#Chris Claremont's X-Men Run

[vertigoartgore]

1991's Uncanny X-Men #274 cover by Jim Lee & Scott Williams.

[samasmith23]

This scene with Kitty Pryde & Wolverine might very well be one of the best ways to convince kids to not smoke!

Lol! Same energy as that one Calvin & Hobbes strip:

From Uncanny X-Men (1963) #196 by Chris Claremont & John Romita Jr.

[atarashura]

there is no heterosexual explanation for storm’s attachment and obsession with yukio, im sorry, that’s VERY sapphic idc what anyone says

the hairstyle change??? the leather jacket and immediate lifestyle change days after meeting her???

ororo munroe, i know what you are

[wanderingmind867]

Stan Lee may have been the only person who understood the X-Men. Because I legitimately think no one else understood them but him. Stan Lee's X-Men hid their powers when in their civilian identities (at least initially), which makes sense! If they're meant to be so actively hated and feared, this makes sense! Nowadays, they seem to have mostly ditched this. Which is a shame.

Also, I wouldn't say the X-Men work great as a metaphor for race. You want to do stories about racism, ableism, whatever, make more characters of colour or characters with disabilities. Here's a quote from a person who wrote an online post critical of the X-Men. I won't speak to how good his whole article is. But I do want to share this quote: "The most appropriate metaphor for the original Stan Lee comics is probably invisible dimensions of power such as LGBT issues or religion." I think they're right on that one note, and so I wanted to share this quote.

[jewishcissiekj]

excalibur 1988 will be so good then boom. unbelievable amount of racism

[notes-from-sarah]

Fav pages/panels

Excalibur (2004) #9 by Chris Claremont

[kamamo1]

Not to get in too deep in the Weeds about it, but who thought it would be a good idea to have Si Spuerrier be the one to finally write the Mystique + Destiny = Nightcrawler plot? Like ignoring the fact that they should have brought back Chris Claremont to pull that trigger because it was his original idea and he's the reason why anyone would care about any of those characters today, but like fine you don't ask Chris, Spuerrier still isn't even in the top 10 of writers I would have do this plotline because as a writer I don't think he's able to do an emotional or satisfying payoff that is this 40+ years of a smoking gun plot.

Also why have Spuerrier do it now for when about the whole Kraokoa era Destiny and Mystique haven't really interacted with either Kurt or Rogue in any meaningful or interesting ways, so there's not like meaningful set up or an added weight to what should be this total bombshell?

Idk it just smells of Marvel going 'Fine, we did it. Happy now?' to the fans and not like planning on continuing this thread in any interesting way.

[dangerousoperatoroperadonkey]

I REALLY cannot stress how much I have enjoyed reading the Claremont run so far. If you like Marvel, and you haven’t read it, you really should.

[ungoliantschilde]

Wolverine by Frank Miller and Chris Claremont, with Inks by Joe Rubinstein, and Colors by Glynis Wein.

[vertigoartgore]

1979's The Comics Journal #50 cover by artist Dennis Fujitake.

[samasmith23]

So this scene right here from Uncanny X-Men (1963) #150 by Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum was the first time ever that Magneto’s tragic origins as a Holocaust survivor were revealed as a central component of the character’s backstory (when he was originally conceived by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby during the Silver Age, Magneto was just your standard one-note bad guy hell bent on world-domination):

This powerful scene & revelation served as the beginning of Magneto’s long-running character arc of seeking to reform from his past supervillain roots, whilst working alongside the X-Men throughout the duration of Claremont’s run. Heck, Magnus even later reconciled with Kitty Pryde in Uncanny X-Men (1963) #199 by Chris Claremont & John Romita Jr. as the two bonded over their shared generational Jewish trauma at a National Holocaust Memorial event.

[themarvelproject]

X-Men WECBA Limited Edition Portfolio by John Byrne (1993) featuring key scenes from his definitive run on Uncanny X-Men alongside Chris Claremont and Terry Austin.

[blade-liger-4ever]

Literally the Fandom of every franchise in existence where fans apply all manner of crap to a character or situation.

i hate when you say something straightfoward and plainly and someone tries to apply subtext that simply isn't there like brother why does everyone call autists retarded when you're the one who clearly can't understand basic speech

[wanderingmind867]

I don't know if I'd like the Alpha Flight comics. Because they're tied to the X-Men during Chris Claremont's run, and I don't know if I'd like any of Chris Claremont's X-Men runs. I mean, I've never tried reading much of them, but I don't know if I'd like much of Chris Claremont's X-Men. No offense meant to people who like his X-Men runs, I mean. I just don't know if I'd like them.

And since Alpha Flight seems tied to the whole X-Men universe of the 80s, I don't know if I'd like them or not. Because I feel I might need context for a lot of X-Men stories if they share antagonists and storylines and stuff.

[gh0stofstarman]

A Ramble about X-Men

I’m a pretty big Marvel comics fan. I’ve had a Marvel Unlimited Subscription since the pandemic and I’ve pretty much run the gamut of heroes. Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Fantastic Four, Peter Parker Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, Miles Morales Spider-Man, Spider-Girl, Quasar, Thor, Eternals, Hawkeye, Howard the Duck, What if?, Deadpool, I could go on forever. And I can pick a run for each of these characters that I specifically clicked with a certain author and the themes they chose.

Except X-Men.

Which is ironic, because I love the X-Men shows, the characters, their major themes, their designs, their movies. Heck it’s not like I haven’t read most of Claremont’s run and beyond.

But I’ve never had a run that actually fully clicked with me, and I kinda wanted to ramble about why. No idea if this will be a series or whatever.

Chris Claremont

Admittedly I’ve never really been one to seek out every single spinoff of a series so most of my experience with the “golden age” of X-Men is with the mainline Uncanny X-Men rather than stuff like the New Mutants. I know it’s sacrilege in some circles not to go in full chronological order with the spinoff series bouncing between but I’m just not that way.

Anyways while Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the blueprint for what would define X-Men on a fundamental level, Chris Claremont would be the author who made the heroes popular. Storm, Colossus, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Banshee … Sunfire, Thunderbird … okay not all of them stuck. But Claremont would write iconic stories that are beloved and I love as well such as the OG Giant Size X-Men comic, Proteus, Days of Future Past, God Loves, Man Kills, and the Dark Phoenix Saga. Stuff that truly gets to the heart of the X-Men fighting against discrimination and hate, proving they deserve a chance to live as they want.

Then that should settle it! I like Chris Claremont, then! These are the most iconic storylines that means I love the most iconic incarnation of the X-Men.

Not really.

Chris Claremont founded a lot of good ideas that would be the springboard used by other authors in years to come. But it’s not as though his stint was as brief as Lee/Kirby or Roy Thomas.

16 years.

And most of what I mentioned is spread far across the first 8.

So what about the bits in-between?

Well, if I had to describe the majority of Claremont’s writing as X-Men outside of these storylines is that it’s kinda a roulette wheel.

This was back in the day where you had to have some bonkers concepts to hook the reader in. Vampires, sci-fi tech, aliens, gods, demons, etc. And most of the time Chris chose a random one to analyze the X-Men under and reevaluate how they can be used for the X-Men’s explicit purpose of fighting against discrimination and promoting equality and diversity.

Which often leads to those aforementioned storylines where they build on this very well. X-Men vs Televangelism does go out into creating weird devices to mind control people but it’s all in service to the team’s message. The bad future the sentinels create in Days of Future Past can easily be seen as a dystopian future where discrimination is normalized.

However sometimes Chris can’t help himself and adds more layers of insanity to the plot, to the point the message kinda gets lost in the mix.

Here’s an example.

X-Men go mysteriously missing, only for Beast to find them working at a circus freak show. Interesting. Leads back to the idea of them being demoralized and treated as freaks rather than real people.

Beast does some snooping around, finding that Magneto is the mastermind behind this. Perhaps he’s trying to humiliate the X-Men and get them to give up their hope for equality seeing how humanity makes fun of them while also getting revenge because he’s the bad guy.

They fight Magneto but are bested in combat. It’s then revealed that Magneto, after being turned into a baby in a previous comic did want revenge, so he took the X-Men to his Antarctic base to … mentally regress them into babies and torture them with a nanny bot.

Huh?

And I’d be lying if I said this sort of weird progression isn’t a repeating theme.

X-Men go to space to fight aliens; makes sense because all the other heroes were fighting aliens so they gotta prove they’re on the level. Alien fighting leads into them meeting Xenomorph-like aliens that slowly transform the X-Men into them; drama is created. X-Men escape but still are transforming, so Storm befriends a space whale and then becomes one to cure everyone; buh?!?!

Like I feel like some of these stories increase the insanity progressively but they go a little step too far. Sometimes it’s just out of nowhere like when demons kidnap the X-Men even though they were never hinted before to care about them, and somehow age up Magik to an adult. Or just Storm becomes a vampire suddenly even though last issue there was nothing even slightly referencing vampires.

It’s kind of a curse because X-Men is constantly trying to get bigger and bigger under Claremont but sometimes you’d prefer it just to take it slow and get back to the more straight forward connections to fighting oppression and discrimination.

Ironically it causes me to appreciate the more mundane moments that aren’t trying to be huge plot twists one on top of each other. Stuff like Kitty Pryde and Storm hanging out, going to Japan and getting to know Wolverine better, Nightcrawler trying to socialize more, and just Beast’s witty banter.

But even that can be a little fumbled at times because well,

Chris Claremont is a straight white guy.

And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But you can tell he has hang-ups trying to write about race or women because he doesn’t really have those experiences. Therefore, sometimes when he tries to write soliloquies and romances (which is pretty common), sometimes it can fall flat because of his perspective.

There is a lot of romance and relationship drama in X-Men, which is understandable and needed for the narrative. But so much becomes either bland, unintentionally problematic, or just too brief to make any true impact.

I’d say the biggest exception is Jean/Cyclops because they’ve been established for years and it’s very clear they care about each other. However, Jean dies in Dark Phoenix (at least that was the intent of the time) so a lot of the time the series bounces between other couples.

He later meets and then marries Madelyne Pryor, who is noted to look nearly identical to Jean. However that just makes things awkward as Madelyne often plays the role of “Not-Jean.” It at least has an interesting through line of him working through his grief, but little time is actually given for Madelyne’s own agency to break out of “Not-Jean,” which makes it really awkward when it’s revealed she’s a clone of Jean and Jean was alive all this time. So … what was the point?

Charles Xavier has so many love interests but often times he comes off as a jerk. Moira MacTaggart, Liliandra … even at one point Jean herself but everyone buries this for good reason. He comes off as very manipulative both to his partner and the X-Men. Charles is very unsympathetic to Moira’s predicament in raising Proteus. Liliandra he’s willing to bend over backwards for even if it means that he’s breaking his own morals in the process. And we don’t talk about Jean. However this would mostly be used by other authors to analyze how good of a leader Charles is, and more of his flaws. Meanwhile, Chris Claremont normalizes his behavior and rarely calls him out on it.

Colossus and Kitty Pryde.

What can I say about them? Colossus is an adult, Kitty Pryde is still a kid. It’s gross, but Chris wants you to really know they love each other more than a brother-and-sister relationship would. And they even point out it’s creepy, yet they still do it anyways.

Wolverine is entirely a whole other can of worms that I could write about separately.

Ironically some of the relationships that aren’t confirmed because of the times but are implied like Mystique and Destiny or Storm and Stevie are actually a lot better and written with much more nuance. However again nothing is confirmed and could be left to interpretation such as with Storm and Stevie. After all they do try to pair up these characters in straight couples … problematically but still.

Ultimately I feel like Claremont does have a lot of good ideas but the execution of them is where the ball is dropped. I would never call his run bad but I’ve never really felt compelled to return to it. I can’t deny the impact it’s made by any measure. However, returning to the originals just makes you wonder, how did some of this lead to Claremont’s X-Men being held up as an absolute gold standard comic?

I don’t know this was a long rant and I dunno if I’ll do it again. If you liked this let me know

[racefortheironthrone]

What did you think of X-Men Blue Origins?

(I may turn this into a People's History of the Marvel Universe later today, so keep an eye on this space.)

X-Men Blue: Origins and the Power of the Additive Retcon

(WARNING: heavy spoilers under the cut)

Introduction

If you've been a long-time X-Men reader, or you're a listener of Jay & Miles or Cerebrocast or any number of other LGBT+ X-Men podcasts, you probably know the story about how Chris Claremont wrote Mystique and Destiny as a lesbian couple, but had to use obscure verbiage and subtextual coding to get past Jim Shooter's blanket ban on LGBT+ characters in the Marvel Universe.

Likewise, you're probably also familiar with the story that, when Chris Claremont came up with the idea that Raven Darkholme and Kurt Wagner were related (a plot point set up all the way back in Uncanny X-Men #142), he intended that Mystique was Nightcrawler's father, having used her shapeshifting powers to take on a male body and impregnate (her one true love) Irene. This would have moved far beyond subtext - but it proved to be a bridge too far for Marvel editorial, and Claremont was never able to get it past S&P.

This lacuna in the backstories of Kurt and Raven - who was Kurt's father? - would remain one of the enduring mysteries of the X-Men mythos...and if there's one thing that comic writers like, it's filling in these gaps with a retcon.

Enter the Draco

Before I get into the most infamous story in all of X-Men history, I want to talk about retcons a bit. As I've written before:

"As long as there have been comic books, there have been retcons. For all that they have acquired a bad reputation, retcons can be an incredibly useful tool in comics writing and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Done right, retcons can add an enormous amount of depth and breadth to a character, making their worlds far richer than they were before. Instead, I would argue that retcons should be judged on the basis of whether they’re additive (bringing something new to the character by showing us a previously unknown aspect of their lives we never knew existed before) or subtractive (taking away something from the character that had previously been an important part of their identity), and how well those changes suit the character."

For a good example of an additive retcon, I would point to Chris Claremont re-writing Magneto's entire personality by revealing that he was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. As I have argued at some length, this transformed Magneto from a Doctor Doom knockoff into a complex and sympathetic character who could now work as a villain, anti-villain, anti-hero, or hero depending on the needs of the story.

For a good example of a subtractive retcon, I would point to...the Draco. If you're not familiar with this story, the TLDR is that it was revealed that Kurt's father was Azazel - an evil ancient mutant with the same powers and the same appearance (albeit color-shifted) as Kurt, who claims to be the devil and is part of a tribe of demonic-looking mutants who were banished to the Brimstone Dimension, and who fathered Nightcrawler as part of a plot to end this banishment.

I don't want to belabor Chuck Austen, because I think that Connor Goldsmith is right about his run actually being a camp cult classic in retrospect. However, I think we both agree that the Draco was a misfire, because of how the retcon undermined Kurt's entire thematic purpose as established in Giant-Size X-Men that Nightcrawler was actually a noble and arguably saintly man who suffered from unjust prejudice due to the random accident that his mutation made him appear to be a demon, and because of how the retcon undermined the centrality of Mystique and Destiny's relationship.

X-Men Blue Origins

This brings us to the Krakoan era. In HOXPOX and X-Men and Inferno, Jonathan Hickman had made Mystique and Destiny a crucial part of the story in a way that they hadn't been in decades: they were the great nemeses of Moira X, they were the force that threatened to burn Krakoa to the ground by revealing the devil's bargain that Xavier had struck with Sinister (and Moira), they were the lens through which the potential futures of Krakoa were explored, and they ultimately reshaped the Quiet Council and the Five in incredibly consequential ways.

This throughline was furthered after Hickman's departure, with Kieron Gillen exploring the backstories of Mystique and Destiny in Immortal X-Men and Sins of Sinister, and both Gillen and Si Spurrier exploring their relationship with Nightcrawler in AXE Judgement Day, Sins of Sinister, Way of X, Legion of X, Nightcrawlers, and Sons of X. One of the threads that wove through the interconnected fabric of these books was an increasing closeness between Kurt and Irene that needed an explanation. Many long-time readers began to anticipate that a retcon about Kurt's parentage was coming - and then we got X-Men Blue: Origins.

In this one issue, Si Spurrier had the difficult assignment of figuring out a way to "fix" the Draco and restore Claremont's intended backstory in a way that was surgical and elegant, that served the character arcs of Kurt, Raven, and Irene, and that dealt with complicated issues of trans and nonbinary representation, lesbian representation, disability representation, and the protean nature of the mutant metaphor. Thanks to help from Charlie Jane Anders and Steve Foxe, I think Spurrier succeeded tremendously.

I don't want to go through the issue beat-by-beat, because you should all read it, but the major retcon is that Mystique turns out to be a near-Omega level shapeshifter, who can rewrite themselves on a molecular level. Raven transformed into a male body and impregnated Irene, using bits of Azazel and many other men's DNA as her "pigments." In addition to being a deeply felt desire on both their parts to have a family together, this was part of Irene's plan to save them both (and the entire world) from Azazel's schemes, a plan that required them to abandon Kurt as a scapegoat-savior (a la Robert Graves' King Jesus), and to have Xavier wipe both their memories.

Now, I'm not the right person to write about what this story means on a representational level; I'll leave it to my LGBT+ colleagues on the Cerebrocast discord and elsewhere to discuss the personal resonances the story had for them.

What I will say, however, is that I thought this issue threaded the needle of all of these competing imperatives very deftly. It "fixed" the Draco without completely negating it, it really deepened and complicated the characters and relationships of both Raven and Irene (by showing that, in a lot of ways, Destiny is the more ruthless and manipulative of the two), and it honored Kurt's core identity as a man of hope and compassion (even if it did put him in a rather thankless ingénue role for much of the book).

It is the very acme of an additive retcon; nothing was lost, everything was gained.

I still think the baby Nightcrawler is just a bad bit, but then again I don't really vibe with Spurrier's comedic stylings.