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Mar 29

Nightcrawler vol 2

Posted on Sunday, March 29, 2015 by Paul in x-axis

Nightcrawler is but the latest in a long line of X-Men solo titles that never looked remotely likely to make it past a year, whatever it might turn out to contain.  And so it comes as no great surprise to find that this second volume is the last.

You have to wonder about Marvel’s thinking, when it comes to commissioning books like this.  I doubt anyone would seriously dispute that the X-Men line is far larger than any creative considerations could justify.  But persistently launching titles for which there is little discernible demand doesn’t exactly make much sense on purely mercenary grounds either.

Of course, we are now in a phase of Marvel’s history where the whole concept of an ongoing title is becoming somewhat vague.  It’s not simply the fact that titles are renumbered with every new creative team; it’s the existence of books like Spider-Man and the X-Men which are billed as ongoing series but are manifestly intended purely as short-run projects.  Increasingly, an “ongoing” title is merely a miniseries that hasn’t been announced as such.  If that is the thinking then perhaps books like this one make a little more sense – they’re intended to be cycled in and out every year or so to fill out the bottom end of the line, and in the unlikely event that one turns out to be a hit, something can be done with it.  And of course, depending on how significant a relaunch the X-Men line undergoes after Secret Wars, it’s decidedly possible that the B- and C-list X-titles are literally are just marking time right now.

Nightcrawler more or less works as a twelve-issue run – it was clearly written with that possibility firmly in mind – but it certainly reads as though Claremont had longer-term plans for it.  This collection covers issues #7-12, but issue #7 is a Death of Wolverine tie-in co-written by Marguerite Bennett, and I reviewed it separately at the time.  So let’s focus on the rest of the run.

The set-up which Claremont inherited at the start of this series from Amazing X-Men – and boy, doesn’t the promotion given to Amazing X-Men #1 as a big new launch just look comical with hindsight? – was Nightcrawler recently returned from the dead.  There seems to be no common line as to whether he needed to earn his way back into Heaven or whether he had actually sold his soul; Claremont is clearly going for option A, Amazing explicitly went for B during an Axis tie-in, and the whole thing looks distinctly as if it falls under the heading of “What are the editors doing all day if they can’t keep track of the basic premise of a main character?”

Over the course of twelve issues, Claremont sets about establishing a supporting cast.  He re-established Amanda Sefton and then promptly banished her from Earth to obstruct the relationship.  He introduced two kids, Ziggy and Rico, so that Kurt can mentor them as his supporting cast.  And in the second volume, he surprisingly repositions Bloody Bess from the Crimson Pirates as a rival love interest, and has her team with Kurt and the kids to take down Tullamore Voge, a minor slave-trading villain who’s been cropping up intermittently in Claremont’s stories for ages now.

Voge’s defeat certainly gives the thing some degree of closure, but it’s pretty obvious that the longer-term agenda is to set up a triangle with Amanda and Bess, and that’s something the series never gets around to.  Nor does it seem terribly likely that anyone else will pick it up – again, leaving aside any issues about the impending reboot, the Crimson Pirates were created back in Claremont’s turn-of-the-century X-Men run, and have never seemed to hold much interest for other writers.  Here, at least, they play into the swashbuckler angle that Claremont is understandably keen to stress with Kurt, but they’re still a bunch of weird gimmick villains best approached with tongue firmly in cheek.

The series is certainly a throwback to a more innocent era – which is no criticism, since that’s presumably what anyone buying a Chris Claremont Nightcrawler story in 2015 was looking for.  Todd Nauck’s cheerful, clean artwork fits quite happily with that tone.  Despite his name, Nightcrawler has never been a particularly dark or atmospheric character – he settled very quickly into the role of an upbeat team player, with his supernatural aspects as an ironic flourish.  He was intended to seem vaguely demonic, but everyone ended up calling him an elf.

So this is the book Claremont and Nauck provide – one where heroic heroes prevail over villainous villains through heart, determination and (literally, in some cases) the power of love.  The bad guys in these issues are the Shadow King and the aforementioned Tullamore Voge, both of whom are essentially mind-control and slavery-themed bad guys.  Long a preoccupation of Claremont, this is something that could be played for the horror of violation, but it’s treated more as a genre convention.  Both villains are entirely one-dimensional – the Shadow King is simply evil, Voge is purely greedy.  But this isn’t because Claremont fails to give them depth; it’s because he’s profoundly uninterested in doing so.

Voge originated in one of the “Cross-Time Caper” issues of Excalibur way back in the 1980s, when he was one of a group of slavers who came across as upper-class twits.  These days he tends to talk a lot about profit.  This might suggest that Claremont sees the character as vaguely satirical, but if so, it’s hardly an angle that gets developed.  It seems more likely that he simply sees the profit-driven baddie as a familiar and suitable trope.  Equally, the story rather takes it for granted that what appears to be a vast and well-organised slaving operation will fall apart if Voge is abducted – which seems at the least optimistic, particularly as we really know very little about the whole thing.  If there’s that many people involved and that many buyers out there to profit from, it seems rather likely that someone else would simply more in to fill the gap.  But this is beside the point, really; Voge isn’t there to be realistic, he’s there so that his defeat can represent a goal for the heroes.

All of which makes it a bit odd when the story wants us to accept Bloody Bess as a love match, without her really doing anything in particular to reform.  Why is she willing to take down the same slavers that she’s been working with for years?  It’s more of a problem with her, because she’s meant to be a love interest for Kurt, and that means she does have to function as a more rounded character.

Taken on its own terms, Nightcrawler is perfectly fine.  It does recapture the voice that Claremont gave the character back in the day, and that goes a long way to making the book enjoyable despite its problems and limitations.  If Claremont seems keen to look back to his own previous creations, well, that’s probably what he was hired to do, and besides, it’s hardly egotism for him to look back on 1980s X-Men as a golden age (as issues #9 and #12 in particular seem to do).  The closing pages of issue #12, and the heavy focus on mentoring the new kids, seem equally interested in positioning all that material as a foundation for the future; Claremont, after all, is from the generation of creators who thought of Marvel’s ongoing titles as open-ended sagas.

It’s not a book with any great depth, but not does it really aspire to be.  It’s a conscious throwback, and more successful in that vein than many of Claremont’s return visits have been.  Even if there isn’t much to the story, it does at least recapture some of his style.  How far that takes you will doubtless turn on how much affection you have for the 1980s X-Men.

Bring on the comments

  1. Tomas says:

    I do find it somewhat amusing that there have just been two x-men doing solo series where they are dating space pirates.

  2. max says:

    I read “Crimson Pirates” in the reviews and solicitations, and I’m out of there. 2000 was not a good year for the X-Men outside of a really good movie. I don’t need to relive it.

    Running X-Men solo series as short run projects is for the best. They tend to overstay their welcome otherwise. And being Xbooks starring mutants… they’re all variations on the same thing at the end of the day, just with different points of view.

  3. ASV says:

    Given the timing of this book’s launch and the number of appearances by other adult X-Men, I often wondered why they didn’t just give Claremont Amazing X-Men for a year.

  4. Al says:

    Claremont let slip in an interview around the beginning of the book’s run that the book was only commissioned for a five-issue run initially, and was going to be recommissioned in short blocks unless it was a runaway success. He didn’t seem even at the time to think he was going to be doing it for very long. Makes sense – he’s been around long enough to know how the business runs.

  5. Kenny says:

    I have to wonder if this book was cancelled purely because of low sales, or because Secret Wars was right around the corner.

    Also, I like Bloody Bess as a love interest, but her heel-face turn came out of nowhere.

    That said, I haven’t enjoyed a Claremont series this much since 2006.

  6. Tim O'Neil says:

    Brevoort has talked on his Tumblr about how the days of perpetual ongoing series are a thing of the past. I give Marvel a lot of credit as far as their business goes. Their sales projections for a series like NIGHTCRAWLER were probably fairly accurate: they knew how long it would probably last, what kind of commitment it would req

  7. Tim O'Neil says:

    As you say, Brevoort has talked on his Tumblr about how the days of perpetual ongoing series are a thing of the past. I give Marvel a lot of credit as far as their business goes. Their sales projections for a series like NIGHTCRAWLER were probably fairly accurate: they knew how long it would probably last, what kind of commitment it would require from the creative team, and the exact moment it would cease to be profitable, with the option for extensions if those projections prove too pessimistic.

    They’ve got this down to a science, and the reason we know this is because of the one time the model failed spectacularly, HAWKEYE. There a book that any reasonable observer would have predicted to be dead in a year did unexpectedly well, and suddenly they had to scramble around a creative team that was simply not able to produce a monthly book past their initial commitment. They won’t make that mistake again, I wager.

  8. Chris M. says:

    Wasn’t this series originally going to be the next iteration of X-MEN LEGACY? Seeing the comment about just giving AMAZING to Claremont sparked the memory of reading that somewhere.

  9. Taibak says:

    Tim: That would seem to imply no hope for the comics industry as we know it. If Marvel is going to keep churning our new ‘ongoing’ series and cancel them in a year, why should we take them seriously when they say they have stories to tell? It’s not like the industry can afford to lose readers – and given how big superheroes are right now that’s pretty sad – and at some point the constant reboots and events will become as impenetrable as the 90s crossovers.

  10. Joseph says:

    Reflections on the new status of ongoings aside, and as a fan of classic Claremont, I just didn’t have it in me to read another one of his mind-control stories. It’s self-parody at this point.

  11. Brian says:

    Chris M.: Yes, this was originally going to be the latest volume of X-MEN LEGACY, but the decision was made rather to brand it by the lead instead of continuing to cycle XML as a rotating-lead title/brand as had been done was Xavier/Rogue/Proteus.

    On the issue of the faux-ongoings, I can see where the failure to sell mini-series made them gun-shy (of course, that’s because Marvel was already flooding the market with multiple titles, often with extra issues, of the characters who they’d otherwise make minis of), but creating effective minis and having a Russian Roulette of “which is a REAL ongoing and which isn’t?” (sometimes with editorial and creative having the answer and sometimes not) isn’t the answer. We’ve especially seen the growing confusion, with all these different “volumes” written for the trade, where now you get a surplus of trades bearing the same numbering where the potential reader can’t keep straight what to read just over a five-year or so period.

    Marvel really needs to figure out some sort of return to the proper maxi-series. A four-issue series rightfully looks disposable, but a run that’s going to be 12 or 18 issues can be made clear to be 12 or 18 issues from the get-go, sub-titled something that will brand it clearly, and still give the appearance that it has the narrative space and weight to be worth reading. Then, if sales and critical attention are positive, it’s very easy to commish a direct sequel/follow-up (that can be branded as such) to start immediately after the first ends.

    (Of course, if they plan on changing volumes with every new writer, I still wish that they’d give said volumes clear subtitles – and not just rotate the same brand titles. Especially when they plan ahead of time how long a series will run, they can treat it the way they would with a maxi, even with a premier character or characters.)

  12. Luis Dantas says:

    To be fair, it is not like the superhero comics industry has a long tradition of relying on storylines that need more than a year.

    That said, it is painfully clear that there is indeed no hope for the industry to thrive on monthly comics that have less than 30 pages of content and cost at least three dollars apiece.

    Odds are that we will end up following suit with the RPG industry, which has largely managed to survive due to digital merchandise and very carefully aimed marketing. The days of the Print On Demand comicbook can’t be far ahead.

    For that matter, nor can event fatigue fail to cause a bust at some point in the future. Personally I hope it happens soon rather than later. We have reached the point where we can’t even hold much hope for a comic book to actually be about the adventures of its nominal protagonist. Far too often now comics are tools to express events and perhaps nothing more. Continuity is now directed towards event storylines, not characters.

    I suppose that makes sense from a sales perspective, but it strikes me as killing the golden eggs chicken.

  13. Nu-D. says:

    Marvel is going to keep churning our new ‘ongoing’ series and cancel them in a year, why should we take them seriously when they say they have stories to tell?

    Because most writers only have about 6-12 issues of “stories” to tell about a particular character/characters.

    Think of it as a trend towards collections of short stories instead of novels. Few writers have it in them to weave lots of plots and subplots into an ongoing epic covering dozens or scores of issues. Not every superhero comic has to be Foundation; most are going to be I, Robot.

  14. Omar Karindu says:

    o be fair, it is not like the superhero comics industry has a long tradition of relying on storylines that need more than a year.

    Because most writers only have about 6-12 issues of “stories” to tell about a particular character/characters.

    This strikes me as a rather recent development, though, since there are loads of counterexamples where someone uses a long run on a title to excellent effect.

    Think of Miller’s Daredevil, Moore’s Swamp Thing, Morrison’s Animal Man, Claremont and Byrne’s Phoenix saga.

    Think of James Robinson’s Starman, Mark Waid’s and Geoff Johns’s Flash, Garth Ennis’s Hitman and Preacher (and I’d argue, Punisher MAX), Matt Fraction’s aforementioned Hawkeye and his Animal Man run, Kieron Gillen’s Thor and Loki work, Warren Ellis’s Stormwatch/Authority and Transmetropolitan and P{lanetary,

    Think of Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and Invincible, Rucka and Brubaker’s Gotham Central, Rucka’s horribly underrated Wonder Woman run, and so on. Or, if you think it’s good, Snyder’s Batman.

    Frankly, it’s hard to think of a well-regarded writer who doesn’t have a major, longform serial as one of their crowning achievements. In a few cases — Robinson springs to mind — nothing else they’ve ever done comes close.

    Some people make better novelists than short story writers. But direct market publication formats tend to pick one type of storytelling or the other. I suppose this is why a lot of longform storytelling has migrated to webcomics and the like.

  15. Omar Karindu says:

    Sorry, that should be Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye and his *Iron Man* run. My opinion of the latter is that it got a bit draggy in its second half, but it’s hard to deny that the thing wasn’t constructed as longform storytelling.

  16. Taibak says:

    Marvel may only commission short series because they know the financials, but I can’t imagine many writers would bother plotting a three year storyline if they know they’ll be cancelled in six months.

    Come to think of it, seems like this became a bigger problem about 15 years ago when Marvel began to believe that deadlines only happened to other people. Given how difficult it was for some creators to even get six series out, I wonder how much damaged the market for longer-term stories.

  17. Nu-D says:

    @Omar,

    That’s true. But Marvel is finding that the short-story model is more successful in this day and age. Why? I don’t know. But in terms of whether worthy stories can be told, I’d say unequivocally “yes.” There’s nothing wrong with a writer saying “I have a Batman story to tell, and it’s gonna take six issues, and I have nothing more after that.”

  18. Joseph says:

    “Brian says: ….instead of continuing to cycle XML as a rotating-lead title/brand as had been done was Xavier/Rogue/Proteus.”

    FYI Legion and Proteus are not the same character, and in fact the Legion incarnation of that title was probably the best it ever was (and I’m saying that as a big Mike Carey fan).

    I don’t mind the season model, but drop the pretense of the ongoing. Make maxi-series of 10, 12, 15, whatever issues, and if it is successful and the team have a story to tell, renew it another season, with new #1.

  19. Brian says:

    Sorry, I shared the same Legion/Proteus brain fart that I always chastised the Animated Series for doing! Its been a loooooooooong Lent of giving up coffee! 🙁

  20. Luis Dantas says:

    The trouble with pre-established plans is that they are self-limiting.

    Editorial seems to decide in advance (years ahead, I think) what they will promote. There is just no room for a 1979 Claremont X-Men or 1980 Frank Miller Daredevil anymore.

    Which is to say, the niche is not allowed to grow.

  21. Chris says:

    Wait. How many distinct Iron Man stories did Matt Fraction actually write and see published in his multiple years on the title?

    I promise you it was less than ten.

    I know I groused to the bookstore guy about how for as long as Fraction was writing this title only six stories at the time had come out.

    The Five Nightmares, two Spider-Man team-up stories including the future issue, the grotesque Mandarin origin issue, World’s Most Wanted, Comatose Reboot Seige crossover tie-in where classic Iron Man villain Ghost takes out Doctor Strange and everyone…. that’s only six. One of those stories took two trade paperbacks.

    Detroit Steel and Prisoner in Mandarin City were two more stories. That’s eight. Am I missing one?

    I have a similar issue with Greg Pak’s Hulks run except that he snuck in some more done-in-one-issue stories, as well as two and three parters to make the four parters and six parters actually epic in scale… and a lot of his larger arcs consisted of some done-in-ones in sequence.

    And that all crossed over with Loeb’s Red Hulk.

    How many stories have been told so far in this X-Men volume 4?

    Or the Bendis series?

    Amazing X-Men?

    Marvel Now X-Force?

    I’m seriously asking.

  22. Chris says:

    Here’s a question I ask myself and I wish I could ask someone at Marvel….

    Why not have an Avengers title with Avengers things…. and then have an Avengers title with Hickman’s ongoing story alongside that?

    The same with X-Men. Why present Bendis’s X-Men as the mainline X-Men when nothing interesting happens? And it’s one (sorta) story?

    At least Hickman’s Fantastic Four had the characters do regular Fantastic Four things… moreso than even Mark Millar’s FF.

  23. Paul says:

    “Frankly, it’s hard to think of a well-regarded writer who doesn’t have a major, longform serial as one of their crowning achievements.”

    Yes, but isn’t that just a reflection of the fact that if you were working in mainstream American comics you were likely to have written one?

  24. Luis Dantas says:

    @Chris: my best guess is that it is because current editorial policy (for about ten years now) is that the books should conform to the events instead of the other way around, and when it is perceived that traditional books aren’t selling well enough there is no reason not to decharacterize them and make them effective miniseries in all but name.

  25. Chris says:

    Let’s call them “writer’s vision” rather than “events” because I’m not at all clear that after 70 issues much has happened in the Hickman Avengers series and I would almost never use the word “event” to describe what happens in a Bendis X-Men story.

    And on a separate rant, the DnA Guardians of the Galaxy sold well, had numbers, and creatively had frikkin direction.

    The Bendis Guardians may or may not sell just as well but I’ll be damned if it actually goes anywhere for more than three issues before….

    As much as I love the Guardians movie, and I do, seeing so many elements of that overwrite, retcon, and outright replace the old comic book continuity sorta depresses me. But it sells, I guess….

  26. Tim P. says:

    If the (presumably temporary) destruction of the entire multiverse no longer counts as things happening, I’m afraid the bar may have been raised too high.

  27. ASV says:

    Hickman is one of the few writers who can hit that particular sweet spot.

  28. Omar Karindu says:

    Yes, but isn’t that just a reflection of the fact that if you were working in mainstream American comics you were likely to have written one?

    It’s probably unfair of me to lump in the creator-driven stuff like Transmetropolitan or Hitman or the various Vertigo series with, say, Walt Simonson on Thor and whatnot.

    But I’d also point to Marvel’s go-to writer, Bendis, as someone who could certainly choose to write 6-and-done or 12-and-done stories rather than his meandering serials and still have full editorial and publisher support. And writers like Ennis and Ellis and Moore seem to choose longform storytelling wen they think it suits the material. Heck, what about the bulk of Jason Aaron’s Marvel work, or Rick Remender’s?

    The distinction may be creative control vs. editorial control. For all the talk we got in years past about the new creative freedom at Marvel, there’s an argument that Simonson — who has claimed that Mark Gruenwald told him he could do whatever he wanted on Thor — or the Britwave writers of the later 1980s took on longer storytelling because they had a remarkable level of control over the direction of the characters and the book.

    It’s hard to imagine someone being allowed to do to a character today what Moore did to Swamp Thing or even Miller did to Daredevil. And in creator-owned or creator-controlled imprints and publishers, you still see writers like the aforementioned Fraction producing longer stories that appear to have particular endpoints in mind. I think we get raid creator turnover and “shorts” with 50- and 75-year old IPs, entities who are less like characters and more like brands.

    I don’t prefer one to the other; there are bad examples of both “6/12 and done” and “40/60 issues and an ending” stories. But it seems rather stupid to require one or the other, and rather irrelevant to the numbering gimmicks which type of storytelling is used.

    Wait. How many distinct Iron Man stories did Matt Fraction actually write and see published in his multiple years on the title?

    Are we talking about “number of stories told on one character in one title” or are we talking about “Number of pages used/needed to tell the story?” They’re different questions entirely.

  29. “Why not have an Avengers title with Avengers things…. and then have an Avengers title with Hickman’s ongoing story alongside that?

    The same with X-Men.”

    Eh, isn’t Avengers Assemble just that? And Amazing X-Men? Neither sell as much as the mains.

  30. Chris says:

    They don’t sell as well as the “mains” because the consumer base is told that they don’t count as much as the “mains”.

  31. Nu-D. says:

    [i]I do find it somewhat amusing that there have just been two x-men doing solo series where they are dating space pirates.[/i]

    Three X-Men are dating space pirates: Kitty, Cyclops and Nightcrawler.

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