A normal comic is under a great weight of awful responsibility. It publishes serially but continuously, so that, in issue 65432, it must at once cater to readers who have been with it since the very first page of issue 1 but also consider people who have never read a previous issue nor heard of any of the characters.
It is a rather constraining box. Thinking within a box (of some sort) may improve one's creativity, but this one is a little tight. I like a good mini-series more. The Nightcrawler mini-ish series ("Limited Series" I suppose) isn't for someone who doesn't know that Wolverene has three claws coming out of the back of his hand (or fist, depending on your artist), or that he has friends called Cyclops and Storm because you will be introduced to a good dozen of characters really quickly. But you don't need to know all that much more. I never knew much about Nightcrawler before this escapade, nor even the X-Men in general outside the movies and 20 year old cartoons which I haven't seen in... 20 years. But the story is kind enough to go over his background and elucidate happenings within the X-Men without being too heavy on the exposition.
It is actually quite a "Fun" series and I find it stimulating to my imagination. The characters are so exaggerated and the adventures are visual and simple. The story isn't so complex, tight, and brilliant as something like Watchmen, but it is still interesting. I red the entire thing in one night.
Then read some of the old 60's comics... Oh my. Well, Marvel was a lot better than DC at the time, but it still was, uh, immature as a medium. The prose is 'the most laughable prose ever penned to paper!' (the exclamation point is important. They put 'em after everything!).
This Nightcrawler series is complete enough in itself to work as a stand-alone story. It is composed of three interconnected story arcs which don't appear to be interconnected in the beginning. The series is not consistently reiterating what each characters "super powers" are, how something was possible, what happened in the last issue. Blah, blah, blah. It shows you instead and assumes that you've read the entire series and for that I am grateful and which separates it from those 60's comics. It also isn't just a huge fight scene with a loose, crappy story holding it together like the first issue of an "X-4" cross-over comic. Which I can't even find a good link for. The art is fine, though it pails in comparison to the cover, even if there isn't a great amount of consistency with how the characters look and all the women have back-breaking busts.
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