The X-books have, for a while now, given the impression\u00a0of being made\u00a0– or at least commissioned – by people wrestling with the commercial challenge of how to have as many X-Men titles as humanly possible, while still trying to make them all at least somewhat creatively distinct. \u00a0Part of the\u00a0answer to that problem has come in a wave of solo titles for characters who would not previously have been thought\u00a0natural candidates –\u00a0Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler.<\/p>\n
Some characters lend themselves fairly easily to solo titles. \u00a0Most of the Avengers were designed\u00a0to function as solo heroes in the first place, and only added to teams after the fact. \u00a0But\u00a0most of the X-Men weren’t, which means that the answer to the question “what does so-and-so do when he isn’t having adventures with the X-Men” doesn’t always\u00a0give the answer that writers of a solo title might be hoping for. \u00a0Wolverine and Gambit? \u00a0Sure,\u00a0they’re easy to imagine\u00a0spending their down time on heists and bar fights. \u00a0But for much of\u00a0X-Men history, Cyclops has given the impression of a character who spends his free evenings balancing his chequebook. \u00a0This is fine in the context of a team book, where he’s the rock of stability, but not so great if you’re trying to put him in a solo title. \u00a0(And we’ll come to how\u00a0his book solves the problem in due course.)<\/p>\n
Nightcrawler sits somewhere in between these poles. \u00a0It’s not too hard to imagine him\u00a0stumbling into swashbuckling adventures of his own, but it is kind of hard to imagine him choosing to fight evil as a solo act when he could just call the X-Men for reinforcements. \u00a0He’s a team\u00a0player by nature; even back in the 70s and 80s, there\u00a0weren’t actually that many stories where\u00a0he was the focus. \u00a0The flip side is that, for a character who’s been in the X-books since 1975, Nightcrawler actually\u00a0has a remarkably uncluttered back story (Azazel may be a dreadful idea, but at least he’s not a\u00a0complicated one). \u00a0And\u00a0a\u00a0Nightcrawler<\/em> solo has been tried before, with a wonky attempt to take a supernatural angle. \u00a0But it didn’t really work.<\/p>\n This series in fact started life as the next incarnation of\u00a0X-Men Legacy<\/em>, with Nightcrawler taking his turn as the focal character. \u00a0That makes a certain degree of sense;\u00a0it’s possible to imagine a series similar to Christos Gage’s Rogue-centred run,\u00a0which wasn’t so much a solo title as a\u00a0series specifically about how Rogue fitted into the X-Men.<\/p>\n In fact, under\u00a0Chris Claremont and Todd Nauck,\u00a0a central theme\u00a0turns out to be Nightcrawler\u00a0trying to fit back into a school, and a version of the X-Men, that has changed dramatically from what he remembered. \u00a0The parallels here are abundantly obvious, of course. \u00a0Claremont himself is a writer associated overwhelmingly with a past era of the X-Men, one\u00a0that\u00a0raised the book into Marvel’s top\u00a0franchise, but which is also now a quarter century in the past. \u00a0That fact inevitably\u00a0casts a shadow over proceedings whenever he returns to\u00a0do work on the X-books;\u00a0he used to be the one\u00a0who defined\u00a0the X-books, but now he’s \u00a0the veteran working in the margins of somebody else’s vision.<\/p>\n To his credit,\u00a0Claremont generally seems to try hard to play fair with other writers’ approaches\u00a0to\u00a0the X-books. As much as anything, he seems to be interested these days in what remains quietly unchanged through these various iterations of his concepts; not in denying the validity\u00a0of today’s approach, but in finding\u00a0lines of connection back to his own work and\u00a0bringing out a latent sense of continuity with the past\u00a0that legitimises both eras. \u00a0And obviously, that’s easy to do with scenes of Kurt trying to find his place\u00a0in\u00a0an almost unrecognisable school.<\/p>\n So\u00a0we get things like the opening of issue #5, in which Nightcrawler attempts to play a game of baseball on his own (well,\u00a0with the help of the Bamfs), but swiftly gives up. \u00a0This is\u00a0a striking scene – Claremont\u00a0is\u00a0intentionally writing a\u00a0failed<\/em> attempt to recapture his own past glories. \u00a0If nothing else, he\u00a0plainly recognises the\u00a0writing challenge that the X-books now present him.<\/p>\n But this aside, what else does the book have to offer? \u00a0Well, it’s got nicely chirpy art from Todd Nauck, and it goes without saying that Claremont gets Nightcrawler’s voice (which he created, after all) in a way that few writers have managed since he left. \u00a0And it has a certain retro charm, if you yearn for the days when\u00a0action scenes were actually constructed in such a way as to introduce\u00a0characters and give them something\u00a0to do. \u00a0It’s\u00a0lighter on Claremont’s writing tics than\u00a0some of his work has been, and it’s a\u00a0little old fashioned in its construction, it’s nonetheless solid. \u00a0Besides,\u00a0if you’re buying a Chris Claremont\u00a0Nightcrawler<\/em> series, “a little old fashioned” is probably what you were hoping for.<\/p>\n With Nightcrawler’s personal rogue’s gallery being on the slim side,\u00a0and an entire wing of that gallery being devoted to the unfortunate Azazel, it’s understandable that Claremont starts by focussing on his family, bringing back Amanda Sefton and Margali Szardos for the first arc. \u00a0Leave aside the eternal oddity that Claremont somehow gets away with\u00a0Amanda doubling as Nightcrawler’s sister and his girlfriend; once again, the weirdness of that is simply not acknowledged in any way,\u00a0as the story cheerfully treats the whole thing as perfectly normal instead. \u00a0Essentially the plot\u00a0of these early issues sees Kurt being drawn back into\u00a0his family by\u00a0Margali, who turns out to be\u00a0looking for a way to exploit his return from the afterlife to open her own portal there.<\/p>\n This plays into the storyline that Claremont inherits from\u00a0Amazing X-Men<\/em>, though it’s not altogether clear that he and Jason Aaron are wholly on the same page here. \u00a0Amazing<\/em> strongly implies\u00a0that Kurt sold his soul to the Bamfs in order to get back to Earth. \u00a0The actual dialogue in issue #5 is actually a little\u00a0ambiguous; Kurt says that he struck a deal with the Bamfs and that it cost him his\u00a0soul, but he\u00a0could<\/em> be speaking figuratively. \u00a0(The recap page in issue #6 says explicitly that he sold his soul, but it also says explicitly that he can never go back to the afterlife, something that’s expressly left unclear in the previous issue – so how far it should be trusted is debatable.)<\/p>\n If this is indeed the concept, nobody seems to have told Claremont. \u00a0Instead, he goes with another idea – one that is also explicitly set up in\u00a0Amazing<\/em>, to be fair – namely that having left Heaven by choice, Kurt can’t go back. \u00a0Which obviously begs the question of what’s going to happen when he dies again. There’s an ambiguity here about whether he’s barred forever or simply needs to re-earn his way in. \u00a0Either way, it’s something to work with.<\/p>\n And in fact, I prefer it to the “sold his soul” idea. \u00a0The problem with claiming that a character has sold his soul is that it’s far from clear what it actually means<\/em>. \u00a0Not least because Kurt’s soul is plainly animating his new body right now; perhaps the idea was simply that the Bamfs get him when he dies next, but even then it’s hard to see what a bunch of child-like goblins on Red Bull would actually find to do with him, or what interest they’d even have in soul-buying. \u00a0But a story where\u00a0the most religious of the X-Men has cut himself off from his\u00a0god\u2026 that’s got some potential, actually. \u00a0You\u00a0don’t\u00a0have to be religious to see that there’s a story in there about the psychology of faith.<\/p>\n So there are a couple of promising themes emerging here. \u00a0That’s the long game, however, and\u00a0one wonder whether the market for X-Men solo titles is likely to be all that friendly to long games. \u00a0In the short term, the reality of these first six issues is two\u00a0fairly routine stories\u00a0with a bunch of\u00a0underdeveloped characters. \u00a0Considerable space is devoted to introducing\u00a0other super powered characters from Kurt’s old circus,\u00a0but none\u00a0really make it to two dimensions. \u00a0The two-parter in issues #5-6 not only brings back the Crimson Pirates, some pirate-themed villains from Claremont’s abortive late 90s comeback that don’t have\u00a0enough charisma to get away with being so silly, it also involves a lot of chasing after a women whose personality is barely a cipher.<\/p>\n Rather better work is done on introducing Rico, a mutant with the deeply unfortunate power to be basically\u00a0just a giant scorpion-insect thing. \u00a0This is a character whose chances of living a normal life are precisely zero, so naturally enough Claremont wants Kurt to be the inspirational mentor figure for him. \u00a0\u00a0Rico’s\u00a0a nice enough sidekick, but it has to be said that Nauck sometimes seems to struggle to make him as expressive as the story really needs. \u00a0It’s not easy when you don’t have conventional body language to work\u00a0with, but\u00a0it feels like there should be room to do more.<\/p>\n The upshot is a competent book that raises some interesting long-term themes but is doing fairly routine stories in the\u00a0here and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The X-books have, for a while now, given the impression\u00a0of being made\u00a0– or at least commissioned – by people wrestling with the commercial challenge of how to have as many X-Men titles as humanly possible, while still trying to make them all at least somewhat creatively distinct. \u00a0Part of the\u00a0answer to that problem has come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2649"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2759,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions\/2759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}