As one book begins, another ends.  Nightcrawler is the last survivor - or, more accurately, the last to die - from the wave of new launches that brought us Rogue, Gambit and Jubilee. 

Then again, the only reason it outlasted them all was that Marvel took Nightcrawler off the shelves for several months to re-tool it.  It made no difference - it's yet another unwanted C-list X-book, dead at issue #12.

Back in the days when comics were frequently cancelled mid-storyline at short notice, you used to get a lot of final issues like this one.  Nightcrawler reflects on the events of the last arc, and then Mephisto turns up to patiently explain the plot to him.  Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa obligingly tells us where he was heading with all this, and how Nightcrawler is apparently going to be a major player in a mystical war.  Of course, he doesn't actually try and do the whole mystical war in 22 pages, so we're left with Nightcrawler declining an offer from Mephisto and the war still pending.

This sort of ending can just about work if the lead character isn't otherwise in use, in which case readers may prepared to accept that the promised conflict is actually going to happen even if they won't get to see it.  But Nightcrawler is still a title character in Uncanny X-Men, so not only will we never see the big mystical conflict in this issue, but we'll also see it Not Happening in Uncanny X-Men too.  Of course, back in the old days somebody would have obligingly spent an issue of Uncanny, or perhaps an annual, wrapping up the storyline properly, but those days are gone.  (Which, in some ways, is unfortunate.)

Anyhow, despite generally lovely art from Darick Robertson, the Nightcrawler series has to go down as a misfire.  The decision to position Kurt as a mystical character was somewhat understandable in so far as it made this book distinctive among the other X-books.  But it just doesn't work as an angle for the character, who isn't mystical at all.  In a more subtle way, Aguirre-Sacasa has fallen into the same trap as Chuck Austen, by missing the fundamental irony that Nightcrawler looks like a demon but isn't one at all. 

If there's an audience for a Nightcrawler solo title - which I doubt, partly because of market conditions at the moment and partly because he's the sort of bonding character who works much better in team books - then it's a comic about a fun, swashbuckling hero.  This title deserves some credit for at least trying something different with him, but rather than hitting on a previous unexplored side of the character, it simply yanked him into a genre where he didn't belong in the slightest.

Rating: B-

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