here is where we list CCCs (Chris Claremont Cliches)

".....makes (them/him/her/it) deadly beyond imagination."

"I possess you, body and soul!"

"nigh on invulnerable"

"cripes!"

"by the white wolf!" "tovarisch" - Colossus

"goddess!" - Storm

"bub" - Wolverine

"unglaublich!" "mein freund" "fraulein" - Nightcrawler

THE
FOCUSED
TOTALITY
OF MY
PSYCHIC
BEING!

"We/I fight for a world that hates and fears us."

It's different for artists, man. I wouldn't expect Rob Liefeld to wear giant shoulder pads and have his legs akimbo at all times, and I wouldn't think that Jim Balent would have huge tits.

as much as Stan was charming, it seems that his "I Created Everything Ever" riff left lotsa folks annoyed, such as the King.

check this out…its amazing…

http://209.51.142.186/~dogatco/mmms/mmms65.mp3

being that he was the face of Marvel in the 60s-70s, he would often not mention JK or SD or Buscema, Wood or whoever to credulous mainstream reporters…he was burned BAD in the 1980s when fandom turned on him for these perceived slights. No less than Alan Moore alluded to "i created…" attitude in his persona as "Affable Al" in the fake letter columns and editorials in the 1963 series…

but he was certainly not alone in credit grabbing— when JK was seeking the return of his original art, he was egged on by Gray Groth to suggest that Stan did nothing.

lemme just say that I think that Stan, jack and Steve all deserve equal credit for all the awesome shit they done…

Sturdy Steve didn't speak up…sigh…

BumP

"what the devil you playing at?"

"No quarter asked, and none given."

reading this thread it's remarkable to me how much of this stuff I absorbed. peak Marvel engagement for me was right during the early ramp-up of X-Men's ascension to Best Comic status, Claremont was a rising star - I was like 12 and could only vaguely glean the way fandom worked/reacted but, like, my comic-reading friend/partner in collecting thought X-Men was head & shoulders above absolutely everything else then and it felt like he was getting that feeling from...the letters page? something in the air?

anyway, just a small surprise to me, how many of these CCCs feel more like Things Characters Say When They're Bein' Awesome when my eye scans them and my inner 12-year-old pipes up and goes "fuckin' rad, this issue's gonna kick ass"

Yeah, I'm just reading the Brood saga now, and it's great! The cliches and verbosity are charming rather than annoying.

After a while it starts to seem like a Fast Show-style running joke about how often Wolverine is about to snap and kill the X-Men

Just filling in a colleague on the best place to start w/X-Men (he's a Batman aficionado) and As I warned him about Claremont's verbosity I also had to admit "But you know what? I fucking love it."

I also really love that mid-70s era of Marvel. After X-Men, what are the other essential series of that era to explore?

Have always thought of Claremont (and Byrne's) run on X-Men as the decisive break with the mid-70s Marvel tradition of Gerber, McGregor, Starlin, Englehart etc (Byrne especially was very hostile to the psychedelic excesses and experimentation of that era), but all of those writers and others certainly matched (or, in McGregor's case, even exceeded) Claremont's verbosity, mainly because the Marvel style - plot>pencils>dialogue - gave the writers the opportunity to fill every last bit of page space with dialogue, captions, thought balloons etc. The rise of the X-Men as a commercial force certainly coincided with Jim Shooter's rise within Marvel, which brought much tighter editorial control over the content of the comics, to good and ill effect.

Sorry, this isn't really answering your question. I would still single out Steve Gerber's run on The Defenders between issues 30 and 40 as being a highpoint of mid-70s Marvel superhero comics, and these were published at the same time that Claremont became the writer on the New X-Men, taking over from Len Wein. For the non-superhero stuff, Wolfman and Colan's run on Tomb of Dracula is incredibly consistent, beautifully drawn, and has some of the same overwrought - and overwritten - soap opera qualities.

maybe not quite what you're after, stevie, but gerber's howard the duck is a really great read both as an exercise in fun, dope-smoke-wreathed experimental storytelling and also occasionally some fun metacommentary on the tics and tropes marvel had developed around that time

i think the essential howard the duck collection has been out of print for a while but it looks like you can pick it up fairly cheap on ebay

Gerber was a chainsmoker, but by all accounts not a stoner (unlike Englehart and Starlin especially) - he just had a naturally freaky mind.

haha really? i assumed the man behind the villain called 'dr bong' would have an interest in smoking more mind-expanding material than tobacco

Genuinely think that was a reference to the sound!

steve gerber has blown my mind from beyond the grave

FYI, Gerber and post-Gerber HTD (including the b&w magazine) has been recently re-collected in three full-color (aside from the b&w magazine) trades with a fourth coming sometime later this year.

This is a great weird old Gerber series too: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17137641-superman

Thanks guys - shall assemble a reading list now. Your input v much appreciated!

i was wondering recently as i paged through an old claremont/byrne X-Men whether any Russian ever exclaimed "Lenin's Ghost!" or whether that was something Claremont made up.

By the shaggy loins of Lermontov!

Stalin's 'stache!

korolev's rocket!

By the titanic taint of Trump!

I suppose you have limited wiggle room when your totalitarian leader insists upon your incorporation of both his name and his anatomy in your gasping, choking exclamations.

You wildin’, Chris Claremont

https://www.thepopverse.com/x-men-chris-claremont-delivers-a-surprisingly-raw-and-controversial-hour-for-fans-at-c2e2-2022

Sounds like relatively inocuous old-man-comics-ing, unless I'm missing something?