Preview: NIGHTCRAWLER #12

It's been completely awful with not even one decent issue, but at least it's finally over. I think it will be a while before we get another Nightcrawler ongoing with how this series was handled.

@teerack: Agreed. I am a huge Nightcrawler fan but was disappointed not only with the story but also the art. It felt like Chris and Todd weren't really trying to do anything special with the book. Kind of a 'well we gotta do something' series. The series could have gone in so many directions but the whole student-teacher thing with Nightcrawler just didn't peak my interest, especially given how much I liked the first arc of Amazing X-Men which re-introduced Nightcrawler.

The art looked old and the story telling and dialog was also incredibly archaic. It felt like when comics were so young they weren't sure how smart they could write then and they would literally just have the characters say what is going on every two seconds. Like there would be someone like "There they are get them." and then the next page would be like "They see us, they're coming to get us we need to get out of here!" literally almost every dialog bubble or thought box was a redundancy.

Also the way the characters talked in this book and the overall characterization of the X-Men was as if the writer of this book stopped reading X-Men after his original run in the 80's and then just did zero research to fill in the two decades of character evolution in the time since.

Also, given what Marvel was experimenting with when this series got green-lit (Ms. Marvel being Muslim, Female Thor, etc), why the hell didn't they think about adding these social-issue driven themes into this book. We have a blue-tailed man, who just came back from the dead and then loses one of his best friends (Wolverine). Yet the story was about nightcrawler being a teacher again. That's what they are doing in All New X-Men and Uncanny X-men. We don't need 3 series with the same theme but just different teachers.

Personally, I would have liked to see Nightcrawler go a completely different route. Maybe questioning God (for bringing him back and taking Wolverine) and then maybe leaving the X-men all together (I know it's been done in Excalibur, but this time he would be solo). Kind of similar to what Storm is doing but not so much about helping people, but questioning his purpose as not a mutant but a human.

@ovi08: I wanted them to do something more about him as a person and less about him as a super hero. If they had gone with a story more like Hawkeye or Ant-Man it could have been amazing. Using a simple stylize art style like Aja's could have also been amazing for the Bamfs which could have had a big part of the way the pages were laid out.

But oh well the X-Men over all have just been decades behind the rest of Marvel. It seems like every since Civil War everything else kept changing and getting more modern while the X-Men were just stuck and falling behind. Bendis was the first new hope of changing the X-Men from just super hero books to books focused around their characters and joining the modern era of comic story telling, but because his books were derailed by event tie ins over and over everyone just complained until he just gave up and is now leaving the x-men which is a massive shame.

I'm really conflicted here, I'm sorry to see the series go because I like having a Nightcrawler series, but also I'm glad to see that the character isn't going to get damaged any more by Claremont. I agree with what everyone said about it feeling less like a solo for Kurt and more like another generic X-Book. It's just sad that this is the second Nightcrawler series to end at 12 issues, I'm not sure he'll ever be able to catch a break.