Stevie Hunter is one of the supporting characters who doesn't get a lot of time on the page, but there's a detail about her that I've kept noticing: that bad knee.

Stevie Hunter is one of the supporting characters who doesn't get a lot of time on the page, but there's a detail about her that I've kept noticing: that bad knee. She's a former professional dancer whose career was cut short by an injury. The knee was badly damaged, and even after treatment, she couldn't go back to performing the way she had before. She could still walk, teach and do some dancing, but the career she'd built her life around was gone. She first appears in X-Men #139 as Kitty Pryde's dance teacher. Xavier arranges lessons for Kitty, and Stevie's studio in Salem Center gives her something to do outside the mansion and all the training that comes with being an X-Man. Kitty is still a young girl with interests of her own, and dance is one of them. That connection gradually brings Stevie further into their lives. She becomes someone Kitty trusts, and she develops a friendship with Storm as well. Before long, being a dance teacher near Xavier's school means getting pulled into situations she could never have expected when she opened the studio. During the trouble with Emma Frost and the Hellfire Club, for example, Kitty and Storm turn to her for help. She's trusted with what's happening and with getting word to Moira if things go wrong. Later, when the New Mutants are dealing with Sentinels, Stevie ends up helping the kids through a situation where the wrong decision could get someone killed. She has no mutant power to fall back on, and she's still there trying to help. Her involvement also carries over into teaching the New Mutants. So even though she isn't one of the people charging into every major crossover, she has a connection to more than one generation of students. A lot of her place in their lives is in those smaller scenes, between the bigger things happening around them. But that knee keeps coming back. I feel like I've noticed it about six different times by now. I haven't been keeping an exact count, but it's happened often enough that I immediately remember what she's dealing with whenever it comes up again. Sometimes it's a sudden spasm or pain. Sometimes it's the possibility of it giving out when she really needs to move. There's an earlier conversation with Moira where Stevie talks about what losing her ability to perform meant to her. She can understand something of Xavier's frustration with his own physical limitations because she knows what it's like to watch other people do the thing she desperately wants to be doing herself. She's still teaching, but that doesn't mean she's stopped missing the stage. I found that to be an interesting piece of her story. We don't get a massive amount of Stevie's life on the page, yet this injury stays with her over a long stretch of the books. It doesn't disappear just because she hasn't been in an issue for a while. By the time it comes up again around X-Tinction Agenda, she's still having to deal with it. That's the part of Stevie that has stuck with me most so far. She shows up here and there, often helping the younger characters, and she's still living with the same injury and the change it forced on her life. It's a small ongoing story compared with everything happening to the X-Men, but I've definitely noticed it.