Chris Claremont, Nightcrawler return to X-Men

by Jeremy DeFatta

It looks like we have more big news coming out of the comics industry this week, this time from Marvel: Chris Claremont (who is responsible for most of what you think of when you hear X-Men) will be writing an ongoing series featuring Nightcrawler beginning this April. Read more about it here.

I’m excited to hear about this, being as this can be a great writer/character pair.

Claremont is responsible for a lot of goodness in the X-Men universe, and two of his most recognizable stories are Days of Future Past (soon to be a big deal of a movie from Fox) and The Dark Phoenix Saga (which anyone else who grew up with the old X-Men cartoon will likely remember vividly). He is also the co-creator of such characters as Emma Frost (former White Queen of the Hellfire Club) and Mr. Sinister, both of whom have experienced a sort of renaissance of interest in recent years. He also co-created Rogue, my favorite of Wolverine’s “little sister” characters. See here for more about his tenure at Marvel.

I feel that Nightcrawler is one of those characters you either love or you hate. Personally, I love him. He’s often presented as the moral compass of the X-Men and demonstrates a naturally merciful outlook on life, despite the fact that (given the very visible nature of his mutation) he has experienced a great deal more persecution over the course of his life than many of his teammates. Another telling trait is his friendship with Wolverine—he is one of the first people to accept the savage Canadian as a rational human being, all appearances at this point to the contrary.

Intriguingly, both Claremont and Nightcrawler have been absent from the X-Men roster for awhile now, though Nightcrawler is making his comeback in Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness’s Amazing X-Men after a shocking death several years ago in the Second Coming storyline featuring the mutant messiah, Hope. These are likely still available at your local comic shops.

I highly recommend checking out Claremont’s body of work and all the other stories I’ve mentioned in this post. Go ahead and subscribe to Claremont’s Nightcrawler beginning in April; I know I will! Tweet me @quaintjeremy. Let me know your thoughts below.

image: Bampire/DeviantArt