For some strange reason Marvel Comic’s new shipping plan involves mostly every X-book released in one week, with the next issues of Uncanny X-men, X-men Legacy, X-Factor, Young X-men, X-Force, Wolverine: Origins and X-men: Kingbreaker all being released next Wednesday. This puts Marvel in a strange position, with a hell of a lot of X-books next week, how are they going to please X-fans this week? Their answer is by releasing only one mainstream X-book, a Nightcrawler one-shot that was solicited as “the departure of Nightcrawler from the X-men…forever!”

When “X-men Quitting Time” (what this issue was originally named) was solicited I was upset because Kurt has always been one of my favorite X-men of all time mostly due to my first exposure to the X-men was by playing as Nightcrawler on one of those old coin-op X-men arcade games based on the old cartoon (good times). But I decided to reserve judgment on the decision until I read the issue. I was divided, from a story standpoint Kurt shouldn’t quit the X-men because the mutant race needs the X-men now more than ever especially with many major villains returning in X-force (including Kurt’s half-brother Graydon Creed) and facing certain extinction. But on the other hand Nightcrawler arguably hasn’t been through any interesting stories since Warren Ellis’ Excalibur run in the mid-90’s. Between the Kurt’s priesthood that led to my least favorite X-men story of all time (Chuck Austen’s “Holy War”) the true identity of Kurt’s father in my second least favorite X-men story (“The Draco”…yeah, not a Chuck Austen fan) and an ongoing that didn’t move the character in any visible direction this past decade has not been too kind to Kurt. Ultimately I believed that there is no such thing as uninteresting characters only uninteresting writers, I was in the “don’t quit” boat. Fanboy rant aside, how was the issue itself.