Remember when Nightcrawler had a beard in X-Men Red?

This thread here is the story of how it came about.

#beardednightcrawler

So in the beginning, I was asked to draw X-Men Red that was going to be written by @TomTaylorMade . Once the roster was decided on, @MarkPaniccia tasked me with designing brand new costumes for the whole team.

While sketching stuff for Kurt, I thought it would be really cool to give him a beard. I don't remember he ever had one and drawing beards is fun. So while coming up with a new look for him, I drew him with a beard and sent it off to the team for thoughts.

Unfortunately Mark, despite liking it, told me it wasn't a feasible idea. The main reason being, Nightcrawler appearing in a bunch of books and changing his look could possibly cause issues.

Meanwhile, Travis Charest was assigned as the cover artist. This was big news as Travis hadn't been actively doing comics work in a while. We were all very excited. I, especially, was looking forward to him drawing my designs.

Here's the fist cover which blew us away.

Back to the beard: I was a tad disheartened for not giving Kurt the beard.

By this time I had news Gambit was joining the team and I needed to design a new look for him. So I gave Remy the beard instead. Seemed a little more plausible too.

Here's my only sketch for this idea.

This was also shot down rather quickly with the same reasoning. I was bummed but it kinda made sense so I moved on. By this time most designs were finalized. Things were rolling and I had started drawing pages from the first issue. Kurt was without the beard.

Lo and behold, we received the cover for the second issue by Travis. Apparently, he had seen only my design sheets where Kurt still had the beard and he had illustrated him with it!

Things were already in motion and we couldn't change the cover and so Mark gave us the go ahead to give Nightcrawler the beard.

We discussed it amongst ourselves and Tom implemented the beard into the story so that he would have a full beard by issue #5.

Hence, with every passing issue, I had Nightcrawler's beard grow. By the time I left the book he had a full beard for the artists who came after me to draw in it's full glory.

So there you have it. The story of Nightcrawler's beard. It was fun while it lasted.

This is a personal anecdote which reminds me why I love what I do so much. The occasional spontaneity that can be unique to comics is priceless.

Kurt having a beard actually ended up with a couple of articles too. Here's one: https://comicbook.com/marvel/news/marvel-uncanny-x-men-bearded-nightcrawler-reactions/

And another.

Thanks for bear(d)ing with me on this! Cheers. https://screenrant.com/nightcrawler-beard-xmen-comic/