Kitty comes into the X-Men with intelligence, energy and a very reasonable amount of fear. She has powers she is still learning to use, adults making decisions about her future…

Kitty comes into the X-Men with intelligence, energy and a very reasonable amount of fear. She has powers she is still learning to use, adults making decisions about her future and a school whose emergencies would overwhelm plenty of grown people. Her arrival in #139 gives the reader a new way into the mansion. The Danger Room is strange again. So are the costumes, the rules and the idea that someone can go away for an ordinary evening and leave a house full of impossible equipment behind. Then #143 leaves her alone with a demon on Christmas Eve. Kitty survives by thinking, moving and using what she has learned about the building and the Blackbird. The sequence is frightening because she has to keep finding the next workable idea. Phasing gives her a chance; it doesn't make the creature stop following her. The book also lets her be wrong. Her discomfort around Nightcrawler, and the recognition that follows the encounter with Caliban, are part of growing up in a team built around people society treats as frightening. Intelligence hasn't automatically protected her from judging someone by his face. Her attachments can be intense. Storm becomes a deeply trusted adult, Illyana becomes important to her, and her feelings about Piotr are complicated by how young she is. The comic gives those relationships space alongside the rescues and training. By the brief New Mutants reassignment in #167–168, Kitty has enough experience to feel that Xavier's decision ignores what she has already survived and contributed. Her anger is recognizably adolescent, but her case has substance. This period gives her room to need guidance and to earn respect, sometimes in the very same scene. That tension makes her arrival much more than a device for explaining how the school works.