The Kurt Wagner comeback continues!
Wolverine is leading a squad through Heaven and Hell to bring back their fallen friend back from beyond in the first arc of Amazing X-Men by Jason Aaron. After his resurrection Kurt will star in a new ongoing series by legendary X-writer Chris Claremont and artist Todd Nauck.
The new creative team revealed their plans for the fan-favorite hero and art from Nightcrawler #1 on Marvel.com.
“He’s smart, tough, creative [and] daring, with an instinctive understanding of people and situations,” says Claremont of the star. “He has a wicked sense of humor and a devastating charm. As his body’s designed well outside the box of human experience, so too are his thought processes. His ‘normal’ is revolutionary to most people; throw him a problem, he’ll find a way to solve it that’s unique to him. He quite simply is the kind of man [who] others trust; to know him is to have faith in him.”
Wolverine will join Kurt on his adventures in this new series. Since Kurt died in Second Coming back when a united X-Men lived on Utopia, there have been some seismic changes. Claremont says Nightcrawler is returning to a very different dynamic among his Children of the Atom.
“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 will hit 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.”
“If we presume that the Kurt who returns to the land of the living is fundamentally the same man who departed years ago, why would the experience affect his friendship with Logan at all?” questions Claremont. “If anything, given how the two of them relate, it might cherish their time together as friends and teammates all the more.
“By the same token, it might also fundamentally affect how Kurt relates to combat; knowing there is an afterlife and an implicit judgment of the individual soul might make him more reluctant to take another’s life, or it might make him even more determined to protect the innocent. Either way, it gives the storyteller something nice to play with.”
I wanted to share this for two big reasons. Nightcrawler is my favorite X-Man and Chris Claremont wrote the first comic book I ever read – which was an issue of Uncanny X-Men!
Nightcrawler #1 bamfs into comic book shops this April.
By Editor