Episode 002: Kurt Wagner (feat. Daniel Kibblesmith)

This episode first aired on September 8th, 2020.

In Episode 2 of CEREBRO, Connor and Marvel writer Daniel Kibblesmith (Loki, Lockjaw) celebrate the fuzzy blue elf: Kurt Wagner, best known as Nightcrawler! Since his 1975 debut, the debonair swashbuckler has been one of the most recognizable and beloved X-Men.

(Content advisory: Kurt's main love interest is his adoptive/foster sister, if that skeeves! This episode also discusses antiziganism and the Holocaust.)

[ COLD OPEN ]

DANIEL: When your Lois Lane is your foster sister, it’s not like you… you don’t have a choice. You can’t escape it.

[ THEME SONG INTRO ] 

CONNOR: Welcome to CEREBRO, the X-Men podcast where a homo and his friends dig deep into the history of homo superior. I'm your host, Connor Goldsmith, and with me today for Episode 2 is Daniel Kibblesmith, a five-time Emmy-nominated former staff writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a founding editor at the comedy site ClickHole. He has also written for Marvel and DC Comics, most recently at Marvel as the writer of the ongoing series Loki, and he is here with me today to talk about Kurt Wagner [“Vog-ner”], the X-Man known as Nightcrawler. Thanks for dropping in, Daniel!

DANIEL: Thanks for having me. And I'm glad that we committed so early to “Vog-ner”.

CONNOR: Oh, I mean, yeah... How else would you say... I mean, Wag-ner, I guess?

DANIEL: Well, you know, for 25 years, yeah, I said Wag-ner. [laughs]

CONNOR: Yeah, because when I was a child, I certainly did. But he's German, I mean, we gotta…

No, actually, I'm taking pronunciation very seriously here because I know that there are a million comic nerds who would get mad at me if I did something wrong. So I actually… this episode was a real white-knuckle kind of moment, because I spent at least four or five hours last night looking at like, six different dialects of the Romani language, trying to decide how to pronounce Margali Szardos [“Sar-dosh”]? Which is what I've decided to go with, because I think — she's French, but I think the name Szardos is supposed to be Hungarian? Except that it seems that Claremont just made it up. So I’m not entirely clear, but that’s what I’m going with. You are welcome to pronounce it however you want, because certainly I think I said “Zar-dose” my whole life until now.

DANIEL: Definitely up until this point. You'll probably hear me use both.

CONNOR: So if Chris Claremont listens to the pod at any point, and would like to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you, because I don't actually know if we're pronouncing these characters’ names correctly. So please, let me know.

 DANIEL: It's possible he also doesn't know. I mean, there's things that have only been in print. He's never needed to talk about any of these characters at cons in any kind of, like, consistent way.

CONNOR: No, of course. And also, he invented them like, 35 years ago. So it's entirely possible he's forgotten how he ever meant to pronounce these names. But Googling Szardos [“Sar-dosh”], which is how you would pronounce it if it's Hungarian, results only in X-Men results about Margali Szardos.

 DANIEL: No, that seems tight.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: That seems fairly clean.

CONNOR: Well, it's, you know, just one of those things with the X-Men. As I said on last week's episode, the only one I'm going to continue to mispronounce, because I just am — it's Selene [“Seh-leen”], because I know it should be “Seh-lee-nee”, but I just can't make that work in my head for whatever reason. So we're just gonna have to roll with that one, and I apologize to my fellow classics majors, because they might cringe a little each time I do it.

So, we are here to talk about Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler is a character that I have always enjoyed, but that I have never had like, a deep and abiding passion for. But I know that he provokes an enormous amount of passion in so many fans, and I know he's your favorite. So I'd love to — as sort of our our intro here — hear a little bit about why you love this character and what draws you to him, before we segue into the character overview for the newbies and real heads alike.

DANIEL: Sure. Well, when you told me that you were doing this podcast, and that it was people taking individual characters, I just fully assumed that Nightcrawler was taken already.

CONNOR: [laughs]

DANIEL: Because he is so, so beloved.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL And he's not just my favorite X-Man, he is my favorite comic book character. Like, he is the avenue through which I started reading comic books. And I got into comic books through video games.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: Specifically the licensed X-Men arcade game; the six-player wrap-around.

 CONNOR: Have you heard the theme song to this podcast?

DANIEL: I have!

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: I have. It made me extremely happy.

CONNOR: So you can tell that I’m also a big fan of the Konami arcade game.

DANIEL: Yeah. I think that a lot of people — and this is something that, you know, you've talked about in other episodes — like, a lot of X-Men fans came to it through these kind of wild licensing directions.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: Because it was such an explosion at the time. So I was never a big comic book reader in my early childhood. I never had Archie or anything like that, but I loved video games. And my dad was a big comic book reader, and he had the X-Men Classic reprints of like, The Dark Phoenix Saga.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: So he had some Claremont/Byrne back issues, and the reprints thereof. So we went to the video arcade, and I knew about Spider-Man and Batman and Wonder Woman from cartoon shows, and Burger King cups, and things like that. I knew that superheroes were a thing, and I knew that they were from comic books, but I didn't really care to know more until I saw Nightcrawler in the video game. And it just immediately broke the mold of what superheroes were, and what they were allowed to be, and what they were allowed to look like, and what your relationship with them could be. And I think that that is sort of a microcosm of my experience with the X-Men — and a lot of people's experience with the X-Men. Is that these are not square-jawed heroes shaking hands with the police commissioner at the end of the Ruby-Spears cartoon. Like, these are a bunch of horny weirdos with complicated backstories.

CONNOR: Absolutely. And I mean, Nightcrawler is sort of the standard-bearer there, because when he comes in, in Giant-Size in 1975, it sort of throws down the gauntlet as to what the mutants can be. Because if you look at the 60s X-Men, the original team with, you know, Scott and Jean and Bobby and Hank and Warren, and even once Alex and Lorna come into the picture, they're all attractive, conventional-looking people. You know, even Warren, who has to hide his big wings growing out of his back, is successful at hiding the big wings growing out of his back.

Nightcrawler shows up and it's like, oh, this is someone who can't hide. This is someone who has gone through his life ostracized because he looks like a demon, which is something that the characters in the previous iteration of the X-Men had never dealt with. And I think that it sets a tone. And there's a lot of reasons why the Second Genesis team from Giant-Size is what made X-Men popular, when the 60s X-Men book was not enormously popular. And I think that part of it is that they are these outlandish, larger-than-life, beautiful designs. And, you know, Nightcrawler is such an iconic design. The Dave Cockrum costume, and the whole look, is so striking that they have never managed to put him in another costume and make it stick. Like for the first episode, which was about Betsy Braddock, I went through endless costume galleries deciding like, what to do for the cover art.

DANIEL: Sure, yeah. [laughs]

CONNOR: And with this one, I just found a relatively recent image of Nightcrawler in that one look that's the one Nightcrawler look. Because apart from a couple little — sometimes he gets a little more swashbuckler-y, like, he’ll put on a headband, or like, he'll have a bandolier or something. But honestly, it's just this look, because this look? It works. You see it and you go, “Who the hell's that guy? I want to know everything.” I mean, he has that appeal.

DANIEL: Yeah. It's interesting, because the costume doesn't really have to do any lifting, because he is physically different. But that being said, the costume is great.

CONNOR: Yeah, it does a lot of work.

DANIEL: And it’s stuck around. Yeah, it's that, you know, big pointy shoulders acrobat suit.

CONNOR: It accentuates his pointy ears, and the pointy tail, and like, it all goes together, you know?

DANIEL: Yeah. It's stark red where he's blue.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm. It’s really good.

DANIEL: He’s got that [laughs] that Spider-Man thing where like, ostensibly he's creepy and he lives in the shadows, but he’s also like, bright primary colors.

CONNOR: And so cute, yeah. I really do think that Nightcrawler and Storm, of those Cockrum designs, are the two where it was just like, you know, he caught lightning in a bottle — literally, in Storm’s case — but just the sense that they’re such striking, immediately visible designs that you can put those two characters on anything and people immediately know who they are, even if they're not comic book people.

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: At the very least, they’ll go, “That's the X-Men.”

DANIEL: Yeah. I don't know that he would get the same pop, but for me, Colossus is also on that list.

CONNOR: I love Colossus. Yes.

DANIEL: With the metal that's exemplified as like, strips, you know?

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: That to me is as iconic as, you know, Johnny Storm being on fire, represented by those skinny vertical lines.

CONNOR: Yeah. Those little cross-hatch lines, yeah.

DANIEL: Exactly.

CONNOR: I think that they're all really great and that's why the team works. But I just mean, in terms of just the visual design itself of the costume, those two [Nightcrawler and Storm] are really just hard to beat.

So, that's a great intro because I do think that for a lot of people, his sort of sense of play and like, the fun factor of him, and the mystery of him and the fact that he’s this sort of, you know, he's creepy and cool, but he's not like an edgelord character. Like he's he's fun, you know?

DANIEL: [laughs] No, yeah. Not at all. He's extremely endearing.

CONNOR: He's Errol Flynn, but a blue elf. He's just a lot of fun. And I think that for a lot of people, that is the entry point. And I think that when they did, you know, for a new generation — I mean, I think for our generation, it was a lot, like, those video games, and things like that, and the cartoon in the early 90s — but then there's a whole other generation of fans who came in via Evolution, I think, which I was a little too... it was a little after my time, you know? But in that, he was sort of the endearing nerd lead character in the teen story. It was sort of him and Kitty.

DANIEL: Yeah. He was the likable, low-status person.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm. And I think that for a lot of people who've come to the comics since then, that was their entry point. So it makes sense that he's so beloved. And also, now that I've seen Nick Robles draw him, I think he's hot, which was like, not really an issue I had with Nightcrawler before. So that's disconcerting. But I’m dealing with it?

DANIEL: [laughs] But I don't think that’s like, afield. I think that Nightcrawler being hot has always strongly been overt.

CONNOR: He’s supposed to be hot. No, he's supposed to be hot. He’s absolutely supposed to be hot, but I've always said, like, “I don't really get the whole Nightcrawler thing, like the obsession with Nightcrawler, Nightcrawler’s so hot.” Now I get it, and it’s unfortunate, but now I too am trapped Nightcrawler sex vortex.

DANIEL: That’s right. [laughs]

CONNOR: So that's a great moment to I think, segue into the CEREBRO character dossier, or character file. I don't know what I'm calling the segment yet. I need to figure it out.

DANIEL: There's probably a real Cerebro, there’s probably something canonical—

CONNOR: I imagine there is.

DANIEL: Like, pull up the file on so-and-so.

CONNOR: Yeah, and I just like the word dossier, but I don't know if Xavier would get French with it, so I just don't know. I'll have to look that up, actually. There’s probably something in the really early [issues], in like the 60s, that I could use. Back when Cerebro just kind of went beep beep beep when like, a mutant was in the area, and it was like, “This is not helpful, Cerebro. Like, you're just telling me that these people are nearby. That’s not—”

 DANIEL: Yeah, Cerebro was a smoke alarm—

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: And the Danger Room was just big saw blades.

CONNOR: Was literally just like, a gym with with saw blades and pendulums in it, yeah.

So in any case, whatever I do end up calling it, these segments are intended to help new people sort of understand the always intricate and wildly maze-like backstories of these characters. Nightcrawler is actually not as outrageous as some of the others, although his origin story has been retconned a bunch. But I've kind of streamlined it in the sense that, like, we don't need to go over every single iteration of his escape from Der Jahrmarkt circus. Like, we get it, you know, he got away from the circus. I wish that writers would look at the previous version of the story before they tell it again and contradict the previous story, but, you know, that's life. And I'm hoping that even if someone is a more experienced fan, that they enjoy these segments, because often there's something I had forgotten about… or, you know, had never quite noticed, when I'm putting them together, that I go, “Oh, I forgot about this story,” or, “Oh, I had missed that miniseries,” or whatever, so I think there's always sort of more more X-Men goodness to discover, lurking in the darkness… much like Nightcrawler.

DANIEL: [laughs] Much like Nightcrawler.

CONNOR: [laughs] So with that, we’ll be back in a moment, after that segment.

[ CEREBRO CHARACTER FILE ]

Kurt Wagner, better known as the teleporting superhero Nightcrawler, was introduced in May 1975's legendary Giant-Size X-Men #1 by writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum, the first new X-Men story since the original book's cancellation in 1970. In the story Second Genesis, Professor Xavier travels the world to recruit a new team of X-Men, as the 60s X-Men are being held captive by the living island Krakoa. In addition to bringing in existing characters Wolverine, Banshee, and Sunfire, this story marks the debuts of Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus, who would become three of the most popular and prominent X-Men. Thunderbird, the fourth new character, was always intended to be temporary, and dies two issues later in the new run.

Cockrum had previously created the design for Nightcrawler years earlier, first as an idea for a superhero's demon sidekick and then as a proposed character for The Outsiders, a rejected DC Comics book that was to be set in the world of The Legion of Super-Heroes, on which Cockrum was then the artist. While a few different aspects of the pitch for The Outsiders were incorporated into the character of Storm, Nightcrawler's design was transported wholesale. The major change, because editor Roy Thomas wanted the new team of X-Men to be international and multicultural, was to make Nightcrawler hail from Germany.

Nightcrawler first appears in the village of Winzeldorf, pursued by an angry mob intent on killing him — a motif that would recur many times over the years. As a visible mutant with blue skin, a light coat of fur, and a demonic appearance complete with tail, he is a stark departure from the X-Men of the 60s, who have all been able to operate in human society undetected. He is rescued by Xavier, who stops the mob in its tracks with his telepathic powers, and Kurt happily joins a team of heroes who are mutants like himself.

After this initial story by Len Wein, along with two further issues for which he did initial plotting, the X-Men were entrusted to writer Chris Claremont, who would go on to write the title for 16 years. Claremont would become the writer most associated with Nightcrawler, as he would with many of the X-Men introduced in the 70s and 80s, and he went on to establish an in-depth backstory for the character. 

In his early years with the X-Men, Kurt uses an illusion-casting device called an 'image inducer', gifted to him by Xavier, to appear as a normal human when out in public. In 1976's X-Men #98, while using the inducer he meets his most prominent love interest: the human flight attendant Amanda Sefton. Though he meets her under this false pretense, Amanda is undisturbed by his true appearance, and they soon begin dating, which leads to her being kidnapped alongside him by the supervillain Arcade in issue #123 in 1979. Despite this frightening experience, Amanda continues her relationship with Kurt. 

Claremont unveils Kurt's backstory in two issues over the course of 1979 and 1980. In Marvel Team-Up #89, Kurt and Amanda again cross paths with Arcade, who has been hired to kill Spider-Man by a circus owner named Amos Jardine. Kurt relates to Amanda that he was once a circus acrobat in Germany, and lived happily there until the American millionaire Jardine purchased the circus and forced him to become part of the freak show. Kurt escaped, and two days later was discovered by Xavier in Winzeldorf. 

The rest of the story is told in X-Men Annual #4, where on Kurt's birthday he is dragged into an illusory hellscape patterned after Dante's Inferno by the immensely powerful Romani sorceress Margali Szardos, who wants revenge for his alleged murder of her son Stefan. The X-Men and Dr. Strange are brought into this Hell to save Kurt by Margali's daughter Jimaine, who professes her love for Kurt and protects him from her mother. 

Dr. Strange uses magic to reveal the truth of what transpired between Kurt and Stefan, in the process revealing Kurt's backstory: he was discovered as a newborn infant by Margali, lying beside his dying mother. The so-called Witch-Queen took the baby home with her and raised him as her own alongside her children Stefan and Jimaine, at Der Jahrmarkt, a traveling circus where she worked as a fortune-teller. Kurt idolized Stefan, who became his blood brother, and at Stefan's insistence Kurt promised that if Stefan were ever corrupted by evil, Kurt would kill him. 

Years later, immediately before the events in Giant-Size [X-Men] #1, Kurt met Stefan outside Winzeldorf and discovered he had murdered several local children. The two brothers fought, and Kurt accidentally killed Stefan while defending himself. Despairing, Kurt tried to go home to tell their mother what had transpired, but the local villagers found him, and — shocked by his demonic appearance — assumed he had killed the children. A mob decided to bring him to justice, whereupon he was rescued by Professor Xavier.

Margali, ashamed to have assumed the worst, embraces Kurt as her son once more and tells him she forgives him. After she departs, Kurt is delighted to be reunited with Jimaine, his foster sister and the love of his life. Jimaine, chagrined, reveals the she has actually been much closer to Kurt than he thought — in the guise of Amanda Sefton, an identity she assumed in order to get close to him and discern the truth of what had happened to Stefan. She's worried Kurt will be angry with her, and while he realizes he should be, he is too overjoyed at the news to care — this is the finest birthday present he has ever received. Jimaine continues to use the name Amanda Sefton, and occasionally assists the X-Men with mystical problems from this point forward.

Nightcrawler serves with the X-Men for the next several years, developing deep friendships with his teammates Wolverine and Colossus, and helping the team halt the attempted assassination of Senator Robert Kelly by the shapeshifting terrorist Mystique and her new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Nightcrawler is shocked to discover how much Mystique's true form resembles his own, and when he asks her if there is some connection between them, she tells him to question Margali Szardos. 

Claremont's intention was to eventually reveal that Nightcrawler was the biological child of Mystique and her female lover Destiny, Mystique having taken a male form to impregnate her partner. The new Marvel editor-in-chief at the time, Jim Shooter, was more controlling than previous editors had been, and one office-wide ruling he made was that the Marvel Universe could not contain any homosexual characters. This obviously put the kibosh on the plan for Nightcrawler's parentage, though Claremont continued to hint at it over the years, and used an obscure archaic term for a paramour — leman — to sneakily convey that Mystique and Destiny were lovers.

After Cyclops retires and Storm loses her powers, apparently forever, Nightcrawler takes over leadership of the X-Men. In 1985, a solo Nightcrawler miniseries by his creator Dave Cockrum follows Kurt on a swashbuckling adventure through magical dimensions with Kitty Pryde's pet dragon Lockheed. On this journey he discovers the Bamfs, a race of small imps who resemble him. When Kurt finds his way back to Earth, he resumes his service as team leader until Cyclops and Storm both return to the team, whereupon he happily steps aside to let them hash it out. 

An encounter with the cosmic being The Beyonder shakes Kurt's deep and abiding faith in the Christian God, which was previously strong enough to enable him to harm Dracula with a cross. (Yes, the X-Men fought Dracula. It was cool.) Questioning everything about himself, Kurt has a nasty argument with Amanda that compels her to leave him. While the team is battling The Beyonder without him, Kurt rescues a woman from his old enemy Arcade, and discovers she is the secret princess of a faraway land — this reignites his belief in adventure, and he rejoins the team. Amanda, regretting their fight, tries to contact Kurt, but fails to reach him with the X-Men, and the two remain estranged for some time.

When he's grievously injured in battle with the time-traveling super-Sentinel robot called Nimrod, Kurt finds that his teleportation power has become unstable and is now very taxing on his body. During the Mutant Massacre in 1986, he fights alongside the other X-Men against the mass murderers called the Marauders, but is forced to overuse his now unstable teleportation, leaving him comatose. When he wakes, he is informed by Kitty — who was also hospitalized after battling with the Marauders — that the other X-Men have been killed in Dallas in the 1988 event Fall of the Mutants. 

To keep the memory of their friends alive, Kurt, Kitty, and their their newer teammate Rachel Summers join forces with Psylocke's brother Brian — Captain Britain — and his girlfriend Meggan to form the new British superhero team Excalibur. Kurt feels romantically drawn to Meggan, especially when Brian — who has been drinking heavily since his sister's apparent death — begins treating her poorly and flirting with his ex-girlfriend Courtney Ross. Though Meggan is tempted by Kurt, she ultimately remains with Brian, who mends his ways, and Kurt has a brief romance with a new teammate, the Shi'ar alien Cerise.

In March 1994's X-Men Unlimited #4 by Scott Lobdell, Nightcrawler has an adventure with his former teammate Rogue where they cross paths with Rogue's foster mother, Mystique. It's revealed that Mystique is Kurt's biological mother — she had conceived him with her husband, the German Count Wagner, and her cover as a mutant was blown when the baby was blue and demonic in appearance. To escape the angry townsfolk, Mystique disguised herself among them and — to the cheers of the crowd — cast her own baby into a waterfall to his death. But Kurt survived, miraculously, and was found by Margali Szardos.  

After numerous adventures with Excalibur spanning multiple realities, eventually Kurt becomes the leader of the team, and reunites with Amanda Sefton, who takes the codename Daytripper as a counterpoint to Nightcrawler. She joins Excalibur and the two resume their romantic relationship, only to come into conflict with their mother Margali Szardos when she uses the Soulsword — a demonic relic Kurt had entrusted to Amanda — to massacre her magical rivals on the Winding Way and seize power as the Red Queen of the London Branch of the Hellfire Club. Kurt and Amanda stop Margali's plans, and Margali is captured by Belasco, the demonic ruler of the hell dimension Limbo. But then Amanda disappears without a word to Kurt, leaving him distraught. He later discovers that Margali has magically stolen Amanda's body, as this was her only desperate means of escape from Belasco. Amanda, trapped in Margali's body, is now Belasco's prisoner, and Margali and Kurt travel to Limbo to rescue her from his torture. Though Margali apologizes to her children, Kurt finds it difficult to forgive her, and in the aftermath of Belasco's defeat, Amanda takes the throne of Limbo, parting ways with Kurt to assume this new duty. 

When Brian and Meggan marry and Excalibur disbands, Kurt returns to the X-Men, where he is once again a valued member of the team. Chris Claremont also makes his return to the X-Men at this time, after nearly a decade's absence, in the 2000 event Revolution, which involves a time-skip called the 'six month gap'. During the gap, Kurt decides to become a priest, and departs the team to study at seminary. He still occasionally teams up with the X-Men, and has a few adventures with Amanda, who has taken up the Soulsword — and the codename Magik, after the sword's previous owner — after assuming Limbo's throne. After Kurt's ordination into the priesthood, he returns to the X-Men.

Then Chuck Austen starts writing Uncanny X-Men in 2002. Hoo, boy.

First, it's established in a retcon that Kurt never became a priest at all, and the whole thing was a long con by religious extremists to try to destroy the Catholic Church from within. Crestfallen, Kurt decides to leave his ambitions of priesthood behind.

Then comes The Draco.

Listen: this is the story many people point to as the worst X-Men story of all time, and it's hard to say they're wrong. This is a deservedly infamous story. 

The Draco continues to explore Kurt's relationship to religion, but in a goofy, goofy way: Kurt's biological father is revealed to be the ancient demonic mutant Azazel, whose war with angelic mutants helped inspire various tales in the Bible, and who has spent the millennia finding interesting-looking women to impregnate to produce more demonic mutants. Azazel seduced Mystique, whose husband Count Wagner was infertile, and impregnated her with Nightcrawler. When she threw the infant to his death to escape the mob chasing after her, Azazel rescued baby Kurt and entrusted him to Margali Szardos, with whom he was acquainted. Azazel spends most of his time trapped in a mystical dimension, and hopes to use Kurt to finally escape it, but he is ultimately foiled. This story basically makes Nightcrawler a literal demon after almost 30 years of stories where the whole point is that Nightcrawler isn't actually a demon. It sucks.

In the 2004 Nightcrawler miniseries by Roberto Aguirre-Sacassa, Margali reveals that Amanda had secretly hidden the Soulsword inside Nightcrawler's body in order to protect it, as he was so pure of heart that it could not corrupt him. Kurt once again meets Amos Jardine, the circus owner who had tormented him as a young man, and discovers Jardine is now possessed by a demon swarm called Hive — the same demon that had compelled Stefan Szardos, all those years ago, to murder the children of Winzeldorf. By defeating Hive, Kurt at last avenges Stefan's death and lets go of his own guilt.

Around this time, Kurt develops a close relationship with Talia Josephine Wagner, codenamed Nocturne, his daughter from an alternate reality who winds up stuck on Earth-616. He continues to serve with the X-Men and eventually proves key to the storyline X-Infernus, when he is recalled to Limbo, where Amanda has been deposed by Belasco. There Kurt witnesses the resurrection of Limbo's former ruler — the first Magik, Illyana Rasputin, who reclaims her Soulsword and her throne.

Nightcrawler mostly hangs around in the background after that until the 2010 franchise-wide event Second Coming, in which he is killed by the highly-advanced Sentinel Bastion. Three years later, in the new series Amazing X-Men, the X-Men journey to Heaven to bring him back. It's not a bad story, but it involves Azazel, so I'm going to skip it. Look it up if you want!

In another Nightcrawler miniseries in 2015, written by Chris Claremont, Margali Szardos attempts to unlock the secrets of the afterlife and enter Heaven to seize power. Kurt and Amanda stop her, but the portal she has ripped between worlds remains open. As Kurt cannot cross it without being destroyed, having already once willingly left Heaven of his own accord, Amanda is forced to enter and seal the portal behind her. Tearfully, she begs Kurt to be the hero she knows he can be and find a way back to her. They later reunite at the borderland of Heaven when Kurt is grievously wounded by the Shadow King, and Amanda encourages him to return to the mortal plane, telling him she has a task to perform outside Heaven before she can return to him.

In the time since, Nightcrawler has remained a loyal member of the X-Men, continuing into the new age of Dawn of X and life on the mutant nation of Krakoa. When the Quiet Council of Krakoa is established to forge the new state's laws, Nightcrawler is one of twelve representatives selected to sit on the Council. Ever the debonair ladies' man, Kurt posits that their task is simple: make more mutants.

[ CHARACTER FILE ENDS ]

CONNOR: That was longer than I thought it would be, because honestly, Nightcrawler is not usually the star of many stories, but he's just been around for so long. And the stories that he is primary in are ones that you kind of do need to talk about for a while — particularly, obviously The Draco, which we'll get to in a bit, I'm sure.

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: Because it's so bonkers that you kind of do have to explain it to people. Otherwise, they don't believe you that it's a thing that happened. What I was struck by, because as I said sort of at the beginning, Nightcrawler’s never been like, my personal favorite, but he's always been sort of intriguing to me? As I was putting that together, I realized that my inroad to him has always been through his family. Everybody loves Mystique, obviously, but they don't really have much of a relationship. The real thing that I've always enjoyed is the stuff with Margali and with Amanda Sefton.

It sort of occurred to me — and this is something I had never quite thought about before — but Claremont did something very interesting when he came on to that book, which is — I mean, he did a lot of interesting things. But one particularly interesting thing, coming onto the book as a 25-year-old Jewish guy, I think he did something that hadn't really been done before. Because superhero comics, people have written endlessly about how the early creators were Jewish. There's a lot of Jewish sort of philosophy and cultural stuff in the very concept of the superhero comic book. But almost no superheroes were actually Jewish.

DANIEL: Right. It was always kind of like, absorbed into the circumstances that produced the creators—

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: And it was this very subtextual but kind of ever-present thing.

CONNOR: And like, Batman has been established to be Jewish through his mother via retcon, or like, The Thing turned out to be Jewish — which was always the intention, but I don't think it was ever said on-panel until like, the 80s.

DANIEL: I believe so, yeah. I want to say that there's like a couple one-off bar mitzvah jokes, or maybe like, even a really sly circumcision joke or something?

CONNOR: I looked into this at one point and I honestly don't think it ever happens in the original Lee/Kirby stories. It was always intended — like, Jack Kirby would draw The Thing on his Hanukkah cards — but like… and his name is Benjamin Grimm. I mean, like, you know, it's a pretty…

DANIEL: [laughs] Right. There's plenty of apocrypha at the time. But no, I think I think you're right. It was not an overt thing until shockingly recently.

CONNOR: Right. And so what Claremont did, which really was obviously revolutionary, was the retcon of Magneto's backstory, because in the classic stories, Magneto is just a crazy fascist who wants to rule the world, right? And Claremont was like, “Actually, he's a Jewish Holocaust survivor who's traumatized by his experiences at Auschwitz. And like he believes in separatism because he thinks that, like, assimilation was in part what led to the destruction of his family.” And that became so indelibly associated with the character that people assume it was part of the character all along. But it's really 20 years into the character's publication that Claremont does that.

What I noticed when talking about Nightcrawler, it suddenly sort of occurred to me — the German characters that Claremont gets invested in, he invariably associates them closely with Jewish people or Romani people. And it feels to me like sort of an intentional thing on his part. Like, if Kurt Wagner, literally named after Wagner is going to be one of the X-Men, then Claremont's like, “Okay, then he was raised by Romani people, and like…” You know?

DANIEL: [laughs] Right. He didn’t stay in that house with the [Count].

CONNOR: Yeah, he’s not a Wagner in like, a Nazi kinda way. Like, “That’s just not something I’m gonna do.”

And similarly, even Mystique, who was evil —but, you know, Claremont always had a soft spot for her and wrote her in a more sympathetic way at times. Irene Adler, Destiny… I mean, Adler is not exclusively a Jewish name, but it's often a Jewish name. And the Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes books — who, of course, Destiny is supposed to actually be, but we'll get to that in a Mystique episode at some point — there's been a lot of scholarship on “A Scandal in Bohemia”, sort of wondering if Arthur Conan Doyle intended for Irene Adler to be Jewish. It's not said in the in the story, but it's a very common Yiddish surname. And I just feel like it's sort of an intentional move that like, Mystique’s wife is an Adler and Nightcrawler’s adoptive mother is, quote unquote, “the Gypsy Witch-Queen”.

And just for, like, a terminology note on this podcast: throughout all of these stories, to very recent stories, all of the Romani characters at Marvel — and any like, Traveller characters — are sort of referred to as “Gypsies”. That term is controversial in the Romani community. Some people have sort of reclaimed it, but a lot of people consider it to be pejorative and racist. So this podcast is going to refer to all characters of these ethnicities as either Romani or, if we know their specific subgroup — like Meggan. Brian Braddock's wife, is Romanichal. Or maybe Ruska Roma, there's a weird issue of [Captain Britain] that implies her family's from Russia. But everything else she seems to be Romanichal. And like, Magneto's wife was Sinti. I'm going to try to be specific because I think it's important to do that. And this is one of the most unfairly maligned and persecuted ethnic groups in the world, and I don't want to contribute to any discomfort or distress for any Romani listeners. But I am far from an expert on this subject, so if I get anything wrong, please do feel free to write in. I'm setting up an email account at cerebrocast@gmail.com, where you can leave comments. I don't know that I'll address emails on the show necessarily, but I always appreciate stuff like that, where it's just like, you know, I'm not an expert on Romani culture.

In any case, Nightcrawler’s family are Roma. Margali is originally from France, but they're operating in Germany by the time they adopt him. That's part of why my pronunciation drama [happened]; I was like, “I'm gonna go with Hungarian because of the S-Z. And I feel like, you know, that seems right? And there are a lot of Roma in Hungary?”

DANIEL: I think it's a good faith reading, though.

CONNOR: Yeah, yeah. Well I think—

DANIEL: I think that something to keep in mind is how many of these things that Claremont was doing were of their time—

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: With good intentions… and also overwhelmingly informed by whatever the dominant pop culture approach was.

CONNOR: Well, yeah. I mean, notably you look at it and like, yes, Nightcrawler’s adoptive mother is a Romani woman. So, of course, she is a fortune-telling witch.

DANIEL: Right. She has magic powers. [laughs]

CONNOR: Right. Like, she is a powerful sorceress. Right.

 DANIEL: And lives in a wagon of some kind.

CONNOR: And lives a in a caravan as part of a traveling circus telling fortunes. So. Yes.

DANIEL: Right.

CONNOR: One thing that I noticed in this storyline that I hadn't quite caught before; for the Buffyheads out there, I think it is undeniable that… I mean, Joss Whedon has talked a lot about how Chris Claremont's run on The X-Men influenced Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it seems now painfully obvious to me, in retrospect, that “Kurt's girlfriend, Amanda Sefton, is secretly Jimaine Szardos” is exactly the season two Buffy plot where Giles’s girlfriend, Jenny Calendar, is secretly Janna Kalderash.

DANIEL: I have no memory of this! We're watching old Buffys, but we're watching them kind of on shuffle. And it's too much. It's too much to keep in my head. I thought you were going to say — and I think that this istrue separately — that Lorne on Angel has big Nightcrawler energy.

CONNOR: Oh, for sure. But I just… so Giles’s girlfriend Jenny Calendar is revealed in — sorry, spoilers for a show that is 20 years old.

 DANIEL: Yeah. [laughs] Buffy was a hundred years ago, you guys.

CONNOR: In season two of Buffy, Jenny — who was my favorite recurring character — is revealed to secretly be a spy sent by the Romani clan that cursed Angel.

 DANIEL: Oh, I remember now. Yeah. Yes.

CONNOR: And her real name is Janna Kalderash. And so Amanda Sefton being secretly a spy who has entered Kurt's life to find out what happened to her brother, and her real name is Jimaine Szardos, it feels like — I mean, maybe… I don't know if it's intentional, but maybe that was something that was just rattling around in his brain since he was a teenager, and he borrowed it.

DANIEL: Yeah, I buy that.

CONNOR: Anyway, my point was just sort of, I think that Claremont felt very strongly about bringing Jewish stuff into superhero books. And, you know, obviously the Holocaust was never very far from his thoughts, between Magneto, and Days of Future Past, and the Excalibur arc where they have to fight versions of themselves from the Nazi Earth, where Kitty is like, a Holocaust victim who's their slave. There's a lot of stuff that's really, uh… that’s real intense

DANIEL: Yeah, that one is… that one is worth reading. That one is nuts.

CONNOR: It’s really intense and good.

DANIEL: Yeah, it’s very provocative.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And I mean that in a variety of ways. It’s very provocative artwork.

CONNOR: Yeah. The Alan Davis art on that run is insane.

DANIEL: Yeah, and integral to my love of Nightcrawler, as well.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And one of the ways that I came to the character, because when I got home from the video arcade and my dad was excited that I expressed interest in Marvel Comics for the first time, Excalibur #1 had come out not terribly long ago. And we didn't have a lot of #1s in the house, and X-Men, you know, as probably everybody listening knows or suspects by now, is not famous for its jumping-on points.

CONNOR: No. That's sort of the point of this podcast on some level, because everybody has a favorite X-Man that they like to talk about. And I hope that over the course of these conversations, people can sort of hear about jumping-on points that they might enjoy, or whatever, and Excalibur is where I certainly liked Nightcrawler most. I loved that book, and I loved Meggan, actually. And his relationship with Meggan was always really intriguing — the will-they-won't-they, will she cheat on Brian with him? And they never do, because they're both good people. But there’s definitely chemistry there.

DANIEL: They’re so sweet. They’re so noble.  

CONNOR: Well, and also they're also both Romani. I mean, he's adopted, but they grew up, both of them, in a Traveller Romani culture. So there is a connection between them.

DANIEL: But then she's also, she’s… look, I love this stuff. I've read a ton of it. It is too much for me to keep in my head.

CONNOR: Oh, for sure, for sure.

DANIEL: So I apologize to anyone who's yelling at their iPhones right now. So she's also… Meggan’s also like, of the Fae Folk, right? Like, she kind of occupies this interesting space of being like, a foot in Brian's world?

CONNOR: Yeah, so that's deeply unclear, and it's something that no writers have ever really been able to agree on. In those classic Excalibur stories, there's no real indication that she's supposed to be a mutant at all. Like, she's just a fairy character.

DANIEL: Yeah. [Her being a mutant] was never my takeaway — which was one of the mind-blowing things about it, was that it was already bending what I understood to be the rules of X-Men.

CONNOR: In more recent stuff, she's been firmly established to be a mutant, which calls a lot of that into question — and I want to do a whole Meggan episode at some point, probably soon, because she's a favorite of mine that I think a lot of people don't know a lot about. And if I do that, my guest and I will really dig deep into that, because my official read, I guess, on Meggan is that she's sort of like Illyana, where Illyana’s mutant power was to control the stepping discs of Limbo, which is like, that's bizarre. How does that make any sense?

DANIEL: Yeah, sometimes it feels like a branding issue that they need to—

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: —retroactively make the thing a mutant power.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: Because they live in the X-Men stories.

CONNOR: Before Wanda got all fucked up in terms of her backstory, because of the movies — or you know, they say it's not because of the movies, whatever.

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: For whatever reason they made Wanda not Magneto's daughter anymore, and not a mutant anymore — before that, it was sort of established in The Avengers that her mutant power, like, attuned her to chaos magic naturally, and made her more able to become a gifted sorceress. So I think Meggan is probably one of those, where her mutant power is also kind of magical. And that actually is what Tini [Howard]’s Excalibur is is sort of about, is the idea that there isn't necessarily a difference, right? Like it all depends on how you look at it. Anyway, that's not about Nightcrawler, so let's let's pivot back.

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: But I guess what I just wanted to say, just to finish my thought on Claremont and sort of the Jewish themes, is that I think with Nightcrawler and with a couple of other characters like Magneto's wife, I do think that he felt it was important to also represent Romani people alongside the Jewish characters he was creating. And I think that that's really cool because you don't see that a lot except in sort of stereotypical roles — and Amanda Sefton is not a stereotypical character at all.

Tini Howard actually has Romani heritage, and I hope that at some point she gets to do something cool with Amanda and Margali, because I think that it would be nice to see a writer with that heritage actually like, write them. Because I don't think that's ever happened before.

DANIEL: That would be phenomenal, yeah. And also just that it's been a minute.

CONNOR: Yeah. We haven’t really— mm-hmmm.

DANIEL: Just to see these wonderful enduring characters kind of like, get their outing as each subsequent wave of creators, with all of the combined influence behind them…

CONNOR: Exactly. And I think it's a good time because, like, Amanda’s not a mutant, and all the Krakoa stuff is like, making it complicated. So for Kurt to be like, “Oh, this is the woman I love. But she's not a mutant. Like, what does that mean?” Would be kind of interesting, I think.

DANIEL: That would be interesting. It would also get it away from the sister thing a little bit.

CONNOR: Yeah. The sister thing is not great.

DANIEL: It's not perfect. [laughs]

CONNOR: It's not… I, uh… [laughs] I. Mmm. Yeah. It's not great. Claremont has a couple of those, like romances where you just pause and you're like, “Wait, what?” But they take great pains a couple times to be like, “Margali never formally adopted him.” It's like, okay, but like, they did… they were raised together like, essentially as siblings.

DANIEL: Yeah. It depends on the writer. I mean, there's some people, you know, because Nightcrawler is kind… of how do I put this? He's a big old horndog.

CONNOR: Yes.

DANIEL: He’s one of the characters who—

CONNOR: He’s a ladies’ man.

DANIEL: He’s a ladies’ man. So I think that's some of the writers who want to make sure that they're honoring that aspect of the character do so in ways that are like, a little fanservice-y sometimes, or a little kinky sometimes.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: So there are writers who kind of treat the Amanda relationship like the third rail, and then there's like the 2004, I want to say, miniseries where the discomfort of that relationship is very much on Nightcrawler’s mind.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And it's all about his kind of fraught relationships with the women he's tempted by.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: In that particular supporting cast.

CONNOR: I mean, I like that... I like the weirdness of it. In the 90s Excalibur stuff in particular, when Margali first sort of like pivots to evil, I think that it's interesting that it's like, “This is Nightcrawler. This is his girlfriend. They are both calling this woman mother.” That’s very weird, you know? [laughs]

DANIEL: [laughs] Yeah, but they are fully dating at that point.

CONNOR: They are fully dating and like, they live together. And like, this is his mother. This is her mother. It's both of their mother. But they're not… blood… relatives. It's just, it makes it sort of sort of interesting and strange. And it feels like something that, you know. Sure! This weird circus, like, why not? Who else did they know? There were like three kids there.

DANIEL: This is probably a pun. But, you know, the mental gymnastics are surprisingly easy.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: It kind of falls into like, “because X-Men” territory.

CONNOR: Right. I mean, the weirdest part is actually that he's dating her for a few months before he finds out she's Jimaine.

DANIEL: Yes.

CONNOR: Like, that's bizarre. [laughs]

DANIEL: Which is hilarious.

CONNOR: Because her being Jimaine is a retcon, so it's just like a very funny… And he's not even mad, that's my favorite [part]. I reread that before we did this, that Annual where they go to Hell, and it introduces Margali. And like, the resolution is, “Oh, well, Kurt, actually, I've been around for a while because we've been dating for almost a year. I've been disguised as Amanda Sefton.” And he's like, “Oh, my God!” And she's like, “Are you mad at me?” He's like, “I think I should be. But I'm actually not, because this is so exciting.”

DANIEL: He’s just delighted, because their emotional bond is already so strong. Also the issue, I believe it's the same issue that opens with Nightcrawler’s surprise birthday party where Wolverine sent him on errands all day.

CONNOR: It is, yeah.

DANIEL: And that's how you get the meme of him opening the framed photograph of Wolverine.

CONNOR: I don't remember because I honestly was reading it to get — because that's the first time that the backstory is related, so I was like… related, no pun intended. The backstory, that Nightcrawler and his girlfriend are related, is related for the first time in that issue.

DANIEL: Right. [laughs]

CONNOR: And so I skipped to like, the Margali and Jimaine stuff. So I didn't read like, the beginning part.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's long. It's an Annual where they do Dante’s Inferno.

CONNOR: It’s an Annual, they’re long, yeah!

DANIEL: It’s long.

CONNOR: Yeah, no. And it's bizarre. There's a part where like, Storm gets turned into a lizard for a minute, and she's like, “The things I did when I was a lizard will disturb me forever!” And then she never speaks of it again.

DANIEL: No, I do not remember that part. [laughs]That is crazy.

CONNOR: [laughs] Yeah, it’s a wild time. Claremont loves people getting turned into stuff. He's a big fan of that.

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: You know, let’s not dig too deep into it. But it happens a lot in that run.

DANIEL: Yeah, he's got stuff. He's got stuff for people who like things.

CONNOR: Yeah. Speaking of runs, what is your sort of — again, like I said, it's hard to kind of identify individual stories about Nightcrawler because he's not usually at the center of the story. But what are sort of your favorite Nightcrawler moments? What do you think of? What's your favorite stuff?

DANIEL: Yeah, I think that's… I mean, I think that's appropriate. I think that's typical of the character and people's love for him is that he is sort of this quintessential utility player. He gets along with everybody. He’s not… whenever something bad happens to Nightcrawler, writers always have Cyclops or Professor X say that he was “the heart of the team”.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And I think that's really true. I don't think that he's — even though his personality is informed by his obsession with leading men, I think that that's intended to be sort of a bittersweet irony because of his appearance, and the love of Nightcrawler is kind of having him… You know, he literally pops up. Like, he is a surprise. [laughs] He pops into frame.

CONNOR: Yeah. Bamf, he’s there.

DANIEL: Yeah, he bamfs. So when Nightcrawler isn't in a run, like when he's not in New X-Men, it's a big deal.

CONNOR: It’s conspicuous, yeah.

DANIEL: And then I think you see him for the first time in a crowd shot, because he doesn't have to be in the in the ensemble, in like the principal ensemble, for an X-Men comic to work at all. He's just like, a catalyst. Like, he brings people together. So when I think of my favorite Nightcrawler stories, I was a big Excalibur guy, but, you know, I was like eleven. Like, I don't know how much of it I was really even getting, the first time I read it. It was more about—

CONNOR: It holds up. I reread it recently, it really holds up.

DANIEL: Yeah, I like everything I’ve reread since. It’s so bizarre. But the art, obviously, was was what compelled me when I was a kid. The relationship I had with the character, and the art. So I didn't — because it wasn't really a comic book reader until I discovered Nightcrawler — I didn't come to him through story. I kind of came to him through design.

CONNOR: The aesthetic, yeah.

DANIEL: Yeah, through aesthetic. And then the stories that I did have at my disposal were Claremont/Byrne reprints. So he was the, you know, he was the jokester, the heart of the team, the weirdo. He was the one who made Kitty uncomfortable for a minute.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And then they gradually become best friends. He's kind of best friends with everybody. He's sort of Wolverine's canonical male best friend.

CONNOR: Yeah, it's kind of hilarious. I think the first time anyone finds out his name is Logan — which it turns out, of course, isn't actually his name, but you get what I mean.

DANIEL: Right.

CONNOR: I think it's Nightcrawler when Nightcrawler, like, goes to Canada with him, and they fight the Wendigo.

DANIEL: Yeah. And that's and that's a great one. Like, that's one that would be on my list. But it's hard to… you know, or when Colossus and Wolverine and Nightcrawler go to the bar, and fight Juggernaut.

CONNOR: Yeah, and then they go on like a road trip at one point. Like, they're always doing stuff the three of them, kind of. I mean, what I love is that, like, when he first starts dating Amanda, it's because he and Colossus start going on double dates with these flight attendants they met.

DANIEL: That’s right. [laughs]

CONNOR: And then all of them get kidnaped by Arcade and like, Amanda hangs around. But like Betsy — not to be confused with Betsy Braddock, but like Betsy, the flight attendant who's Amanda's friend — never shows up again. So it’s like, clearly she called Piotr and was like, “Yeah, it's not me, it's you, and your team of misfits that get kidnaped by serial killers. I'm out.” But Amanda hung in there for some reason. And then not long afterward, we understand that the reason is that she's dating her brother and she cares about him.

 DANIEL: Yes. Which is… sweet.

CONNOR: [laughs]

DANIEL: And very, very comic book.

CONNOR: I mean, listen, you know, it's… It's also, though, it’s very much a fairytale trope. It's like, they're so close, but they’re not actually related, so it's okay for them to get together at the end.

DANIEL: Right.

CONNOR: You know, because when you're telling a story for children, often that bond of like, “they grew up like siblings” is a pretty common...

 DANIEL: Right. There’s a… “one of them is royalty and one of them works in the stables.”

CONNOR: Exactly, right.

DANIEL: And they’re the only children. It's the old-timey equivalent — or in the case of The X-Men, the sort of like, timeless Bavaria equivalent — of the girl next door.

CONNOR: Yes. And there is something so intimate about the fact that it was really their own little world. Like they were so isolated in this traveling circus, and they were traveling all the time. So they didn't get to put down roots and make friends or anything, like they really only had each other.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's so odd. And I think that that's… you know, when I think about the other great Nightcrawler stories, I think about the first appearance in Giant-Size.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And I reread it really recently, and something that I never noticed before was that he, at that time, can teleport away. He can leave the conflict if he has to.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And instead he gives in to the idea that he's a monster, but not in a way where he's going to, like, kill anybody. Not in like a bestial, Wolverine going berserker way. He plays the role for them, and then he lets them get the stake against his heart—

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: —before Professor X freezes over everybody in their tracks. And I thought that that was so interesting because I know, you know, in a sort of superficial kind of always-on kind of way, that that's Nightcrawler’s story, is that he's the one who doesn't blend in. He's the one who's all the way on the far end of the spectrum when X-Men gets relaunched and they start sort of committing to the metaphor.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: He's the one who exemplifies it's with the least privilege. But I hadn't really grokked the fact that there's a passively suicidal—

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: —“not meant for this world” degree of melancholy baked into his first appearance. That’s in the DNA, that Nightcrawler is a kind and innocent soul who… he will give in. Like, if he is bullied. If he is the victim of cruelty, you know, he will break.

CONNOR: And then in that Annual that introduces Margali and Jimaine, you find out that the conflict he had with his brother Stefan, where Stefan ends up dead, happens literally hours before that first appearance in Giant-Size. That's what happens immediately before that scene. And I think that that on some level was Claremont asking — because Claremont didn't write Giant-Size, that was Len Wein with Dave Cockrum — he was sort of saying like, “What would have driven him to the point where he doesn't want to escape?” And it's that he's just killed his brother, thinks he can never return home to his mother — and never return home to Jimaine, who he loves —and he doesn't care at that point. And then Xavier offers him another option. But in the moment, he thinks that he has no home — and it's the only home where anyone would ever accept him, because the way he looks makes it impossible for him to find another home. So, you know, he feels that he has nothing left and no options. And I think that it's a really smart story, in that sense. It is kind of funny to me that as different writers keep, you know, adding bits and pieces to his backstory at the circus, that day seems to become just like really busy.

DANIEL: Yeah. [laughs]

CONNOR: [laughs]

 DANIEL: He's got that superhero thing of, like, you know, a lot was going on when Batman's parents got killed—

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: —or when Krypton blew up. Everything kind of gravitates towards the same, you know, two week period. [laughs]

CONNOR: I think there's like, in different flashbacks there's like three different incidents that week where he saves Jimaine from killing herself in the circus by, like, falling off the trapeze or whatever with his teleportation. It's like someone took a note, like, “He saves Jimaine by teleporting,” but they didn't note down how. Because one time it's a tightrope, one time it's a trapeze. It's like, wow, for a girl who grew up in the circus, she's not very good at all of this, I guess, because she almost died like four times that day.

DANIEL: And he's a ringer. He's essentially cheating. [laughs]

CONNOR: Yeah! But that's the the joy of the X-Men on some level, is you have to take what you want and kind of let the rest of it go. I mean, the really sterling example of that for me with Nightcrawler is The Draco, which is one of the last things I was really pulling for a while because I fell off the X-Men really hard when the Decimation happened and just didn't read comics, really... I mean, I started reading DC. I was like, so angry [laughs] about the Decimation. But before that is [Chuck] Austen’s run on Uncanny.

DANIEL: Is a weird little detour.

CONNOR: And it is astonishing how bad that is, for so many reasons. Like, first of all, the story is just bad, but also, the stupidity of taking a character where the whole point of the character for the 30 years of publication up to that point is that he looks like a demon and is treated like a demon, but is not actually a demon. And then going, “Meet his father, who is a demon,” is just. Astonishing to me, that you could miss the point that badly.

DANIEL: Yeah, I understand the temptation to do something like that because you have a very religious character who looks like a demon. And that's kind of the game. You play that tension for, you know, 45 years. And then also on the X-Men, you have a character whose name is Angel, and he is and he has big wings.

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: And magic has always been part of the X-Men, and then there are characters like Apocalypse who are very old. And then they're kind of, in a sort of Chariots of the Gods science fiction way, kind of tied into mythology.

CONNOR: Yeah. Apocalypse and Selene are are certainly just as magical as anybody, even if their power comes from being a mutant. Because they go back that far, and they were worshiped, and, you know, that kind of stuff. Total Chariots of the Gods stuff. And then Nightcrawler himself is very tied in with the magic side of the Marvel Universe because of Margali and Amanda. The special guest star in that Annual with his backstory is Doctor Strange. And then, like, he and Margali have a sorcery battle in hell. Right? So Nightcrawler always has that stuff, especially like, as it goes on, and he gets tied in with the Soulsword because Amanda does. And then there's all kinds of stuff in Limbo with Belasco.

DANIEL: Yeah. His team ends up being Excalibur, you know, for ages.

CONNOR: Yeah, which is the magic team. But like, you'd think you could do that without feeling the need to literally make him a demon when the point… is that he's not. It makes Reverend Stryker from God Loves, Man Kills seem a little bit correct. And I feel like any story element that remotely validates that guy is a poor narrative decision. I'll just put it that way. And even if you're going to go, “Well, they’re demon mutants,” it's like, okay, but… you know, the Azazel character is literally… Satan.

DANIEL: Right, I believe that at times the story... The character tells you that he was Satan, that he was misinterpreted as Satan, or he says that, you know, there were a bunch of people who wanted to be Satan, and he fought Mephisto.

CONNOR: Yeah, which like, Mephisto; Marduk [Kurios], the father of Hellstrom and Satana; you know, there's a bunch of them in Marvel. And they all kind of argue. I mean, Belasco is a great example of another one of those.

DANIEL: Oh, yeah!

CONNOR: But I mean, honestly, like, if you were really going to do this, make his father Belasco.

 DANIEL: Yeah. No, that makes sense too.

CONNOR: Like, why…

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: Why invent a new, stupid character… but I would have been mad even if if they'd made his father Belasco, too. I just… that would at least have like had some resonance with anything that already existed. It just is one of those things where it's so literal that it makes my head hurt. Like, why would you... And this is right after, by the way, the arc where Austen writes the Church of Humanity, where it turns out that Kurt becoming a priest was all an illusion, and that the goal of the Church of Humanity was to install him as Pope and then trigger the Rapture — which, by the way, Catholics don't believe in.

DANIEL: I will confess to loving that idea on paper. Like that's to me… if that happened in like, Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, I'd be like, that's genius.

CONNOR: Because Morrison would have made it good! Morrison would have written that and made it good.

Like yes, the idea that “We convinced Kurt to become a priest so that we can break his image inducer after he's Pope and then like, reveal the Pope as a demon?” That's hilarious as a concept, but the storyline is awful. And then it goes directly from there when he's like, “Oh, well, I guess I don't want to be a priest. Nevermind. I've lost my faith in organized religion,” or whatever. And then we go into The Draco where it’s like, “Also, your dad is Satan.”

And that's not even to get into the fact that Claremont's original intention for Nightcrawler’s parents was that Destiny was his mother and Mystique was his father, which is so much—

DANIEL: Which is brilliant. That’s so fascinating.

CONNOR: So much more interesting. I believe Rogue was also supposed to be their biological child and was supposed to be his biological sibling. I think that that is what Claremont intended to do. But it was never… he wasn't allowed to do any of it, obviously, because Shooter wouldn't let anyone be gay, much less let someone be a shapeshifting, genderfluid, androgynous being who takes male form to impregnate her lesbian lover. I could understand that one being a little outré for Marvel in the 80s. But, you know, he wouldn't even let Claremont say on-panel that Mystique and Destiny were a couple. Claremont had to sneak it in by referring to Destiny as Mystique's leman, which is like a term no one has used since, like, the 1720s or whatever.

DANIEL: Which I do love. If you are going to if you are going to sneak stuff in, that's such a comic book writer way to do it.

CONNOR: Oh, yeah. And Claremont… I mean, Claremont was clearly very enmeshed in sexual subcultures. He knew what he was talking about. The metaphor becomes a lot stronger under him, in part, because while he is not, as far as I know, like, a queer person himself, he clearly was in… I mean, look at the Hellfire Club. Look at Rachel Summers.

DANIEL: Right.

CONNOR: He was in the BDSM scene, pretty clearly. And he clearly knew a lot of people in the queer scene in New York.

DANIEL: Yeah, these are not accidental or uninformed choices.

CONNOR: Yeah, exactly.

DANIEL: And that's one of the reasons I think that they resonate so much with people.

CONNOR: Yeah, they work.

DANIEL: Is they’re, they are… he comes correct.

CONNOR: They feel very lived in. Yeah.

DANIEL: He's serving the audience, and he has a relationship with them.

CONNOR: But that was why it aggravated the shit out of me, apart from the demon thing, was that I was like, it's 2003. Surely we could do the story now. Like, there's no reason not to do it.

DANIEL: Sure. Yeah. It would have been interesting in any era. It's an inherently fascinating superhero idea.

CONNOR: And instead you're going to establish via retcon that Mystique was seduced by the Devil?

DANIEL: So this bummed me out not in like a big comic book fan way, because I didn't read very much of it, and I wasn't reading a lot of superhero comic books at that time. But what bummed me out about it are these kind of really — regardless of how you feel about the big picture story — the things that I latched onto were these really nitpicky things that, because I love Nightcrawler, but also because I love the X-Men, these really nitpicky things that kind of break X-Men for me a little bit. And one of the big things that I think is so important about X-Men is that your kid can be a mutant.

CONNOR: Yes.

DANIEL: That's kind of the whole point, is that Charles Xavier comes to your house.

CONNOR: That’s why they’re scary to people.

DANIEL: Exactly. It's like, “Oh, man. There's a kid there's a kid down the block who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs, and he just has, like, normal parents. And I don't want this in my backyard.”

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: And that, to me, is kind of the core of the X-Men, is that there's a you know, there's a place for you. And as soon as — and it's kind of inevitable, and I don't really blame anybody, and you have to come up with new stories because you've been doing it for 40 years — but as soon as you make mutants an explicitly genetic thing… Like I know that they all have siblings, and—

CONNOR: Oh, yeah.

DANIEL: You know, there’s the Summers brothers, and the Mr. Sinister bloodline, and it's always been a thing. But when a blue mutant and a devil mutant have a baby—

CONNOR: Have a blue devil mutant? Yeah.

DANIEL: Who’s a blue devil mutant, yeah. So I think you're working against one of the things that I think is really important about the X-Men, is that what is interesting about Nightcrawler — and, you know, continuity is what it is. But one of the things that I thought was important about Nightcrawler was that he was born looking different, and therefore abandoned. And then when you find out that he has a blue mom, you're like, “Okay, that kinda makes sense, but she was a shapeshifter, so there was still like, stigma about it.

CONNOR: That’s introduced so early in the 80s stuff that it doesn't really bother me, the idea that Mystique is his mother. Because the first time he sees her, he's like, “Whoa, we look a lot alike.” And she's like, “Ask Margali about that.” You know what I mean?

DANIEL: Yeah, it's definitely grandfathered in.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: And it would be an elephant in the room if you didn't do it.

 CONNOR: Well, and weirdly, Claremont didn't, because I guess for so long… I guess he was just like, waiting for Shooter to get fired — which did eventually happen — to, like, try and do his his awesome genderfluid lesbianism women power plot.

 DANIEL: He was going to do it right or not at all.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: Yeah. I don't think this has anything to do with The Draco, but what ends up happening in the Marvel Universe and with Marvel writers is that you get stuff like… I want to say in the Kevin Smith Black Cat comics, there's a bad guy who has sort of like a low-level teleportation-based power. And he genetically traces himself back to the area of Germany where Nightcrawler came from, like he's a distant cousin of Nightcrawler.

CONNOR: [dismayed noise]

DANIEL: And so he has these kind of — and, you know, I'm a Kevin Smith fan on the whole, but this is not how I would have done this one comic book.

CONNOR: No, it's just the endless need to connect everything. And listen, Claremont was not immune to that, but I do think that he was very careful about how he did it. And I do… like occasionally there’s stories where it just feels like they pull a lot of things together. Mr. Sinister is really a classic exemplar of this. I feel like anytime they do a flashback with Mr. Sinister, it's like, “It turns out someone else's grandma knew Mr. Sinister!”

DANIEL: [laughs] But at least that's his deal, you know?

CONNOR: No, it is his deal!

DANIEL: I believe that’s what Mr. Sinister’s deal is.

CONNOR: His whole deal is tracking mutant bloodlines through centuries. So it makes total sense. But it does start to become… it's like, how many ancestors of Scott Summers, like, crossed paths with Mr. Sinister? In that case, at least, that's his like, huge obsession. But when it's like, “And then he had this research facility, and Destiny worked there,” and it's like, why? Just because she's old?

DANIEL: Sure.

CONNOR: You know, like there’s no… I don’t know. It’s just one of those things, like… that’s the Black Womb Project, which is—

DANIEL: No, I don't think I even know about that. But that's my hang-up with The Draco. It's not so much like, “this is a bad story” or you shouldn’t have done it, it’s that—

CONNOR: No, it’s that the blue mom had to also have a demon baby daddy — who has teleportation powers, by the way. Like it's so on the nose, and it’s insulting to the reader.

 DANIEL: That's not how my headcanon with mutants works. I think it's very important that it be like, “Hey, I'm just like… I'm a kid from Deerfield, Illinois, and I can walk through walls.”

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: “And I was told that this is where y'all live.”

 CONNOR: Yeah. And I think that there is value in the sort of dynastic lines that certain characters have, but I do agree that it shouldn't be that literal. Because then, if Nightcrawler can only be born to people who already look like that, then the existential fear of Nightcrawler is no longer scary to regular people. I mean, the Nightcrawler motif that recurs constantly through those early issues is he's constantly — from his very first appearance in Giant-Size — being chased by angry mobs that want to kill him.

DANIEL: Right.

CONNOR: I mean, there's a very memorable issue that I always think of whenever I'm talking about Kitty Pryde, where — and like, you know, is this a little eyeroll-worthy? Yes, she's like 15 years old and she gives a speech that convinces the mob that they're wrong. But it's a very powerful speech where she talks about how, you know, her family was butchered in the Holocaust. And like, people still think Black people aren't human and like, does that mean they're right? Like, how dare you just, like, decide because of the way this person looks, or because of what you think about him, that he's not a real person deserving of dignity? And it's it's a very, you know, [Claremont] has Kitty give a lot of those soapbox speeches, and they don't all hit.

DANIEL: Sure. [laughs]

CONNOR: But that one has always hit. I mean there's the really bad one where she drops a bunch of racial slurs. But you know, that one I think sort of threads the needle pretty well.

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: And I do think that for [Nightcrawler] to work on that level, he has to be something that can just happen to you.

 DANIEL: Yeah. It has to be spontaneous. And just for the X-Men to work on that level, too.

CONNOR: Yeah!

DANIEL: Because it's different to have two Summers brothers who both have kind of like, you know, ill-defined laser powers, than to have, like, you know, a third Summers cousin—

CONNOR: Right.

DANIEL: Who can shoot like, a little bit of laser out from between his fingers.

CONNOR: Right. Like, I don't have a problem with the retcon that Polaris is Magneto's daughter. That's fine with me.

 DANIEL: No, that feels like blue skin, yellow eye territory where it would be honestly a little stranger if it wasn't addressed.

CONNOR: If you weren't related in some way, right. Because it's such a specific power. It's like, “Oh, you also have the power of magnetism?” So that kind of stuff makes sense to me.

DANIEL: Yeah. But exception rather than the rule, you know, is where I land.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: Because creating a parallel mythology, I think does a disservice to… at least what I like about the comics, and what I feel like makes them work.

CONNOR: It turns it into The Eternals or The New Gods or one of those, as opposed to the like, “Your kid could be a mutant, uh-oh.”

DANIEL: Right, and I just think that stuff’s stronger.

CONNOR: And that's the only thing that really separates the X-Men from the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, right? Like, it doesn't really make sense that the Marvel Universe will fully accept the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, but the X-Men are a bridge too far. And the reason that that can work at all is because what's scary about mutants is that your child could be one, is that they are lurking among you, and they are going to outmode you. They are going to supplant you. And that's why Grant Morrison's E is for Extinction is so brilliant, because once the fact of the matter is, “humans are going extinct and mutants are going to replace them,” of course humans are going to become extremely reactionary about that news. So you know, I agree with you.

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: And I think that making Nightcrawler the son of a millennia-old demon mutant is like, just so fucking stupid, because it throws all of that out the window. So my position is — and this is why in the character overview, I just skipped over the plot where he comes back from the dead, because it involves Azazel. And I just don't care.

DANIEL: It does. I will say if anybody wants to read it, I do think it's handled really well.

CONNOR: It's good! It’s not a bad book.

DANIEL: It’s a really interesting example of embracing the continuity, of not just being hard-nosed about it. Kind of like, “Yep, it all happened. Let's make it work.”

CONNOR: Yeah, and I think that there's value in that. But if it were me, I would just truly put Azazel down the memory hole. And it's very easy. I mean, you don't have to to go really far out there. You just say, “Oh, this Satan guy? He was lying to you. He's not your dad.” Like, it's really that simple. And it's not like anyone is like, a huge Chuck Austen partisan who's going to be like, “How dare you retcon out The Draco?” So I just feel like at this point they have nothing to lose there, especially now that Mystique and Destiny are pretty prominent, storyline-wise, in the new status quo.

 DANIEL: Yeah. That's been really great and really effective.

CONNOR: Yeah. I mean, I'm a Destiny stan. I love that old broad and her exposed sexy legs despite her being a million years old. I think that if we're all that ancient and wearing a sexy high-cut leotard with our legs exposed, we should be so lucky as to be that confident.

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: And, you know. She's that confident because her immortal girlfriend thinks she's smokin’ hot no matter how old she gets, and I love that for them.

DANIEL: That's right. OTP.

 CONNOR: Oh, truly. Truly. I guess that's that's enough on The Draco.

What would you like to see? Where would you like to see the character go? Obviously we're in an exciting new status quo where it feels like almost anything can happen in the Dawn of X, but you don't have to get that specific. Just sort of like, what would be your ideal sort of positioning for the character? You know, he's had a lot of weird hats. He’s been sort of a swashbuckling pirate guy. He was, in that one miniseries, kind of an occult detective for a minute.

 DANIEL: Yeah. He has kind of a Hellboy phase, or a Hellblazer phase.

 CONNOR: Hellblazer, yeah, a little bit of a Hellblazer edge in that one book. That's not where I would want to put him. But I'm just curious as to what you think the ideal sort of positioning for the character would be, or where you think his story maybe should go in a hypothetical, ideal world.

 DANIEL: That's kind of where I keep coming back to my my thesis of Nightcrawler as ultimate supporting character. And I can't stress enough that he is my favorite superhero. [laughs]

CONNOR: [laughs]

DANIEL: But that doesn't really mean that I think that there needs to be like, a going Nightcrawler comic at all times.

CONNOR: Well, I think most I think most of the X-Men cannot support a solo title. I think that they are an ensemble cast. I think there are a couple characters that work solo. Wolverine obviously work solo. I think — they've never quite done it, but I think Storm could anchor a book.

 DANIEL: Yeah, Storm is always so close.

 CONNOR: And I think that whenever they do stuff with Gambit and Rogue on their own, that always really works. But otherwise, I do find that they work best as as a team book. So I don't mean like, a Nightcrawler solo series. I just mean, is there something unresolved that you think would be fun to play with, or…?

DANIEL: Sure. Well, I think they're doing a good job so far. I read [Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler}. I think Hickman penned it. I think it was Hickman and Alan Davis. And I thought that was very, very good. And I thought that between that and — Nightcrawler has a memorable, show-stopping line during during one of their big Council meetings that ends up sort of setting the tone, at least for the soap opera aspects of Krakoa.

CONNOR: Yes.

 DANIEL: They're trying to come up with the laws for Krakoa and they turn to Nightcrawler, who is their sort of — I believe it’s Mystique, sort of in a taking a dig at him kind of way, turns to the man of faith at the meeting. And Nightcrawler suggests the commandment to make more mutants.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: Because Nightcrawler is very sex-positive.

CONNOR: Nightcrawler likes to fuck.

DANIEL: Nightcrawler fucks.

CONNOR: While the Holy War storyline was bad, I don't have a problem with them getting rid of the priest element, because I do think that while it was interesting — and it is interesting that he is religious — I don't think it serves the character to have him not fucking, because he loves to fuck.

 DANIEL: I'm almost positive that at some point I said on Twitter that Nightcrawler was the original “Hot Priest”, when the Fleabag season two thing was going on. Because I'm totally cool with Nightcrawler diving in and out of the priesthood.

CONNOR: Well, but like, he needs to at least be like, Episcopalian or something.

DANIEL: Sure. [laughs]

CONNOR: Like you can’t do the Catholic priest thing, you can’t; because then he can't be with the ladies, and Nightcrawler loves the ladies.

DANIEL: Well, or, it’s, you know, it's forbidden love.

CONNOR: Well, sure, yes.

DANIEL: It's the thing that tests his faith, because he is such a sexually-charged person, that he ultimately finds... Like, I think that that is an inherently interesting and totally fair story. I think I would rather have seen Claremont do it in like the 80s, because Claremont's so good at sexy subtext.

CONNOR: Yes. And I do like — in that miniseries where he does sort of do like the occult detective thing — that it is sort of, he's like, “Well, I'm…” — because he is a priest by that point, right. Isn't he?

DANIEL: He’s like, just out, I believe.

CONNOR: Yeah. So it's like, torn between, “Hmm, I'm a priest. I love God. Also, I really want to fuck my sister. Remember, my sister? Who I was in love with?”

DANIEL: Which is not the most priestly thing to do.

CONNOR: Right! Because his relationship with Jimaine/Amanda is already so, like — to an outsider who doesn't know them — would already come across as so sinful and weird that it's almost the perfect foil for his, like, Catholic convictions. Because if there's anything you should feel guilty about, it's like, coveting your adopted sister, right?

 DANIEL: Right. There's like an Oscar-bait drama in here somewhere.

CONNOR: Absolutely.

DANIEL: But that's… When your Lois Lane is your foster sister—

CONNOR: [laughs]

DANIEL: It’s not like you… you don’t have a choice. You can’t escape it. But so I guess that's a roundabout way of saying that I think that Hickman and the Dawn of X stuff really gets Nightcrawler, which is that he is a support player. He is a sort of, he's a big pop. You know, he's a show-stopper. He’s somebody who's in crowd shots and your eye is drawn to him, but he's not necessarily the main character. And in the Giant-Size [one-shot], he's doing paranormal investigating type stuff.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: Which is kind of baked in now. I’m surprised that he's not in the Marauders, I guess.

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: Because that's the one that’s about a pirate ship! [laughs]

CONNOR: Yeah, I was also a little surprised by that, and I honestly—

DANIEL: But Kitty also has her own pirate, you know, legacy, so I guess if you’re…

CONNOR: But he's also not in Excalibur. I feel like he should be in one or the other, you know what I mean?

 DANIEL: I know. I'm fascinated by the choice not to, though. And the comics are so strong that I don't want them to—

CONNOR: To change them too much, right, exactly. It’s so good right now.

DANIEL: Well I don’t want them to lurch into like, a nostalgia position, you know? I don’t want them to just do it because that’s the brand.

CONNOR: No, no.

DANIEL: I really like the casts that they've put together. So I trust them to kind of keep him where I discovered him, which is to be one of the X-Men.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: Like, one of the core X-Men. So I think that he should just keep on being a horny guy on the island who occasionally talks to God and/or ghosts.

 CONNOR: That sounds good to me, honestly. I think that that's a great thing for him to focus on. It's like, “Are you talking to God, or ghosts, or like, hot girls?”

DANIEL: Right, are you on Tinder?

CONNOR: That’s sort of what he does. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like, Krakoa is basically a real free love kind of place. So he's probably having a fantastic time. And we should we should delve into that a little more maybe.

 DANIEL: I would love... Yes. I would love to see how Nightcrawler’s sex life is going on Krakoa because that is such an explicit part of the book. And he is the perfect point of view character for the way that aspect of their sociology operates.

 CONNOR: Well, and it's such a… what I love about it is, it is that Claremont vibe, right? Because in the Claremont 80s comics, it does feel like everyone is fucking everyone else in the book.

 DANIEL: Yeah, it's a big old dormitory. Everybody’s hooking up, that’s the entire point.

CONNOR: It feels like everyone is having sex, yeah. So to just explicitly go, “Yeah, we all live on an island together now, and we are kind of all having sex,” is like… that is the X-Men to me on some level. It's always been this big kind of incestuous family of like, people who live together, but are also in love, and are also the only family that they each have — but also, it's a total pot of like, boiling sexual angst. And it's just, it's good stuff. And I think that [Nightcrawler] has always been a good sort of pressure release valve. He's fun. He keeps it light. But by virtue of his appearance and his existence, he always kind of has a lot to be upset about. So he has to keep it light.

DANIEL: Yeah. And I think for that same reason, he's allowed to be overtly sexual as well. It's not the same as Angel or Emma Frost.

CONNOR: Or Gambit.

DANIEL: Yeah, or Gambit. He is allowed to express sexuality in a way that is safe and kind of family-friendly, both in the story and to the readers. That he can be this kind of debonair ladies man, and there’s a quaintness to it.

CONNOR: It’s cute. It’s Old Hollywood.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's very cute. It’s very cute. Until you're in the bedroom, and then it's happening.

CONNOR: Yeah, and I mean, notably, Chuck Austen did imply in an interview one time that Nightcrawler has two penises. That is a thing that Chuck Austen did, circa The Draco. I don't believe that's canon.

DANIEL: Yeah, I don’t know about that. [laughs]

CONNOR: I don’t believe that’s canon and I don’t support it. I'm just saying that—

DANIEL: I feel like somebody would have said something by now.

CONNOR: No, I was like, “At the very least it would have come up,” I feel like, at some point, you know? But I personally am glad that… that's one that I'm glad was kept off-panel, if that was the intention. But… yeah.

I like your point that he's your favorite character, but you're okay with him being a supporting character. See, I what I love about the X-Men is that they reveal — it's like astrology, like they reveal so much of our psychology by talking about them? Even if, like, you know, I don't necessarily believe that astrology is real in the sense of the stars having power, or whatever. But I do think that sitting down I mean, like, “Ugh, I'm such a Pisces,” and then you are talking about it with someone, and you actually just start doing talk therapy. And it’s a jumping off point.

DANIEL: Right, you accidentally use a shorthand for the way that you're feeling. [laughs]

CONNOR: Yeah, exactly. But like I've known you for some years now, and you're like… you are someone who I would consider to be a happy supporting player, you know what I mean? Like, you're like a big wife guy.

DANIEL: Oh, I'm a total wife guy.

CONNOR: And so the idea… like Kurt is 100% a wife guy. Like, I feel like part of the reason why they keep finding reasons to keep Kurt and Amanda apart is because if Kurt and Amanda were allowed to just like, be together and be happy, all Kurt would want to do would be like, “Hey, guys, this is my wife. She is a powerful sorceress. She used to rule Limbo. She's super hot. She does magic.” He would just never shut up about his hot sorceress wife.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, I think a lot of characters are denied romantic resolution because of the serialized nature of the medium.

CONNOR: Because it could get boring, right.

DANIEL: But he in particular seems like… the way that he is tortured, I don't think he's allergic to eventually being content.

CONNOR: No.

DANIEL: The way that Cyclops and Wolverine will never be truly happy. [laughs]

CONNOR: [laughs] Right. I think it's more that he would be so content that they're like, “That wouldn't be interesting.” To us, because it's less strong... It's like, if he's just thrilled to tell you all about his Sorceress Supreme wife, it's like, “But what is Nightcrawler doing?” “Oh, you know, Nightcrawler’s mostly retired. He is a stay-at-home dad and his wife is a magical superhero.” Like that feels like it's almost where it would go. [laughs] He would just be sort of hanging out at his house.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think, I mean, that's the deal. If I have a kind of like, a meta theory — and I would love to write something with Nightcrawler or even, you know, something with Nightcrawler’s name on the front.

CONNOR: [meaningfully] That would be awesome, if that could happen somehow.

DANIEL: Let’s put that out into the universe.

CONNOR: Just putting that out into the universe.

DANIEL: What you what you'll notice about all the Nightcrawler solo stuff is that it's wildly different.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL: And I think I told you when I wanted to do Nightcrawler — just by way of sort of like, wrapping up my thoughts on this guy — I don't think there's a character who is like, this beloved while still being this inconsistent.

CONNOR: Yeah, there's no defining story.

DANIEL: Not really. There’s not really a defining story. Or, you know, he has defining moments in X-Men stories, or he has relationships that are really enduring. Or like we were talking about with the aesthetic. You know, I think that so many people — other creators, I think — come to him through aesthetic. That's how you get a story about him being a demon or, you know, the Dave Cockrum solo stuff where he's like, this kind of Heavy Metal magazine sci-fi swashbuckler.

CONNOR: That mini is so fun.

DANIEL: It's great. It's so great. [laughs] But you would never say that's the definitive Nightcrawler story.

CONNOR: No, it's like, the one where Nightcrawler and Lockheed have interdimensional—

DANIEL: Even though it’s the guy!

CONNOR: Yeah. No. Right.

DANIEL: So even though [Cockrum]'s sort of the principal Nightcrawler creator, you could argue, you would never say like, “Here, read this. This is Nightcrawler.” Right?

CONNOR: Or like I always think, you know, because I loved Excalibur so much, I'm always like, “Well, The Cross-Time Caper.” And then like… but that's about Rachel, that’s not about Kurt. You know?

DANIEL: But that’s his value, is he's your brother, you know?

CONNOR: Yeah.

DANIEL: He’s everybody's brother. And he's just — he's noble, and for you, he's unfailing, and he's melancholy, and he's the X-Man who wears the whole metaphor on his skin, so he'll never have a normal life. Which kind of maybe means he’ll never have a starring role.

CONNOR: Mm-hmm. I think that's a great note to kind of end the conversation on.

So now I'm going to make you play my game, which is that if Nightcrawler were a cast member on The Real Housewives of Krakoa, what would be his tagline in the opening credits?

DANIEL: Okay, I thought about this, and I think that it's got to be: “Ich bin ein BAMF!”

CONNOR: Like a badass motherfucker.

DANIEL: Yup. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to say it, because—

CONNOR: Oh, no, we’re — This is rated explicit on Spotify and Apple podcasts. So you're allowed to — we're not on Apple Podcasts yet. We will be, hopefully, by the time you're listening to this, but it takes like 10 days, so I don't know what's going on over there.

I really like that. I think that's really cute. I think that the the “bamf” thing is… like, the fact that he has an identifiable sound effect that is unique to him is another aesthetic element that really is great for the character. I mean, Wolverine has one, too, right? With like, “snikt”.

DANIEL: Yeah, but they're fairly rare. I mean, you see them trying ones for Cyclops every once in a while.

CONNOR: And they never quite work. And then, like, Psylocke was kind of her own sound — in that she would just announce what she was doing to you.

DANIEL: Sure.

CONNOR: Like, “This is the focused totality of my psychic powers.” But it's not a sound. It's just like her... it's the same line, that she says. 

DANIEL: I think honestly, I think all of the Claremont characters do that. [laughs]

CONNOR: Oh, for sure, for sure, no. Like, Cannonball is always like, “Good thing Ah'm invulnerable when Ah’m blastin’!” You know, like, they all have one. But with Betsy, because that happened, like, in the Siege Perilous storyline, you didn't really have it beforehand? So it felt like in the, you know, three years that Claremont remained on the book. or whatever — not even, gosh, because he left in ‘91. But it felt like he put it in there a whole bunch. Just to really underline it for you.

DANIEL: Yeah. That worked on me. That got me so hyped.

CONNOR: I've said this before, I love the expository Claremont dialogue. It is occasionally super ridiculous. But when Betsy says, like, “This is my psychic knife, the focused totality of my psychic power, and with one touch, it will render Magneto insensate,” I'm like, “Fuck yeah, it will.” Like that sounds awesome.

DANIEL: [laughs] Yeah. Let's see it. Let’s go.

CONNOR: So I have no problem with that. Or like, when he has Storm gives some really melodramatic speech about like, the elements she's about to summon, or when Rogue is like, “Ah can never touch anybody, because one touch and Ah will drain the life force from—” You know, I’m like, “Good. Tell me all about it.” You know?

DANIEL: Yeah.

CONNOR: It is aesthetic a lot of the time, because it's a visual medium, right?

DANIEL: Yeah. It’s a… a word I haven't used yet with Nightcrawler is iconic.

CONNOR: He is!

DANIEL: And I think that we talked a lot about how he's sort of a design-first character. And, you know, in the original you can go find the pitch, and he was not German, and he a totally different personality.

 CONNOR: He was supposed to be for The Legion of Super-Heroes!

DANIEL: Yeah, and he was gonna be a DC character. [laughs] It was pretty different. But the design was the same. So I don't think that I'm being dismissive when I say that he's kind of a look first, and then they figured out everything else over time. But you're right, Wolverine has “snikt” and Spider-Man has “thwip” and Nightcrawler has “bamf”. And then it's it's kind of hard to figure out what's number four.

CONNOR: Right. Like, those are the sound effects.

DANIEL: And it’s crazy that Nightcrawler is that high on any list in Marvel, because he's, you know, like I was sort of saying—

CONNOR: He's never been a starring character. He just never has.

DANIEL: He’s this beloved B-Lister. And you're not going to find a better B-Lister. But just don't push him much harder than that. [laughs]

CONNOR: Right. No, I think that’s right.

DANIEL: Because it gets weird. [laughs]

CONNOR: Well, speaking of really wonderful B-Listers, thank you for joining me today, Daniel Kibblesmith.

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: I would love to tell the people where they can follow you online, and what comics work of yours they might enjoy. I feel like Loki and Nightcrawler probably have a lot of fan commonality. I feel like they're both characters that are very popular with female readers, they're both sort of trickster-y characters, so the Loki ongoing you did is the first thing that jumps out to me as maybe something people should pick up. But why don’t you take it away?

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s definitely what I would give to a Nightcrawler fan. And obviously, I'm a huge fan of both characters. Well, if you wanted to find me online, I'm on all social media at @kibblesmith — although I'm trying to use it less, so you can go to kibblesmith.com or you could go to kibblesmith.substack.com, where I’m doing a newsletter, in hopes of doing a little bit less social media, because I'm starting to suspect it might not be good for us.

CONNOR: What would make you think that?

DANIEL: Oh, gosh. As for work that people might enjoy, if you feel as strongly about Nightcrawler as I do, I definitely tried to put a lot of that same kind of humor and charm and swashbuckling energy into our run on Loki, which is out in paperback. Lockjaw is really fun and it's also kind of a stealth D-Man pilot.

CONNOR: [laughs]

DANIEL: If you want to watch a sort of down on his luck guy getting over a break-up by getting a big teleporting dog. And similar fun energy, I just did a Harley Quinn digital first for Harley Quinn: Black, White, and Red with Marguerite Sauvage. So that's also a very acrobatic, kind of jokester character.

CONNOR: Playful character.

DANIEL: I’ve got a wheelhouse.

CONNOR: Yeah. No, absolutely. And I would love to see you do do something with Nightcrawler at some point; I think you’d be good at it.

DANIEL: Let's do it! People are listening.

CONNOR: Call us up! See, I'm just gonna turn this podcast into me deciding who should write what, and I'll just tell people what they should write.

DANIEL: [laughs]

CONNOR: Well, thank you again for being my guest. This is only the second episode. I appreciate you being in on the ground floor and taking a chance on me, and on this, and I'd like to thank the listeners.

You can follow Cerebro on Twitter at @CerebroCast. You can follow me there at @dreamoforgonon or on Instagram at @connorgoldsmith. I have set up a Gmail account, cerebrocast@gmail.com, where you can send comments, questions, concerns. I'm probably not going to address any of them on the air, but I'm always happy to hear from [haughty voice] the fans, which I'm assuming that we now have. After two weeks. You never know. I think it pays to to think big, right? So until next time, everybody, thanks for listening, and… bye!

[pause]

Now you say bye.

DANIEL: Oh, bye! [laughs]

CONNOR: [laughs]

[ THEME SONG OUTRO ]