kitty and a team of Captains as a kind of pan-temporal S.W.A.T. team, dealing with crises on alternate Earths and serve as the foundation/springboard for a possible new ongoing series.
Claremont's run had also opened with a time gap (about six months passed between X-Men #99 and #100) and had a lot of changes to characters that were also never revealed, but this Kitty bit was a lot more significant because X-Men #100 was so clearly setting up a plot and it never materialized and, of course, it happened in real time (as opposed to stuff that happened off panel in a time jump).
Okay, that's it for this edition of Left Unresolved!
If you have suggestions for other unresolved comic book plots that you'd like to see featured, drop me a line at bcronin@comicbookresources.com