X-Men Gold's Wedding Brings Back Wolverine

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for X-Men Gold #30 by Marc Guggenheim, David Marquez, Matthew Wilson and Cory Petit, on sale now.

A wedding is a cause for celebration; even if it doesn’t end up going quite the way it was supposed to, it’s always nice to see old friends and family that you never get the chance to outside of formal events.

With the wedding of Shadowcat and Colossus, that means the X-Men Gold team get to tap into the rich history of the X-Men to produce some wedding guests you might not have expected to see, as well as catch us up on some fan-favorite characters that haven’t made an appearance in a long time.

The Best Friend

While you can argue that Kitty Pryde’s best friend is Illyana, or Rachel or even Colossus himself, there’s no bond like that between a girl and her alien space dragon, which is why it was so great to see Lockheed return to the X-Men for Kitty’s wedding.

Originally introduced via a fairytale told by Kitty, she would meet a dragon that looked exactly like the one in her story while trapped on Sleazeworld with the alien Brood. The pair formed a bond and Lockheed saved the young X-Man from the parasitic aliens and accompanied the team back to Earth.

Kitty and Lockheed were inseparable and wherever she went, he followed; however, when the X-Men were among the heroes and villains abducted by The Beyonder to his patchwork planet Battleworld, Lockheed was among them while Kitty was not. While on Battleworld, Lockheed met a similar female dragon who was nicknamed Puff by the team, but she didn’t survive the trip back to Earth as the teleportation caused her to grow gigantic and threaten Tokyo, forcing Lockheed to reject her which led to her suicide.

Puff returned with no apparent explanation in Kitty Pryde: Shadow and Flame — written by now Marvel EiC C.B. Cebulski during the period of time he was pretending to be a Japanese man named Akira Yoshida — but hadn’t been seen since, until now. It appears that the family Lockheed arrives with to Kitty’s wedding includes Puff as his wife, along with two little dragon children, although it’s possible he just has a type.

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The Big Sister

One of the most important people in Kitty Pryde’s life was Stevie Hunter, a former ballerina who became an instructor following a broken leg. She was hired by Professor Charles Xavier to give the thirteen year old Kitty Pryde dance lessons, and though Storm was initially jealous of someone threatening her sisterly bond with Kitty, Stevie quickly became a part of the X-Men family and eventually joined the institute full-time as the X-Men’s physical therapist after discovering their true role as a mutant superhero team and school.

Stevie parted ways with the X-Men when an attack by Mister Sinister destroyed the Xavier School and she returned to her private studio, appearing occasionally in cameos. She was attacked by a Shadow King-possessed Colossus in an attempt to target the team’s most vulnerable allies and briefly return to the X-Men following his defeat, once again serving as a physiotherapist and occasional bed nurse for X-Men critically injured, including Charles Xavier following an assassination attempt on his life. After an appearance in 1994’s Uncanny X-Men Annual #18, Stevie wouldn’t appear in any Marvel comic book for the next twenty-five years, only reappearing very recently.

Stevie reappeared for the first time in decades in the pages of X-Men Gold where it was revealed she was now a United States Representative, serving Connecticut’s 3rd district. She invited Kitty, who was now the X-Men’s leader, to testify before Congress on mutant affairs and her time in Washington partly led to her rekindling her romance with Colossus. Stevie returns to the X-Men’s lives for the wedding serving as one of Kitty’s bridesmaids alongside Storm, and the bride-to-be has a revelation that alongside her own mother, the three women who raised her were all in the same place at the same time, to see her enter this new phase of her life.

The Mentor

The last special guest at the wedding doesn’t make himself known to the rest of the team, but it should be no surprise that he at least made an appearance in the shadows.

The recently resurrected Wolverine watches the procession from afar, but has his own business to attend to that means he can’t return to the X-Men, at least not yet. While the heroes of the Marvel Universe continue the hunt for Wolverine, we’re going to have to wait until later this year to learn all about the hows and whys surrounding the popular mutant’s return.

However, it’s fully in character for him to at least drop in to make sure the wedding was going smoothly — that is, not attacked by supervillains — as Kitty Pryde was his first protege. While it’s become somewhat of a trope now, with Wolverine taking the likes of Jubilee, Armor and Oya under his wing, Kitty Pryde was the first and the two share a familial bond that’s hard to replicate. Wolverine helped Kitty become a stronger fighter, while Kitty helped Wolverine learn to open up and accept his found family and it’s a shame he couldn’t bring himself to attend the wedding properly. If Kitty ever finds out he was there and didn’t say hi, she may just kick his ass.

While the wedding may not have gone through the way people expected it to, thing did end on somewhat of a celebratory note with Rogue and Gambit getting hitched, with Kitty and Piotr’s wedding. As far as superhero weddings go, X-Men Gold #30 was somewhat revolutionary in that all of its drama and turmoil was personal and there weren’t any dust-ups between heroes and villains. Instead, it was a look into the personal lives of the X-Men and how they related to each other and those around them, which is something the franchise has always done better than just about anyone else in superhero comics.