- Nightcrawler, the German, demon-like,
former circus acrobat is a popular member of the X-Men
with the mutant power of teleportation
and a prehensile tail, perfect for swashbuckling.
He's an easily recognizable character
and one of Marvel's more popular mutants.
But before joining the X-Men,
this fairy blue elf was almost a DC character.
(upbeat action music)
It's X-Men week here at NerdSync,
and we'll be taking a look at the real origins
of some of your favorite mutants, like Storm, Wolverine,
and in this video, Nightcrawler.
They each joined the X-Men in the same issue
at the same time when the X-Men needed to be revitalized.
You see, X-Men wasn't Marvel's best seller back in the day.
It did okay, but it was nowhere near as popular
as Spiderman or Fantastic Four.
With Issue 66, Marvel had canceled the book.
A few months later, Marvel started printing new issues
but the stories inside were just reprints of older issues.
This was the state of the X-Men from about 1970 to 1975
until Marvel's then Editor-in-Chief, Roy Thomas,
wanted to bring the X-Men back with a twist.
In 1975, Giant-Size X-Men number one
was released to the world,
featuring a new team of mutants from countries
all around the globe, like Germany, Kenya, Russia,
Japan, and Canada to name a few.
Nightcrawler, of course, was the one from Germany
and to understand how he was almost a DC character,
we have to take a look at one of his co-creators,
David Cockrum.
Cockrum was working at DC Comics
as an artist for their book Legion of Superheroes
about a young team of superheroes that took place
in the future.
There was a cartoon about it once, it was, I don't know,
probably fine. I didn't really watch it.
Either way, during his run on Legion,
Cockrum pitched a spin-off book called "The Outsiders"
which would center around a team consisting of heroes
who were rejected from the Legion
and formed their own separate squad,
like that one episode of the cartoon
where they had the Legion of Substitute Heroes
whose powers were deemed too useless
to actually help in battle,
but they teamed up and saved the day together anyway.
I promise I didn't actually watch the show.
The team he proposed for The Outsiders
were two characters who had somewhat been established before
named Reflecto and Power Boy,
teamed up with some new characters
like the winged bird lady, Quetzal,
the weather-controlling typhoon, a character named Trio,
and finishing up the roster is none other
than Nightcrawler himself, looking pretty much identical
to his Marvel counterpart that would debut later.
Looks aside, the backstory of this character
was gonna be pretty different.
Cockrum explains in the excellent "Comics Creators on X-Men"
that he came up with the idea of Nightcrawler
when he was visiting Guam with his first wife.
They were caught in the middle of a terrible storm,
like an actual storm, we're discussing her tomorrow,
anyway they decided to keep distracted from the storm
by making up superheroes,
as I'm sure all couples do, I assume.
Cockrum thought up a character called "The Intruder"
who he explained was "kind of like a cross between
The Punisher and Batman" which does sound pretty cool.
(cough)
Moon Knight
(cough)
Excuse me.
The Intruder was also going to have a demon sidekick.
This sidekick's story was that he was sent on a mission
from Hell, but kind of screwed it up.
So instead of going back to Hell
and facing the consequences of his failings,
the demon decided to stay on Earth,
hanging out with The Intruder.
This demon's name was, you guessed it, Nightcrawler.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately,
Jack Kirby's The Demon was released at DC around this time
so as to not seem like a copycat,
Cockrum dropped Nightcrawler's demon angle,
probably in favor of making him some kind of alien
when he proposed the character to be a Legionaire.
But the editor of the book, Murray Boltinoff,
rejected the idea of Nightcrawler,
saying, according to Cockrum,
that "the character was too funny looking
and would offend the readers."
Cockrum would later use Nightcrawler again
in his pitch for The Outsiders,
but DC never took him up on that idea.
They did eventually make an Outsiders team,
but that was like a decade down the line,
completely different, let's not really dwell on it.
Not long after though, Cockrum had a big fight
with Boltinoff and left to go work at Marvel
where he would soon land a gig working on
Giant-Size X-Men.
Roy Thomas tasked Cockrum with creating
new mutants for the team.
Thomas had a general idea of what he was looking for
but Cockrum pretty much said, "I got this,"
as he and Len Wein started putting together
a new team of mutants, including Colossus, Banshee,
Wolverine, Storm, Thunderbird, Sunfire, and Nightcrawler.
Since the idea for the team was to have characters
from different corners of the world,
Nightcrawler gained a German heritage
and alter ego, Kurt Wagner.
With his debut appearance, the fuzzy elf's personality
was slightly different than how we might know him today.
He was more serious, more animalistic.
He howled whenever he would defeat an enemy, for example.
Pretty quickly though, they changed the character
to be a little bit more fun and easy-going.
Interestingly, as they were pitching ideas for new X-Men,
Cockrum came up with bat-like character named Vampyre
with a "Y" but some of the others involved
with getting this new X team off the ground
thought that Vampyre and Nightcrawler looked too similar,
so they had to choose only one.
Cockrum preferred Nightcrawler, and that's who we got.
And that's pretty much how Nightcrawler was created,
but I'm curious what you think.
Would you have liked to see Nightcrawler's initial origin
as a demon sidekick?
Or perhaps a member of the Legion of Superheroes?
Or are you just glad the blue dude has found a place
on the X-Men?
Let's talk about it all in the comments.
We're doing a whole week of X-Men videos here at NerdSync
so hit that big, sexy subscribe button
so you don't miss out on any of them.
We'll have links in the description below
to the other videos as they are released,
or if you're watching this video in the mysterious future,
you can click right here to learn the real origin
behind Storm and how she was an amalgamation
of five distinct comic book characters.
Or you can click right here to learn about
how Wolverine, this is true,
was almost a real, literal wolverine.
My name is Scott reminding you to read between the panels
and grow smarter through comics.
See ya.