While the bouncing ‘Fuzzy Elf’ Nightcrawler is often treated as the moral core of the X-Men, his son became one of their most brutal members ever. Kurt Wagner’s powers allow him to pass through the Brimstone Dimension, effectively teleporting across great distances in a burst of sulfurous smoke. Kurt’s abiding faith and heroic nature mean he rarely uses this power to truly harm others, but it turns out that the next generation aren’t as good-natured.
Kurt is responsible for the modern Krakoan nation’s law to “Make more mutants,” and Marvel’s various alternate universes show that he lives up to this dictum, with powerful children across the multiverse. While his daughter with Scarlet Witch – the body-stealer known as Nocturne – works to save the multiverse as one of the Exiles, his relationship with Meggan Puceanu in the Age of X-Man pocket dimension resulted in Tenia Jean, a fellow teleporter and mystic powerhouse.
However, it’s the world of the Offspring which introduces Nightcrawler’s most brutal child. Created by Alan Evans and Buddy Scalera in X-Men: Millennial Visions, Salamander is Nightcrawler’s son, fighting against the Morlocks in the New York City of 2035. In a world where attacks by the sewer-dwelling faction have strained relations between humans and mutants, the X-Men take it upon themselves to destroy the Morlocks and end their nefarious plans. However, rather than acting as the group’s teleporter like Nightcrawler, Salamander has a different form of his father’s powers. Salamander can’t teleport through another dimension, but he can tear it open, spilling “burning plasma” onto his opponents.
Salamander possesses the same basic connection to another dimension as his father, but with a far more brutal application, allowing him to burn his enemies alive with interdimensional matter. It’s not stated in Millennial Visions who Salamander’s mother is, but the story does make it clear that the new generation of mutants are far more powerful than the first, often combining their parents’ powers in new configurations. While Millennial Visions is an anthology of potential futures for the X-Men franchise, characters from its pages have made the jump to mainstream stories in the past, meaning that Salamander could return at any point, especially given the tendency for mutant heroes’ children to travel back in time to help their parents.
While Salamander continues Nightcrawler’s legacy in several ways – from reimagining his powers to taking his name from a subterranean creature – the cruelty and violence of his abilities are opposed to everything Kurt Wagner stands for, as is his mission of harming fellow mutants to pacify humanity. Hopefully, the mainstream Nightcrawler gets the chance to meet his wayward son, setting him straight on the X-Men‘s core mission, and perhaps helping him find a less R-rated use for this interdimensional powers.
