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I should maybe expand on that.

I had a two bedroom apartment, and I used the larger one as my studio. There was a closet with floor to ceiling folding doors, creating four vertical panels. I found I could tape the finished pencil pages to those panels, four by four, so that as I worked I could glance to the right and see the growing issue all in one go. The last page (of 17 in those days) didn't need to be put up.

There was something very satisfying about looking at a book this way, as it took on its full form page by page.

(A picture of me sitting at my board, with that closet in the background, appeared in one of the local Calgary papers, circa 1979, but I don't keep clippings, so I can't show it to you.)

By the time I came to the book, Chris and Dave had pretty much abandoned any thought that Nightcrawler's appearance was supposed to be horrific. That people would be instinctively repulsed by this demonic looking creature with his blue skin, pointed ears, glowing eyes, malformed hands and feet and prehensile tail. Not to mention his habit of arriving in a smoky belch of sulphur and brimstone. No, he had instead become a bubbly, bouncy, "fuzzy elf".

This bugged me. The X-Men might have gotten to know him and discovered that under that frightening exterior he was really a fun guy, but for others a first encounter should be, at the least, uncomfortable.

So when I was putting Kitty together, I decided to make that part of her character: she found Kurt creepy.

There was some suggestion of this, most notably in everyone's surprise in "Days of Future Past", when Kate, in Kitty's brain, is thrilled and delighted to see him alive. My idea, then, was that Kitty sould slowly get used to Nightcrawler, but not become completely comfortable around him.

Unfortunately, I left the book, and Chris abandoned that subplot. (I suspect, having done Future Kitty, Chris just went ahead from there. There had been plenty of occasions when he'd worked past important points in his head, and so the points were lost.)

So, keep all this in mind when you see the next page, cuz in my timeline, Kitty and Kurt have only recently met..

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

(Why in Dog's name would Cyclops wish Gladiator "luck"?)

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Just occurred to me that, fantasies aside, Marvel might not even want this story. I recall a DC editor rejecting someone's work after it was posted on the InterNet, saying they didn't want to do a "reprint".