As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #2
“Blue Streak”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artist: Lee Garbett
Colour artist: Matt Milla
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler fights the Rhino.

PAGES 2-3. Nightcrawler and Mystique.

We saw Mystique last issue, wandering around Central Park mostly in the form of a homeless person. Since Nightcrawler says they’ve had several previous encounters, this presumably isn’t an immediate continuation from the previous issue. Mystique suffered an aneurysm in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 while resisting Professor X’s attempt to force her through the gates, which is why she’s incoherent here – although how she made it back to Central Park in this condition is unclear. It’s surely not a coincidence that she wound up in the same place as her son Nightcrawler.

Mystique is referring – in a rather rambling way – to Nightcrawler’s origin story. This area of continuity is a mess, with multiple versions of the story that slightly contradict each other.

• In X-Men Unlimited #4 (1994), Graydon Creed recounts the version of the story known to him. According to Graydon, Mystique “was the widow of a recently deceased German count”, who she may have killed; she was living with him simply for the money. Her cover was blown when she gave birth to Kurt. Some sort of mob – Graydon calls them “the royal family” – tries to kill Kurt. Raven changes to her original form to scare them and tries to escape with Kurt. She drops Kurt at a waterfall and flees to save herself. The mob then throw Kurt over a waterfall. All of this, of course, is hearsay. Later in the issue, Mystique gives her version, which broadly matches Graydon’s. She claims that she disguised herself as the villager and threw Kurt over the cliff in order to cover her own escape. This was not a very well received story when it came out.
• Uncanny Origins #8 (1997) basically repeats this version, though a little more sympathetically to Raven, with more emphasis on the idea that the mob were going to kill both her and Kurt anyway.
• In Uncanny X-Men #428 (2003), Chuck Austen spends an entire issue on a much expanded version. This account is basically consistent with X-Men Unlimited #4, though it names the Count as Christian Wagner and establishes that Raven was living with him under her real name. They were supposedly trying to have a child, and Christian was apparently infertile. Christian introduces her to Azazel, then posing as a ruler of a Caribbean island, who somehow knows that she’s a mutant, and seduces her as part of his plan to have lots of children on Earth (for reasons connected with the plot of “The Draco”). Raven murders Christian because he suspects Azazel of being the father. Kurt is born, and Raven lapses into her true appearance during the birth. A torch-wielding mob pursues her, and in this version Raven herself throws the baby off a cliff before making her escape. Austen is clearly aware of X-Men Unlimited #4 but makes no attempt to suggest that Raven has any agenda in living with Christian beyond his wealth, and doesn’t attempt to explain how Destiny fits in to any of this. In fairness to Austen, Destiny had been dead for years at this point. Austen’s version of the waterfall scene contradicts the earlier versions, showing Raven in her natural form and with no pretext that she’s posing as a villager. She’s just trying to kill Kurt.
• The 2010 one-shot X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler skips directly to Kurt working in a German circus, and reduces this entire sequence to a one-page flashback. It simply shows Raven fleeing the torch-wielding mob with baby Kurt, and collapsing unconscious next to a river. Kurt is then swept away by the current, rather than being deliberately thrown over the waterfall by anyone. The canonical status of the X-Men Origins one-shots is a bit dubious anyway.

Raven says here that “I went back for something in the castle.” So far as I’m aware, this doesn’t happen in any previous version of the story, which suggests that Spurrier may be intending to actually do something about this storyline beyond merely acknowledging its existence. The whole thing has generally been treated by later writers as best ignored, though not worth the hassle of actually undoing.

It may be worth mentioning that Austen’s version provides a back door in which Kurt’s father could also be just a random local who Mystique seduces at the start of the story while posing as a maid – or even Christian himself. That would be the simplest way of detaching Kurt from Azazel, if you really wanted to. Admittedly, the plot of “The Draco” hinges on Kurt being Azazel’s son, but you can handwave a lot away when magic is concerned. And besides, the plot of “The Draco” never made any sense in the first place.

PAGES 4-6. Nightcrawler talks with Dagger.

We saw the “angel Kurt” talking to Kurt last issue, but we’re given no real further cues about what it is.

We haven’t seen Cloak & Dagger in a while – they’ve been pretty quiet over the last few years beyond showing up in crossover events. When Dagger says that they’ve been “X-adjacent their whole lives”, this is more of a meta comment. Their original back story, which is also their current back story, involved them getting powers from experimental drugs. Don’t do drugs, kids! However, they did appear quite prominently in New Mutants, and for a while they were retconned into being latent mutants whose powers had been activated by the drugs. Their late 80s series was actually called The Mutant Misadventures of Cloak & Dagger, and they were briefly members of the X-Men (in an extended-family sort of way) during the Utopia era.

Kurt has correctly guessed what happened to Mystique (or at least seems to have happened to her).

“Come by Jarvis’s some night, huh?” Dagger means the Jarvis Lounge, a superhero community bar owned by the Wasp (Janet van Dyne) and named after the Avengers’ long-standing butler.

PAGE 7. The Rhino attacks.

Once again, the Rhino is a Spider-Man villain on loan to the X-books. He’s mainly just a general big strong guy who’s been around for years and has high recognisability, if we’re being honest. This Orchis themed costume is not his normal one, and we’ll find out more about it later. Rhino was actually seen hanging out at one of Gambit’s poker games in X-Men vol 6 #2.

PAGE 8. Recap and credits.

PAGES 9-10. Silver Sable and an Orchis agent watch Nightcrawler fight Rhino.

Supervisor Toomes is the Vulture, who we saw working for Orchis last issue. He was working on turning mutants into Hounds, but seemed to be up to something involving techno-organics. The agent with Silver Sable is Wilson Travers Jr, who we saw talking to Toomes last issue.

“That Boy Scout killed six world leaders with his bare hands.” While under Orchis’s control in X-Men: Before the Fall – Sons of X #1.

“The Rhino I know is an intellectually subnormal knuckle…” Silver Sable is exaggerating a bit. Normally, he’s written as well below average intelligence, but no more than that. At any rate, she has grudgingly agreed to test the Rhino as somebody who can lure out Nightcrawler. As far as she’s concerned, this is just an excuse to observe Nightcrawler in action before making the real attempt to capture him later on. Sable presumably believes at this point that she’s working for a more-or-less above board organisation, and she figures out for herself that the Rhino is wearing the same control headgear as Nightcrawler had when he was an Orchis asset.

The headgear isn’t exactly prominent in Sons of X, but it is shown, and we specifically see Legion removing it when he rescues Kurt.

PAGE 11. Data page. Travers is given the full name Wilson Travers Jr, and his father is said to be “a noted physicist (who counted Stark, AIM and Roxxon among his employers). This would seem to be Wilson Travers, a random Stark employee who helped to take the remains of F.A.U.S.T. to Asgard in Thor #273. I suspect it’s just a case of picking a random scientist from the usual sources, since it seems unlikely that anything turns on that particular story.

The “Current Status” section confirms that Vulture is indeed experimenting on the “stolen alien Technarch sourcecode” – i.e., presumably Warlock, who was absorbed by Nimrod in Legion of X #10.

The anonymised subject references are just the initials of real names followed by codenames: KW/NC is Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler, and AS/R is Alexei Sytsevich/Rhino.

PAGE 12. Silver Sable confronts Travers.

Sable wasn’t told that Orchis were using mind control technology… but she’s not exactly losing much sleep over it either. More fundamentally, she doesn’t trust Travers an inch.

PAGES 13-16. Kremer goes against orders and tries to capture Nightcrawler.

Kremer got some dialogue last issue to establish him as an anti-mutant thug. Frankly, the fact that he’s made it this far in Sable’s organisation is a poor reflection on her HR functions. Anyway, it all goes wrong because Kremer didn’t anticipate the Hopesword, but Silver Sable subdues Nightcrawler anyway, because she’s talented.

PAGES 17-21. Nightcrawler and Silver Sable escape underground.

Sable has lost control of Rhino and her men, it seems. So Nightcrawler gets them to safety underground.

Sable mentioned last issue that she thought Kurt was cute. Even so, her behaviour towards him when she gets close is out of character, and she recognises it. Not unreasonably, she assumes some sort of mind control or pheromone power, but as Nightcrawler says, he’s not supposed to have either.

PAGES 22-23. Nightcrawler teleports Rhino above ground.

Nightcrawler is hoping not just to free Rhino of his mind control device, but to keep it as evidence that could exonerate him of the killings he committed under Orchis control in Sons of X #1. The “angel” voice quite reasonably argues that nobody will care.

PAGE 24. Trailers. The Krakoan reads SUPERPOSITIONAL.