What happened in “The Draco,” and how did the storyline almost ruin one of the best X-Men?
Nightcrawler is a long-time member of the X-Men and one of their most visually distinct heroes, but while he represents a lot of the best parts of X-Men as a franchise, that doesn’t mean his history is flawless. Revelations about his character history actually almost risked undoing the best elements of the veteran X-Man.
So how exactly did one infamous story in X-Men history, “The Draco,” which ran through Uncanny X-Men #428 – 434 by Chuck Austen, Sean Phillips, Phillip Tan, Takeshi Miyazawa, and Avalon Studios, almost ruin Nightcrawler?
“The Draco” opens over 20 years ago, when the shape-shifting mutant Mystique had taken on a human disguise and had become the wife of a wealthy German Baron named Christian Wagner. Things changed when she met Herr Azazel, a wealthy associate of her husband. Drawn to the mysterious man, Mystique slept with him, conceiving a son that would grow up to be Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler. Forced to kill her husband to hide her infidelity, Mystique wasn’t able to hide the infant Kurt’s appearance and even reverts to her own natural blue skin color upon giving birth. She was forced to abandon Kurt to save herself.
Decades later, Kurt finds himself drawn to Isla des Demonas, along with other mutants gifted with teleportation powers. Together, they are able to raise a portal to a hellish dimension, sucking in the handful of survivors along with the other recently arrived X-Men. The group is captured by Azazel and his allies, where he reveals not only is he Nightcrawler’s father but that he’s also essentially Satan or at least someone who inspired the stories of Satan. He claims to have even rivaled Mephisto for that inspiration before he’d been banished to the “Brimstone Dimension.” He and his demonic mutant horde, the Neyaphem, were early mutants from thousands of years ago, who had been sealed away by a group of angelic-looking mutants for their crimes.