Kurt wants to enjoy being alive, even when he has landed in a house where everybody seems to be carrying a private emergency.

Kurt wants to enjoy being alive, even when he has landed in a house where everybody seems to be carrying a private emergency. His teasing helps give the new X-Men a social rhythm. He is willing to prod at somebody's dignity, make a joke or treat an extraordinary situation as an opportunity to play. In X-Men #96, Wolverine's response shows how dangerous a bad reading of a new friend can be. Teleportation gets Kurt out of the immediate attack. It doesn't make the moment harmless. He has learned something about the man beside him, and the team has learned that training together won't automatically produce trust. Outside the mansion, the Christmas outing in #98 gives Kurt and Peter a little room to behave like young men in a city. There are people to meet and an evening to enjoy before the Sentinels interrupt it. Those ordinary possibilities are worth seeing because they establish what the attacks keep taking away. His combat style brings that same liveliness to the page. He can change position abruptly, cling where another person couldn't stand and force an opponent to keep reconsidering where the next move will come from. Cockrum's Nightcrawler looks as though the entire panel is available to him. Lang's duplicate X-Men give him a particularly odd opponent in #100. The false Beast looks familiar from photographs, but the details don't fit what Kurt knows about the real man's life. The confusion is part of the trap: a recognized face encourages hesitation even when the person behind it is behaving all wrong. Kurt's humor doesn't remove his attention to those details. He is watching, thinking and trying to get through to people while he fights. The acrobat has more going on than the next spectacular jump.