WARNING: The following contains minor spoilers for X-Men #6, by Jonathan Hickman, Matteo Buffangi, Sunny Gho, VC’s Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller, on sale now.
Right now, Nightcrawler's origin isn't a mystery. However, that wasn't the case for the first few decades of his existence. While the questions surrounding Kurt Wagner's beginnings were never quite as prominent as Wolverine's famously mysterious origins with the Weapon X Program, they were still a concern for quite some time.
By now, it's common knowledge that Mystique is Kurt's mother, but before that was confirmed, several familiar Marvel characters were considered as his potential parents. Now, we're going to take a look back at everyone who was almost one of Nightcrawler's parents, and how those revelations played out.
NIGHTMARE
Early in his seminal run as the X-Men's writer Chris Claremont wanted to reveal the devious ruler of the dream dimension, Nightmare, as Nightcrawler's father. However, Nightmare was mainly a Doctor Strange villain, and Roger Stern, who was writing Strange's book at the time, didn't like Claremont's idea.
In Back Issue #29, "Nightcrawler's Two Dads and the Owl That Could Have Been," Stern recalled when the idea was first pitched to him. "I replied with something like, 'No, he's not. I'm not going to let you appropriate one of my character's major villains,'" he said. "As I recall, Len Wein crossed the room and shook my hand. And not too long after that, I did become the X-Men editor and was able to make sure that didn't happen for long enough that Chris eventually changed his mind."
MYSTIQUE
Mystique was originally teased as Nightcrawler's mother when they first met in Uncanny X-Men #142, by Claremont and John Byrne. When Nightcrawler sees Mystique's blue form he remarks how alike they are. Mystique knows him by name, which startles Kurt and prompts him to ask who she is. Mystique replies, "Ask your mother, Margali Szardos. Who would know better than she?" Later, Mystique confides in Destiny that she wasn't able to harm Nightcrawler, once again hinting at a deeper connection between the two.
In Claremont and John Romita Jr.'s Uncanny X-Men #177, Amanda Sefton, Kurt's step-sister, says Margali found Kurt next to the body of his deceased father. A few years after that 1984 story, Marvel Age Preview announced that Excalibur creators Claremont and Alan Davis would work on a biographical graphic novel about Kurt Wagner that would include details about his birth and his connection to Mystique.
While that project never materialized, several other hints to Mystique's involvement in Kurt's parentage are given over the years, but none were concrete until 1994's X-Men Unlimited #4, by Scott Lobdell and Richard Bennett, which saw Mystique explicitly tell Kurt that she was his mother, and revealed the circumstances of his birth.
Mystique tells Kurt that she was the pampered widow of a German bureaucrat. When the townspeople found out she was a mutant and that her son bared a striking resemblance to a demon, they chased her with pitchforks. "I was too weak to stand and fight," she says. "I realized I had a choice. I could die with my unwanted child in my arms...or I could save myself at the expense of my newborn son." With that in mind, she threw him down a raging waterfall to save herself.
At that point, Mystique took the form of a local farmer and told the townspeople that she killed "the woman" and her child.
X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler by Marc Bernadin and Adam Freeman tells a different story, suggesting the information that Mystique and her mutant-hating son, Graydon Creed, gave Nightcrawler was unreliable.
In this iteration, Margali tells Kurt the story of his birth, saying one thing while the image shows another. While she lies about Kurt's mother being a beautiful, brave and wise woman, the panels show Mystique gently placing Kurt in a nearby river to save him instead of violently throwing him into raging rapids, as she did in X-Men Unlimited #4.
THE LAST OF THE ELFBURGS
In Claremont and June Brigman's Uncanny X-Men #204, Nightcrawler rescued from Arcade a woman named Judith Rassendyll, who learned she was the last of the Elfburgs and heir to the throne of Ruritania.
In Marvel Age #36, that issue was solicited with the description, "Nightcrawler deals with his fears about the Beyonder, a love-life that's falling apart, and the truth about himself and his origin."
In Comics Focus #1, Claremont elaborated on that abandoned story, saying, "We started to do his origin and the story died on us. We set up, we started it rolling, tried to hammer it into something of value, and it died... So, we rewrote the ending of the story and instead did one with Rachel Summers, Wolverine and the Hellfire Club, which led up to the 'Mutant Massacre', which turned out to be a much more powerful and effective storyline."
In Uncanny X-Men #206, Nightcrawler chooses not to go with Judith to Ruritania. The unfinished arc raised a lot of questions for many readers, such as the identity of who hired Arcade to kill Judith. As "How Would You Fix..?" notes, it was likely someone who didn't want her to take the throne of the European nation.
MYSTIQUE AND DESTINY
For the most part, Mystique being half of Kurt's parentage was always understood to some degree, but the other part of Claremont's original equation wasn't. He wanted Mystique to be Kurt's father while Irene Adler (Destiny) was his mother. Concerns with Marvel and the Comics Code were often cited as reasons why that origin never became canon.
Scott Lobdell, who wrote X-Men Unlimited #4, explained his reasoning for abandoning Claremont's idea in 1995: "It was always Chris' plan that Mystique and Irene Adler (Destiny) were lovers, and that Mystique at one point had transformed into a man and impregnated Destiny and she gave birth to Nightcrawler. So Mystique and Destiny were actually Nightcrawler's father and mother."
He added that the likelihood of Mystique's powers allowing her to feasibly do that were "pretty slim." Thus, he instead decided to make Kurt's father a wealthy German man.
Though Mystique and Destiny had been confirmed as lovers years prior, it wasn't until 2019 that the two were finally shown sharing a kiss on panel. Most recently, in X-Men #6, it was revealed that the pair was actually married at some point.
MYSTIQUE AND AZAZEL
In 2003, one of the most infamous Uncanny X-Men stories, "The Draco," by Chuck Austen, Phillip Tan and Sean Phillips, added another wrinkle to Nightcrawler's history. That new origin revealed that Mystique was married to a wealthy German man, Baron Christian Wagner, but the couple was unable to have children. Raven engaged in various affairs, but her most notable entanglement was with Azazel.
He was a member of an ancient demonic race of mutants known as the Neyaphem, who were mostly banished to another dimension by a race of angelic mutants. During their affair, Raven became pregnant with Azazel's child.
When she gave birth, the boy had black hair, yellow eyes, blue skin and a forked tail. To make matters worse, as she was giving birth, Mystique reverted to her blue form.
That caused the locals to revolt, naming both Mystique and Kurt demons and attempting to kill them. Mystique then dropped Kurt off a cliff into a riverbank as she made her escape, cursing Azazel as she did so.
For now, the canon remains that Mystique is Kurt's mother and Azazel is his father, and that he was subsequently found and raised by Maragli Szardos. Although this story drew considerable criticism upon release, it set up the accepted status quo for Nightcrawler's origin that still stands almost 20 years later.