Random thoughts about recent issues…
Uncanny X-Men #428 was the Draco prologue, in which we learned…
… that Nghtcrawler’s father is a dude called Azazel, who might be a demon, a mutant, a combination of the two, or possibly a Smurf.
Also did anyone else think that the doctor presiding over Nightcrawler’s birth could have been…
… Mr. Sinister? Considering that the average baby is not born blue, fuzzy, and with a tail, he took the birth rather in stride. Sure, he talked about smothering Kurt to “send [him] back to god” but I think that was just a ruse to throw off the mother. Speaking of whom…
… when Mystique throws poor baby Nightcrawler over the waterfall…
… he either bamfs to safety or Azazel bamfs in and rescues him. Someone on the ComiX boards suggested that Azazel set up the whole thing just to get Mystique to abandon Kurt so he could snatch him. Maybe he even gave him to Margali, who knows? We know her story about finding Kurt next to the dead body of his father is bunk, so it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to me to suppose that Azazel gave him to her; if he turns out to be a demon they’d have moved in the same circles.
Also, in another recent issue, Vargas strips Rogue of her powers. Does this mean the Shadow King is now free of his prison on the Astral Plane?
Okay, so…why are they retconing Nightcrawler’s past? It’s bad enough they made his mother Mystique, but come on? A demon daddy?! Whatever happened to mutants being the evolution of mankind? The more they delve into everyone’s past, the more it seems they’re nothing more than continuations of mutant heredity or results of bizare experiments.
Why’s Marvel gotta fudge everything?
Nightcrawler’s father was a European nobleman. That was a demon? What was he doing posing as some nut in a castle?
Austen, IMHO, did a very good job taking what we know of Mystique and Nightcrawler’s past and writing his own story within it. [spoiler]Mystique is married to a German baron, Erik Wagner. He wants to have a child, but is infertile, and the in-vitro treatments aren’t working. She meets another nobleman, named Azazel, at a party and falls under his spell. They conceive Nightcrawler in a church (TMI) and he’s pleased with the pregnancy but spurns Mystique’s love. Her husband has been having doubts about whether this “miracle baby” is his at all, and asks for a blood test. Mystique stabs Count Wagner to death (a very cool and scary sequence) and buries him. She then goes into labor and little Kurt is born. You know the rest.
Here’s what we know of Azazel: He rules an island called La Isla de Demonas. He can shift his form from a handsome human man with black hair and blue eyes to a red-skinned demon with a tail and three fingers per hand. He can teleport and can see through Mystique’s shape-shifting powers.[/spoiler]
Nightcrawler’s always been my favorit X-Men and even though I haven’t picked up a comic in ten or more years, I really like the way they’re doing his history.
Now they just need to turn Angel back into Archangel and bring Collossus back from the dead.