Kieron, Baby, Make It Kurt So Good in Immortal X-Men #7

As Judgment Day rages on, Nightcrawler carries the world on his shoulders and searches for the one ray of hope that might save the world. Optimism! Immortal X-Men #7 is written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Lucas Werneck, colored by David Curiel, lettered by Clayton Cowles and designed by Tom Muller, Jay Bowen and Kieron Gillen.

Mark Turetsky: Greetings, Austin! It seems like a scant few months ago we started reviewing this, a comic with a simple premise: What if there were 12 mutants who sat in a circle and worked through their differences? Also, there’s something about one of them cloning a woman who could reset the world by dying. And yet, here we are, and it doesn’t seem like they’ve fixed much of anything. In fact, things have gotten considerably bad.

Austin Gorton: It’s just like that old saying about the best laid plans being upended by the machinations of eternal worshippers of cosmic space gods who pass judgment on humanity and set about destroying the world! As we head into the final stretches of Judgment Day (This is, I believe, the series’ last tie-in issue to that event), everyone’s favorite Quiet Council member who is a teleporting “fuzzy elf” gets the spotlight, Nightcrawler!

Mark: Did you just hear a *BAMF*?

Anna Peppard: He who smelt it dealt it! (I am so sorry.) Anyway, you know what’s better than smelling Bamfs? Watching B.A.M.F.s be big damn superheroes when it’s all on the line. 

Mark: Oh gosh! It’s ComicsXF’s resident Ph.D. in Nightcrawlerology, Anna Peppard!

Plan A

Mark: First off, our title page is, err, slightly wrong. It says it takes place after A.X.E.: Judgment Day #5, and while I’d say it should definitely be read after that issue, most of it, except for the last few pages, takes place during that issue. That aside, I’d like to talk a bit about who we’ve gotten as POV characters during this crossover: Exodus, Sebastian Shaw and Nightcrawler. Obviously, Sinister is the cast member of Immortal (one could argue that he and Destiny are the two leads of Immortal) that’s most involved in the main events of the crossover, so he’s kind of spoken for over there. Given the event’s, shall we say, Catholic vibe, it makes sense to have Exodus narrate the more Crusade-y bit early on. And since that big POV issue he’s been put to good use, albeit elsewhere (check out this week’s A.X.E.: Death to the Mutants for more). Here, we’ve got the other notably Catholic character (though many of his biggest fans — you, Anna, included, I’m sure — would say his religion has been given too much prominence lately), less focused on the holy war, more focused on heroism despite seemingly impossible odds.

Anna: This is definitely a comic book about religion, and Nightcrawler’s religiosity is clearly relevant (so much of what he does here is informed by his belief in the power of sacrifice). However, it’s also a very good example of how to write religiosity well, which is to say with character-driven complexity. Kurt’s version of faith includes plenty of stuff other people (including other Catholic mutants like Exodus) would find blasphemous. But that’s Nightcrawler for you — he’s always thumbed his blue nose at orthodoxies and done things his way. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen Kurt Wagner perform the part of Kurt Wagner quite this magnificently. This comic book made me tear up a little, and then smile a lot, and then put aside a bunch of other stuff I should have been doing to write some words about it because I couldn’t let this momentous occasion pass without commemorating it. This is a comic book I can point to and say — this. This is why I love this character, and why you should love him, too.

Austin: One of the things Gillen does really well in this series is create and explore unexpected character pairings, like Hope and Exodus. Here, we get a brief exchange between Nightcrawler and Shaw, two characters I’ve never really considered as connected in any way. But Gillen sets them up as thematic opposites in the opening pages, the eternal optimist vs. the avatar of “disaster capitalism.” It’s both a clever way to define both characters in opposition to each other and a neat bit of connective tissues with last issue’s Shaw-centric focus (I also love how Emma, no optimist but not as self-serving as Shaw, gets in on the gambling action Shaw offered Nightcrawler). 

Mark: It also makes me wonder how much of the crisis that the event opened with (humanity has learned about mutant resurrection and is pissed) will be swept under the rug after this. Is the Krakoan foreign aid really going to settle tensions enough? The fact that the latest Orchis pamphlet (designed by Kieron Gillen; I wonder, did he get paid for the page of art?) has shifted from raging about resurrection to “mutants could wipe us all out whenever they want to” seems to maybe point in that direction. Over the last few years, we’ve seen humanity depressingly willing to accept ever-more-awful “new normals,” so maybe, save for a bit of resentment, the people of the 616 will just grudgingly accept that Krakoans can resurrect. Speaking of that Orchis pamphlet, did it give you the vibe of those X-Men Marvel House ads from the 80s? 

Austin: Oh, absolutely. Something about the font of the text, the use of pre-existing (if slightly altered) images it’s overlaid on, it all had that vibe. “It’s not too late, get Orchistrated!” is a great pun to close on, very Kieron Gillen. To your point, I wonder if the resurrection of Captain America (depicted both here and in Judgment Day proper) is also meant to help point toward the path forward in terms of the mutant resurrection stuff: If they’re not just hoarding it exclusively for mutant use, it might be more acceptable to the world at large. 

Plan B

Mark: Let’s discuss that resurrection, because we see a bit of the “behind the scenes” planning of it. It turns out that inspiring the world through Captain America isn’t truly effective against an angry god that didn’t even ask to be born, and they’ll need to go forward with Plan B, the one “that had Irene trembling.” As a trope, I don’t always love when point-of-view characters know more than they tell the reader, but it’s necessary here to avoid breaking the story entirely. If this tie-in told us how Judgment Day would end, that wouldn’t be very satisfying, would it? Still, I much prefer scenes of revelation, like Irene’s vision of the future in issue #3, to this kind of “and then she told me precisely how we get through this” elision.

Austin: There is something fun in watching the character execute the plan and coming to realize what it is they’re doing. There’s a lot of talk about how afraid of “Plan B” Destiny is, and kudos to Lucas Werneck for managing to depict that sense of fear in Destiny despite the fact that she’s wearing a static metal mask. As the focus of the issue widens to incorporate more of the events from Judgment Day #5, we also get a legitimately sweet moment of Mystique and Destiny together just before their deaths. With the continuity of the resurrection process somewhat in doubt, there’s a little more actual fear to be felt here, and Gillen ties it back in to Nightcrawler’s outlook by framing it as an act of hope on Destiny’s part: Just like her previous death, she dies now in the hope that this death is necessary to ensure she and Mystique will ultimately be together. It’s a darker kind of optimism than Kurt’s, but it fits his de facto stepmom. 

Anna: Can I jump in and say how gosh darn much I have been enjoying Gillen writing Mystique, Destiny and Nightcrawler as a family? A family wherein people might hate each other and occasionally try to kill each other, but still — he’s writing these bonds as a real thing, which is something we rarely get to see with Kurt and Mystique let alone Kurt and Destiny. I don’t know if Destiny likes Kurt, but on some level, she trusts him. And I found that very touching.  

Mark: There’s doubt that there will be a world to be resurrected into, but let’s not forget how very recently it was that Professor X tried to underhandedly remove Mystique and Destiny from the Quiet Council. Luckily for them, the power balance has shifted since the beginning of this series, and they’re pinning their hopes on Hope more than Xavier at this point, but he remains a powerful political voice. The scene of their deaths on Krakoa reminded me of the climax of Watchmen, the synthesis of the Hiroshima lovers. 

On the other side of the ongoing Immortal X-Men drama, we have Sinister treating the world as if it were a game of Grand Theft Auto that he could grief his way through, since he plans on using a save point. When he returns to his bolthole, his turtle UI informs him he can’t upload his data into the Moira clone and, curiouser still, his rifle is empty when he tries to “reset” one of the clones. Is it sabotage? So far, we only know about Destiny being aware of Sinister’s experiments with the Moira clones. Could she have done this? Or is someone else at work here? Suffice it to say the Sinister we see invading the Celestial in the A.X.E: X-Men, Avengers and Eternals one-shots has been cut off from some of his safety nets.

Austin: I am deeply curious about what is inhibiting Sinister from saving and restarting the game, and whether this will become a Judgment Day plot point or stay an Immortal X-Men one alone. I’m also curious to see if this change is reflected in Sinister in later appearances in the crossover, if his devil-may-care bravado fades now that he doesn’t have full control over the continuation of reality.

But those are questions for another day, as now it’s time to watch Kurt put Plan B into action!

Fingertips, Fingertips, Fingertips…

Anna: In this comic, as in my heart, Kurt Wagner is a character centrally defined by goodness and hope, but that goodness and hope isn’t naïve, simplistic or silly. It is hard-fought, reckless and deeply heroic. This is a comic book in which Kurt sacrifices his life at least seven times in quick succession, via live backups that mean he feels and remembers the pain of being repeatedly incinerated, for the sake of laying a single fingertip on Nimrod, which is all he needs to save the world (for a while, maybe). And of course he looks fabulous doing it. In the panel in question, he’s posed as either God or Adam from Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” fresco, but upside down with swoopy hair and a devil’s tail. Apocalyptic stakes can’t stop a flamboyant mutant swashbuckler from swashbuckling. If anything, it makes him swashbuckle harder. Kurt is rarely not sporting a devilish grin in this story steeped in death and destruction. Which is a note-perfect character read if you understand that Kurt’s performances have always had a dark edge.

Way back in X-Men #109 (1978), Scott Summers puts down Kurt by telling him, “Life isn’t all swashbuckling adventure and circus stunts.” In response, Kurt gets angry and gives a speech about his approach to life, as a guy who was born blue and furry and had to learn pretty quickly to either accept himself or “go mad.” Then he says a line I’ve always loved, which I think applies to this comic: “Though I am now occasionally crazy, I am not insane.” You see, Kurt’s swashbuckling isn’t actually silly. It’s actually pretty serious, because embracing the impossible is something that helps him survive. And here, in this story, it helps mutants and the whole world survive. Which is why it’s such a beautiful testament to why this character matters — to folks like me, to this event and to this franchise as a whole.

Mark: A few things about this sequence: First, it’s a huge flex on the X-Force team in Inferno #1. Where that issue began with the 16th attempt to destroy the Orchis forge with no luck, it led to a greater defeat: It revealed the limitations of Krakoan resurrection to their enemies. Here, Kurt, as a one-man invasion squad, has Xavier, well, live-streaming his consciousness, ready to download it into new bodies, with Magik standing by to send him to new spawn points on the fly. It’s the sort of thing that Gillen thinks up because of video games. Kurt manages a victory that Logan, Domino and Quentin Quire couldn’t get anywhere near because of a lateral kind of thinking. He’s used to teleporting as an everyday activity, so he makes the most of Magik’s mutant power. Cerebro produces a gap in memory because of the age of the backup? Well, what’s stopping you from tightening that gap?

Second, it’s clear that Destiny didn’t tell Kurt all of the plan, because he independently decides to recruit Moira.

Austin: I love the quiet reveal that the reason Destiny is petrified of this plan is because it involves Moira. Like, Inferno was more or less a victory for Destiny and a loss for Moira, but Destiny still fears her. It’s also another great expression of his character that Kurt is the one who implements this plan. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a notion that borders on cliché, but it’s the kind of thinking that would appeal to Kurt, the notion that despite their (murderous, hateful) differences, Moira would be willing to help the X-Men in the name of survival. 

Mark: The question is when will Moira’s part be played? The only Judgment Day material that’s left is issue #6 of the main series and the Omega issue, and while she could show up in either of those, it seems a bit late to be introducing a new element into the main Judgment Day mini, doesn’t it? But enough about the tie-in machinations, this was a really fun issue!

Anna: I love what you said, Mark, about Kurt’s teleportation powers giving him the unique perception necessary for this mission. I really appreciated how it’s a Kurt issue in form as well as function. Kurt’s uncannily acrobatic body and mutant power of teleportation defy space and time. So do comics, of course, which represent time as space and can do a lot of kooky things with that state of affairs. We ricochet all over the dang place in this issue, both emotionally and physically. Kurt seems to rocket through the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) at the speed of bamfs and out of order, but in context, it feels convincing. And the monologue helps ground us amid the chaos, explaining Kurt’s thought process without being didactic. Kurt’s not an omniscient narrator of his own life; he’s figuring it out as he goes, wondering if the world’s worth saving even as he repeatedly gives his life to save it. Those contradictions are yet another element of this comic that sang to me of my love for Kurt Wagner. Kurt can be a very contradictory character, but good comics understand the contradictions don’t negate each other. They inform each other, which is exactly what happens here. Kurt’s hopeful because he isn’t; he’s reckless because he’s smart; he’s awesome because he has to be. 

All of which is a long-winded way of saying — I really love Nightcrawler, you guys. Thanks so much for letting me bamf in to yell about him with you. <3

X-Traneous Thoughts

• The scene where Kurt drops Destiny to force her to talk is similar to a scene from Way of X #4, but the context and execution are different. Here, it’s not a strong-arm tactic so much as a way for Kurt to convince Destiny he’s willing to do whatever it takes, which is what convinces her to trust him with the information he needs. It feels, in other words, clever rather than cruel.
• Also, Kurt referring to Destiny as his “evil stepmom” was legit funny for its blunt accuracy.
• The one-panel shot of Nightcrawler standing in the center of the empty council chamber before leaving to implement the “Captain America plan,” as he ponders whether the world truly deserves to live, is a small but effective moment that shows Nightcrawler isn’t above self-examination and moments of doubt. 
• Kurt: “I would do this naked if I had to.” Yes. Yes, he would.
• Kurt got a sample of Cap’s blood. … Does that mean Sinister now has a sample of the super soldier serum to put into his bag of tricks. Is there any reason to doubt that he’s always had it?
• Moira is often shown with one glowing eye, a nice parallel to the Progenitor’s glowing eye, a repeated visual motif throughout the event.
• When Nightcrawler finally gets close to Moira and greets her as his old friend and new enemy, it was hard not to think of their time on Muir Island together in the original volume of Excalibur (and then be sad). 
• This puts us at at least three visual references to Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” in Immortal X-Men.
• Something that’s easy to miss: Nimrod is on Kurt’s spaceship, behind him and Moira. Is Nimrod standing? Could Nimrod fit in a chair?
• Next issue: the Mystique issue! Guess she doesn’t stay dead after all!

Mark Turetsky

Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana.

Austin Gorton

Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton

Anna Peppard

Anna is a PhD-haver who writes and talks a lot about representations of gender and sexuality in pop culture, for academic books and journals and places like Shelfdust, The Middle Spaces, and The Walrus. She’s the editor of the award-winning anthology Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero and co-hosts the podcasts Three Panel Contrast and Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow!