You Aren't a Priest Forever: Nightcrawler vs. the Writer, Part 3

(Well, geez. Just when Bill Cork had kindly linked to my blog, and I'd gotten up a good head of steam and everything. Darn those inconvenient facts.)

Bamfette explains it all. No, Kurt Wagner was never a priest. It was all just delusions planted in his head by mind control. For at least fifty issues or more. *bangs head against desk*

And people ask me why I gave up on X-Men, or used to be so glad that Excalibur took place in England, far from the Mutant Shenanigans of the Month. It sounds as if the distortions of Catholic practice and the lack of clue on how to use Kurt's priesthood in the storyline were already so great that many readers are just glad to get shed of the plotline by any means, however idiotic.

(In case you were wondering about Bamfette's issue references, there is a comic book every week in the month which chronicles the X-Men's adventures. Uncanny X-Men is the original book and has been running since the late seventies. X-Men only started in the early nineties. The other books are The New X-Men, which is apparently Chris Claremont's return, and Ultimate X-Men, which doesn't take place in the normal Marvel universe and can be ignored for this purpose. Also bear in mind that each issue costs four or five bucks. Gee, I wonder why kids and teenagers aren't picking up the comics hobby....)

I'm glad that most of the apparent anti-Catholicism is not the result of malice, but stupidity. See, the plot only gets stupider. Mr. Austen has the schismatic Church of Humanity planting nanodevices in the communion wafers, wine and holy water in every church in America, Catholic or no, to get rid of "the religious right". (Now I start to believe that he was raised Catholic, because he apparently thinks that every Christian church uses these things.) The sheer logistics is laughable. Communion wafers and wine do not all come from one centralized factory. Holy water is made on the premises of a church. There would have to be huge numbers of Church of Humanity agents or members, something I don't think likely. And where did the nanotech come from, and how much did it cost? Even assuming help from mind control, the scope of the thing is just ridiculous -- and that's if it's just being done in the US.

But anybody who crucifies Jean Gray and Jubilee on the front lawn of Xavier's mansion (yes, that was what Austen wrote into Uncanny X-Men #243), in a 25 cent issue intended to attract kids and new readers, has obviously got an awful lot of malice and stupidity in him. Unless Marvel's comics division wants to go back to the Land of No Profit, he should go.

(But no, they'd rather lose Mark Waid.) *bang head against wall* Well, bah. I think I'll just go catch up on Ruse and try to forget what they've done to my poor Kurt.