The Man Who Made the X-Men Famous Returning to Marvel’s Mutants
Nightcrawler is still in the afterlife in Amazing X-Men #3, where they seem to have pirates and swords.
While the news of the return of the much-beloved X-Men team member Nightcrawler from the dead has already generated a great deal on buzz among fans of Marvel’s mutants, yesterday in a press statement delivered one day before the solicitation for the April comic book issues, Marvel noted that Nightcrawler #1 will be written by none other than Chris Claremont.
While Claremont didn’t create the X-Men, he is credited with writing the stories from the late 1970s to the 1990s that made the assortment of mutant teams the most popular comic books in the world. X-Men #1 still holds the Guinness Book of World Records trophy for the best selling comic book of all time. Claremont wrote the “Dark Phoenix” saga and the “Days of Future Past” saga, both of which have defined the X-Men movies. Apparently even after he left Marvel’s stable in 1992, Claremont continued to write for the company on occasion, as recently as 2010 when he worked with brilliant Italian illustrator Milo Manara on a title called “X-Women.”
Claremont said in the release that the events of the schism between the Jean Gray School group of X-Men and Scott Summers’ rogue team will have a significant impact on Nightcrawler, particularly that Kitty Pryde has joined the Summers team.
“The one that comes most markedly to my mind is that Kitty [Pryde] appears to have gone over to the ‘dark side’ by leaving the school and joining up with Scott’s group,” says Claremont of what change hits Nightcrawler hardest. “To Kurt, without an explanation from Kitty herself, it would seem a fundamental violation of character, something she would never have done especially [in] Excalibur. Presumably one of his major goals would be to find out directly from her the truth behind her decision.”
Expect swashbuckling fun as Nightcrawler teams up with Wolverine. But also expect some major drama — Claremont is the man who killed Jean Gray, after all, and the man who thought it would be interesting to see a future in which Jean and Scott’s child was basically a hunting dog that had helped kill nearly all the mutants.
