8. Mystique And Destiny Were Nightcrawler's Parents
The canonical parentage for the teleporting, brimstone-stinking German X-Man Nightcrawler is that he got his mutant gene and blue skin from the villainous Mystique, and his demonic good looks from...an actual demon. Having fathered the baby with Azazel, who is an actual demon from hell, Mystique reconsidered whether she had made a smart move sleeping with a literal hell-dweller, and chucked the baby down the well. From there he was found by a gypsy, drafted into the circus, and eventually joined the X-Men. And became Catholic, which was especially ironic given his parentage. Except, originally, that wasn't meant to be his parentage. The plan was Nightcrawler's mother and father would be Mystique and Destiny, two female members of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants. In their early appearances there's been oblique hints that the pair had an intimate relationship, which has all but become canon in recent years, as comic books (and society in general) get a little more tolerant. Still, when the characters were introduced in the seventies the mooted origin for Nightcrawler - where Mystique shape-shifted into a male and impregnated Destiny - was canned for being too controversial. And nobody ever spoke of it again.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
