By: Dave Cockrum (writer/artist), Paty (colors) & Jim Novak (letters)
The Story: Everyone’s favorite blue-furball mutant gets transported through the Well at the Center of Time to a parallel dimension full of swashbuckling pirates in airships!
What’s Good: I never see this 1985 four-issue miniseries from Marvel get any respect, but it is really a pretty hot little number if you don’t want to take your comics too seriously.
Written, penciled and inks by the late/great Dave Cockrum (who was a co-creator of Nightcrawler), this miniseries finds Nightcrawler (and Lockheed the dragon) entangled in a Danger Room mishap that zaps him into a parallel dimension that is somewhat reminiscent of the fantasy world that Kitty Pryde told of as a fairy tale in Uncanny X-Men #153. This is a world full of swashbuckling pirates and maidens-in-distress. Perfect for the noble, but impish, Nightcrawler as he finds himself enjoying being cast among a group of pirates (and teaching them to play poker) before being captured by the shark-like Shagreen the Sorcerer who becomes the villain for the miniseries (why has he never been used again???).
Throughout the story, all the characters who see Nightcrawler refer to him as “Boggie” and Lockheed as “his frumious bandersnitch”. Just what are Boggies and bandersnitches? Well, you have to read the rest of the series to find out.
In some ways, this miniseries is also a team-up/buddy-caper for Nightcrawler and Lockheed. Remember, Lockheed was still a somewhat new character and at this point and was still being written as spunky and overly-self-important tiny dragon who was always breathing fire all over things twice his size. It’s just a different team up than seeing Nightcrawler with Wolverine and it is/was fun partially because Lockheed is only partially committed to the team-up.
Cockrum is still on his game here with his artwork. His linework on Nightcrawler is really strong and his overall design work on the airships of this fantastic world are really cool. Plus, this is about the cheapest you’re going to be able to buy a Dave Cockrum-drawn X-book.
What’s Not So Good: Some parts of this are pretty dated. Most notably, this was during Kitty Pryde’s fascination with computers during the early 1980’s. I was a kid back then and it was funny how it was a nerdy-cool thing to be a “computer programmer” and movies like War Games were big hits, but it was almost impossible to do anything more than make a computer go “beep” so the idea that her programming wizardry was so great that she accidentally conjured the Well at the Center of Time into the Danger Room is a little silly. Thankfully, this is not a miniseries to be taken too seriously.
Part of the reason I think this miniseries isn’t considered a classic (by some) is that it isn’t really in continuity. I’m sure that some of that is due to the fact that Cockrum was doing the whole comic and Marvel didn’t trust him enough to tie this into “real” events. Through the plot device of time passing at different rates of time in the two universes, Nightcrawler gets to have a huge adventure in this other world while only being gone for a brief time in our world. When you compare how synced some other miniseries of the day were to the main story this was a little odd. The same era Kitty Pryde – Wolverine miniseries lasted for 6 months during which in Uncanny there was no appearance of either character because “they’re taking care of problems in Japan.” In some ways, this series was perhaps ahead of its time because it wasn’t concerned with what else was going on in the world.
Conclusion: Nightcrawler having pirate-themed high jinks with his bandersnitch (aka, Lockheed). What could be better?
Grade: B
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion