Chris Claremont: C/D

I'm not saying everything else sucked. Simonson's run had moments -- Walt has a knack for coming up with things to do with characters who are otherwise spent. And I'll always love the run from about #180-20something, whoever's that was, because it was when I started reading FF.

Reed stuck in Doom's armor, MAYBE FOREVER! Valeria Von Doom -- future child of Doom and Susan Storm Richards! It was definitely a "back to the icons" run, with a terrific Namor story and the return of Diablo and a new Willie Lumpkin (she's a she now, the grand-daughter or something of Ol Wiggle Ears). But maybe it's a title that really only hits greatness when you go for the icons.

As for other stuff --

X-Men -- enough classic to outweigh the dud, assuming we don't include his return to the title after Alan Davis (just as I was getting into the X-Men again! argh), which was perplexingly bad and stilted and just awful despite coming hot on the heels of his FF.

Ignoring that, though, Claremont kept the X-Men on the map; his run petered out (did he introduce Maddy Pryor and the silly "Maddy is Phoenix!" arc, or had he left by then?) but includes a large chunk of the title's best moments to date. The characters may be at their worst when writers try too hard to emulate Claremont -- like Stan Lee, his prose style was overblown even when it worked, and he doesn't make it work more than half the time; his imitators would be lucky to make it work once -- but I can't blame him for that any more than I blame Miller for what Batman's gone through.

Recent stuff ... has he done anything good since FF? (And that was a fluke, I think.) The new Excalibur is terrible; the original had its moments, and Alan Davis's art was great, like a shinier and prettier Byrne.

OH YES HE DID (only wasn't Maddy actually not Phoenix but instead an evil Sinister-created clone?)

He also made Storm into a leather-clad Mohawk girl. So props for that, anyway.

Geez, his run went on a lot longer than I remembered. Okay, I can't vouch for its classicness after Mutant Massacre -- even though I really kind of like Mr Sinister.

1) circa X-Men #100 (from the mid-70s) - X-Men get sucked into space by Sentinels (& human mutie-hating overlord), have fight, & escape in malfunctioning space shuttle. Jean uses her telekinesis to save the team (protecting the passengers from the shuttle's manfunctioning heat shield thing) & her telepathy to learn how to pilot the ship from the conked out pilot. Of course, she has to manually fly the ship, so she's up in the cockpit while everyone else hunkers in the back.

2) Classic X-Men back-up story (from the mid-80s) - Jean's getting all messed up by Earth's re-entry, when the Phoenix Force visits her, saves the X-folk, throws her body into a restorative cocoon, and takes her place. Though this thing isn't actually Jean, it is based on her soul or spirit or some stuff, and is for all intents and purposes the real thing. Phoenix will now be called nu-Jean; old Jean is the one in the cocoon.

3) circa X-Men #100 - shuttle crashes, everyone survives, but Jean's nowhere to be found. Suddenly, nu-Jean emerges as PHOENIX (complete w/ ginchy green / yellow uniform & sash & mondo-sized powers). Meanwhile, old Jean sits in a cocoon thingy at the bottom of the Hudson River (or some NYC body of water), patiently awaiting her return

4) X-Men #107-108 - I forget the details, but there's shenanigans involving the Starjammers (a group of interplanetary pirates lead by Corsair, AKA Cyclops' father), the Sh'iar (feather-headed humanoid alien empire; the queen & Professor X are romantically involved) and some super-powerful crystal that threatens the fabric of the world; key point is that nu-Jean gets to strut her stuff as Phoenix and displays the awesome powers at her disposal.

5) up through X-Men #129 - I believe there's some work here to show nu-Jean grappling with (and potentially subcumming to) the power at her disposal, and all the human frailty such a grapple entails. This struggle between her humanity and newfound omnipotence plays a central role in what follows.

6) X-Men #129-134 - Mastermind (an old old villain from the Lee/Kirby days w/ illusion-casting abilities) attempts to flex some power within the Hellfire Club (an aristocratic group of mutants w/ designs on world domination & chess fetish) by manipulating nu-Jean into believing (and I quote from a seemingly reputable online synopsis available here) "she was the reincarnation of a Black Queen of the Hellfire Club from the 19th century, and that she loved [Mastermind]." She becomes the Black Queen (complete with flattering bustier and hott schoolmarm hair bun), and flexes her powers for the dark side. X-Men come & rescue her, but the Mastermind mind whammy, coupled w/ her own emotional struggles, causes nu-Jean to snap and become DARK PHOENIX. (In the process, her uniform becomes MUCH more presentable.)

7) X-Men #135-137 - Drunk with power, Dark Phoenix goes off and destroys a planet full of asparagus people. (The oft-clipped photo of the flaming Phoenix engulfing a sun with its claw comes from this.) After this occurs, though, she returns to Earth and is "talked down" by Cyclops (her boo) and becomes normal happy Jean again. However, as a result for wiping out an entire civilization, the Sh'iar come back into the picture and charge nu-Jean with genocide, which comes w/ quite a stiff penalty. The X-folk gamely attempt to rescue Jean and save her from the Sh'iar, but it turns out that happy Jean is having trouble keeping DARK PHOENIX under control, and after another DP flare-up, Jean wrests control from DARK PHOENIX long enough to realize that she can't control all this evil, and, through the use of a hidden laser on the moon's surface) commits suicide.

8) X-Men #138 through #170ish - Scott's angsting (and the X-Men's angsting) over Jean's death ensues.

And then Madelyne Pryor (the Jean Grey lookalike) happens. And then Cyke & MP get married. And then Jean pops out of the cocoon (which propmted the back-up story in Classic X-Men to justify Jean coming back from the dead). And then MP & Cyke divorce. And then Jean & Scott get back together. And then Madelyne Pyror goes gonzo w/ the thanks to various demon folk and some pale-faced Hellraiser reject that had it out for Cyke's entire bloodline since Day 1. And it's about there that CC lost the plot.

There is something weirdly compelling about the 'classic' Claremont run that keeps me reading even though I don't like almost ANY of the scripting - it must be the draw of the soap opera plots. More than anything, when he lost his ability to juggle multiple plots coherently and come up with good new subplots (around X-Men 220-230), he lost it, and that's when people really started noticing the scripting tics, I think. (It's like how Stan Lee's style is only REALLY annoying when the plotting is totally lifeless, it seems so unearned.)

Chris Claremont established the idea of mutants as a persecuted minority and then blithely wrote eleven hundred issues with barely a thought about what that might mean beyond giant mutant-bashing robots and the X-Men having something else to moan about.

CC run was at its best when it was either able to get to the heart of this persecution complex (which usually happened best w/ Nightcrawler, I think) OR when it forgoed the woe-is-me castigation for some over-the-top mutant-bashing robot fun - the Dark Phoenix saga mixed both in equal portions, and succeeds as a result. The Days of Future Past storyline also works on this principle. In hindsight, the Proteus story that preceeds Dark Phoenix almost acts like a test-run for the emotional manipulations CC & John Byrne - & Jim Shooter - pull off in the following issues.

The closest CC came to tapping the best of his collaborations with JB happened w/ Jim Lee & his first farewell to the X franchise, and even then (w/ the DEATH OF MAGNETO and all the dialogue balloons such an event required), the book was a pale shadow of what it once was. And the heart of this comparison has to do more with the type of flash & panache JB & Jim Lee brought to their artwork more than any sort of intrinsic qualitative similarity.

[x-post w/ Tom's nice & tidy summary]

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Days Of Future Past as monstrously complex underpinning of entire X-Continuity: NO CHRIS NO.

(i.e. the initial decision to create Rachel Summers seemed like a terrific story idea but is also the point at which Claremont dooms the X-Men forever)

I wish I had a different login for posts which show quite how much I have thought about the X-Men.

Am I right in thinking that Chris Claremont is one of the few examples (along with Marv Wolfman's Teen Titans) of a writer losing the plot without* editorial influence? I mean, what you've just described sounds crazy. "I have at least created at least one comics milestone, that will stand in the memories of readers for years to come. . . . Hey, why don't I screw the pooch?" Though obviously he would havbe recieved a fair amount of pressure from fans over the years.

* except usual "keep making money" pressures. I've had Chris Claremont described to me as the guy who basically built the X-Men out of one or two books to the behemoth it is today. He kept writing, people kept buying, and because he loved starting people/stories and hated ending them, every few years they'd split off another team, which he'd write the first 6-12 issues of. Is that about right?

Granted, the fact that she WAS a dead ringer for Jean is slightly creepy, so the spectre of DARK PHOENIX would have to linger like fart stank & things were bound to go south eventually - the Goblin Queen route is possibly the worst way to handle it, though I hold out hope a chump like Chuck 4u$t3n or H0w@rd M@ck!3 could have done worse.

And, yes, the Days of Future Past / Rachel Summers boon turned into a boondoggle, like Tom notes, when CC went and ran w/ it into the dog kennel for some hott poodle bangin'. Stuff spawned as a result of CC introducing Earth II crises to the X-verse (for better or worse) - Cable, Bishop, The Twelve, Dark Beast. And all related shenanigans which failed to cash in on the initial storyline's promise (and probably should've left well enough alone). Even GM's attempt to one-up it (and boy does he!) falls a bit flat (by most folks' standards - I read it out of sequence, so I can't vouch for this consensus).

I've only read X-Men (patchily at that) up to the first Maddy Prior arc (apart from a brief flirtation with the pretty rotten Jim Lee run), so my memories remain unsullied.

xpost

Like Tom says, it was great for a one-off, and foreboding of potential things to come, and so on, but you can't do much more with something like that when you're determined to keep your setting from changing much (this is my complaint about the X-books again: how do you credibly institute anti-mutant policies in a world that happily accepts a century-old Captain America, a Norse God, a teenager on fire, etc? And how do you move that forward without having your non-mutant superheroes do anything about it, unless you want to create the kind of mutant/superhero rift that Marvel has never been willing to create?)

It's like, if Superman found out he was going to go supernova with his absorbed solar energy and destroy the world when he turned 50, we wouldn't care, because we know Superman will never turn 50.

many xposts, I am slow like Juggernaut

Currently, CC's been on a crusade to justify the existance of Sage, a "human computer" that folks in his latest Uncanny tenure can't help but want to kill / destroy / reboot. I haven't seen much of her in CC's hands, but she seems to exemplify the worst of CC's tendencies.

Yes. After the death of The Hellions she did some serious soul-searching and ended up renouncing a lot of her old allegiences if not her core personality/attitude; she was the headmistress for Generation X (aka the teens introduced during the Phalanx Covenant crossover, including Husk, M, Skin, Penance, Synch, and Chamber, plus existing characters Jubilee, Artie and Leech).

Sage was in Xtreme X-Men, too, which I forgot about -- what I read of it was bad but not as bad as his X-Men return.

Andrew OTM. We need Martin to hop on board this thread & share w/ us his stories of CC and England.

[Dang x-post!]

X-Men 3, geez! I was way, way off. By like a hundred issues. He's actually responsible for a lot of the things I was blaming on his influence.

[whatever, Dan, I win because I used the phrase "hot shit" nyeah]

I just might do that this Wednesday, then! And speaking of crap accents! Sam Guthrie's southern draaaawl, Rahne's brogue, Sunspot's muy caliente accent & slang, Warlock's Yoda-speak ... it's a multi-cultural mulch-fest!

(x-post)

[Days of Future xxx-post!]

I think Marvel should bring back the cowboy.

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OMG DEMON BEAR:

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Also notable from CC's New Mutants run - the issues penciled by Jackson "Butch" Guice (somewhere between #40 and #50). Lots of time-travel chicanery w/ Magick (including some Future Days reduxing - #48, if you're gonna go look for it) and a double-sized throwdown featuring the Newbies against Warlock's dad, THE MAGUS! Butch doesn't have so good a grip on Warlock (or Magus, to be exact) (as if anyone can really do Warlock & his ilk justice after BS), but he's good w/ the other stuff. And it's hard to make Sentinels suck. (If someone's managed this impossible feat, I don't want to know.)

I've probably already posted the stuff I'm offering on this thread elsewhere on ILC, which is why I'm still finding it odd we never C/D'ed CC.

Warlock, the Magus, and Magik (and Cypher, I guess, you can't talk Warlock without talking Doug) were the best things about New Mutants, but I hate to admit that I never warmed to the series. It was the roster, in large part: I've always disliked Rahne (even Ellis's "How Rahne got her backbone back" story in Excalibur), Sam seemed like a cypher (okay, poor choice of words), etc. Well, I liked Dani, too, to be fair -- Rahne's the only one I outright disliked, with Magma a close second much of the time. I suspect Rahne's dialogue dinnae help any.

That is one of the most fucked up mutant lineups around, in a good way. (And the blonde leggy liaison was Val Cooper, who mentioned "cousin Dale" at least once, because PAD is that kind of fanboy.)

(Apropos of nothing except allusions, I'm watching Everwood and Madison's band is named JOE LIES! That's the song Lili Taylor sings in Say Anything. This show has dorky writers.)

Also, if I remember correctly, wasn't it actually John Byrne who brought Jean Grey back (and at the same time rewrote the Phoenix saga) in an issue of Fantastic Four? Anyway, it must've been pretty much an editors' choice, since Jean's return resulted in the birth a new X-title, X-Factor.

Bishop's around in District X, and he was hanging around in Xtreme X-Men, I think he has a thing for Sage.

I think Tuomas is right about Byrne -- Jean was definitely brought back in the FF (well, FF and Avengers), and if it wasn't Byrne's run it was whoever wrote immediately after him.

I'm guessing @ the X-Factor bit - I recall li'l blurbs in the upper right corners of both comics heralding this fact. X-FACTOR BEGINS HERE or something. (FYI - FF #286 featured JB re-teamed w/ Terry Austin, AND was super-sized - not double-sized, but regular sized [32ish pages], w/ no ads!) (FYFYI - That issue of FF, & the two following - w/ JB & Joe Sinnott on the boards, & JB revisiting what actually happened following Doctor Doom's "death" - was the last gasp for JB's FF run. Not to slight JB bringing back Anhillius & Blastaar one last time. Don't get me started on that time-travel Hitler thing, though.)

I remember it kind of annoying me at the time because it just didn't seem to be relevant enough to the FF -- I realized it was a big deal to bring back Jean Grey, but if you were going to bring back Uncle Ben, you wouldn't do so in Captain America.

As for bringing her back in the FF, it probably had to do with creative team serendipity. That is, if Stan Lee & Steve Ditko were on Captain America @ the time that the Powers That Be wanted to bring Uncle Ben (& his wheatcakes) back, then it'd probably happen in Captain America.

For the record, when this happened (and when I read most of the stuff discussed in this thread that happened in the 80s), my reaction was undoubtedly "OOOO WOW COOL BEANS".

(I also kept reading X-Factor for years on the hopes it would become worthwhile, but I don't think the book really hit its stride until PAD.)

KURT BUSIEK.

..not to forget Louise. I think, at that point, she was already beginning to get better at the Claremontian mutant soap opera style than Claremont was himself. For me, Angel's death was a truly touching moment, and I think Simonson's contributions to both the mutant massacre (Remember Thor cleansing the Morlocks' sewers with hellfire and shouting "Hela!", while Simonson is quoting "The Masque of the Red Death"?), and definitely to that Inferno mess (Nanny and the Orphan-maker! A rain of demons!) were better than Claremont's. Also, Apocalypse was definitely a better villain than Mister Sinister.

I remember the issue where Apocalypse talked about his origins (around the time that he was turning the Angel into Death), and there was one page w/ 3 equally sized horizontal panels (like the page layout Darwyn Cooke used in New Frontier) w/ Apocalyse (in Egyptian regalia / as Anubis) ominously posed in the foreground and grand vistas of his empires in the background. Cool stuff. Again, praise be to Walt (&, sure, Louise, too, I'm easy).

The following is a Great Moment in Usenet History:

Disgruntled fan (re: Avengers Disassembled): "Given Bendis's asinine attempt to defend continuity flaws, however--especially when> fixing continuity flaws is specifically the responsibility of Brevoort and his assistants--I think that Brevoort is obligated to address the subject."

Kurt Busiek (in response): "You have every right to dislike it, and to post negative comments. Tom's entitled to read them, not read them, respond, not respond -- just like comments made by any other method."

Other fan (hopping into the currently forgiving morass): "What on Earth gives you the right to say that?!?!?!? ;)"

Kurt Busiek (in response to winky): "Neeper, the Psychic Cow. She's on Earth right now, and I checked with her. She said it was fine."

It's amazing how much I remember of these comics, given that it's over ten years since I last read them...

Also worth a S: The back-up stories from the first 30ish issues of Classic X-Men. Nice little character vignettes filling in blanks or just adding some texture w/ gorgeous John Bolton art. There's a silent story featuring Jean Grey right before she becomes Phoenix that really struck me - Jean's getting ready to go to the party that will be crashed by the Sentinels that'll bring the X-folk to the moon that'll spawn all the machinations that lead to DARK PHOENIX, and it's just John Bolton's art w/out any words or dialogue (shocking I know!) sketching out this quaint little snapshot of Jean's non-hero life. (Of course, just to make sure you know what's going to happen, there's a panel featuring some poster in her bedroom that has a BIG FLAMING PHOENIX in it.) There might be a few places during this run where Claremont & Bolton aren't doing the work - don't say I didn't warn you.

Man, how much of Claremont's X-run involved Adventures In Space? The Sh'iar, the Gladiator & his posse, the Brood, this Warskrull crap, Asteroid M, the first Claremont Sentinel story...

But it's very odd how much Marvel's Space Stuff Claremont used -- and invented -- in the X-Men, especially when you consider that he didn't do any Space Stuff in his FF run.

The Brood, though, were great.

*choke while shaking

I still like his X-Men until soon after Byrne left, when it got boring and long-winded and bloody Maddy Pryor and the Brood and I gave up.

Jordan: You're also required to spell it "Maddie," or reference alternate spelling with the issue number in which your chosen spelling was presented. Note: This is not impossible. She's been nicknamed Maddie, Maddy, and Lynne.

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It's the deliberately-mussed runway model look!

The first two pages, though, are ridiculously purty.

What is this shit? It reads like fucking fanfic. The characters are just empty caricatures being jerked around by the plot, and the dialogue is abominable, consisting mostly of heavy-handed exposition and dramatic, overblown declarations punctuated by lots! of exclamation points! Rogue was always one of my favorite characters, and when she "died" in this issue I didn't even care because I couldn't take it seriously.

Has Claremont always been total crap? I remember really liking the Dark Phoenix saga, but maybe I was wrong.

Claremont hasn't always sucked. It's just been a slippery slope.

Days of Future Past – This series would pick up the moment after Kitty Pryde sent Rachel Grey into the past from the original story. The world is under the rule of Sentinels, most mutants are either killed or in camps, and only a strange alliance of outlaws stand a chance at changing this dark future.

Asgardian War Stories – During the Asgardian War, the X-Men, Alpha Flight, and the New Mutants all fought alongside the Norse Gods. But what would have happened if they never returned to Earth and stayed in Asgard?

NEXT – Witness today’s generation of X-Men if the Marvel Universe aged in real-time. Both the first and second teams of X-Men are approaching 50 and the New Mutants are now in their thirties. This series will follow this new generation of X-Men and the new reality they find themselves in.

What If? X-Men - Continuing from 2004’s What If Magneto and Professor X Had Formed the X-Men Together?, this series would be a re-imagining of the X-Men in contemporary times from an entirely all-new perspective. Because of Magneto helping found the X-Men, not only has the history of the X-Men changed, but that of the entire world. Every character’s life and future is up for grabs here.

OTM