Oh my dear Nightcrawler

Manifest Destiny - Nightcrawler is a one-shot comic from a few months back.
For those not following Marvel Comics: "Manifest Destiny" refers to the X-Men moving from New York State to San Francisco.

I really do wonder what the hell Marvel writers/editors were thinking when they took the label for an idea that boils down to "We must take away land from inferior humans, because God made us superior" and apply it to the X-Men.

Anyway, spoilers will follow.

Nightcrawler feels superfluous, and gets an invitation to Winzeldorf, Germany, a place where a flaming-torches-and-pitchforks mob tried to kill him long ago, but now there's a museum dedicated to him.

It turns out that while there indeed is a museum, the main reason why he was invited was that they have a monster problem.

The monster is called "Vielfras", apparently a not entirely correct spelling of "Vielfraß". That's a colloquial expression for someone who eats too much, and it sounds hilarious to me in that context for two reasons:

First, to my ear it's a somewhat cutesy thing, something parents might call their little child when they want third helpings of dessert, so it sounds odd as name for a monster. (However, I'd like to stress that I don't know how widespread this is. It might sound not cutesy to most people for all I know.)
Second, it's also the German name for the mustelid species known in English as wolverine. I'd love to know if James Asmus knew this when he wrote the comic.

It turns out the monster is a sixteen-year-old boy under a gypsy curse.

Looking at that panel, I have to think of the Roma camp in my hometown a few years ago, for contrast. They had run-of-the-mill mobile homes, with satellite dishes. The whole "gypsie witches" stuff seems to be an American thing, for what I can tell - or maybe those stories just went out of fashion here in Germany after the Holocaust.

As to the small flaming-torches-and-pitchforks mob in this comic, I would like to point out that we do have flashlights here in Germany, and I know no-one who uses burning sticks for lighting, so that scene was stupid-ridiculous.

One more thing that seemed odd was when people spoke English.

Mara Keller, the woman who runs the museum, speaks English to Kurt, even when she's so surprised to see him that she drops a cup of coffee (and even though, as his biggest fan, she should know he does speak German). Well, she said that she studied in the USA, so it would be possible that she's actually American and moved to Germany because of her obsession with Nightcrawler, so English could be her first language.

Henrik Weber, the misunderstood monster, a 16 yearold who grew up in a tiny village behind the times, speaks English, too. Without obvious mistakes. Even in the middle of a fight. What?

Most troubling, the result is that the only people speaking German in this comic are the xenophobic bastards who come up with lines like "Ask me, either one [Nightcrawler or the monster they asked him to fight] dies, we're better off", or people directly addressing those bastards. I've seen people call German "evil" because it's "the Nazi language" often enough that implications like that rub me the wrong way.

To end on a positive note: While the olden-timesiness of Winzeldorf was a bit over the top, I really liked the museum. Old buildings that have had modern parts added - like the huge glass doors here - is something I see often in real life.