[A while back Neil was looking at Claremont's return to the X-Men, a series in four parts. He sent me the first three together, but the fourth a bit later -- and I totally missed that last part. So to give Neil the time I thought he needed I ran Jason Powell's Best Of series. Then when I decided to bug him about where he was with that fourth part, I discovered what happened. Sorry about the confusion. Here is the last of Neil's posts about Claremont's return.]
Before I talk at all about the interior of the comic, I wanted to address its cover. Where the other three comics that I’ve written about are given either standard team shots or dramatic battle poses (or, in the case of variant covers, both) – the stuff deemed appropriate for (re)launches and stories that are ostensibly epic in scope – this one is subdued and whimsical. It’s just Nightcrawler’s looping tail, and Claremont’s name is just one of the several in the bottom corner. There’s no hoopla surrounding this second return to Uncanny, and it seems that the comic is better for it.
I noted, ambiguously, at the close of the last entry that Claremont pieces his voice back together by the end of X-Treme X-Men, and carries that confidence over to Uncanny when he returns one last time. (Well, ‘one last time’ as of this writing, anyway.)
Perhaps most interesting is Claremont’s ‘creation’* of the XSE over in X-Treme, and subsequent decision to carry the concept over to the core books. (Along with more or less the same team that served as the X-Men in X-Treme. It’s a messy transition, since Claremont had to hastily resolve the tensions that originally drove the two teams apart in the last issue of XXM, and does a poor job here of explaining why some characters leave and join the XSE. Cyclops’ and Wolverine’s interaction to this effect is particularly weak.)
(* ‘Creation’ in the sense that the XSE had never existed in the mainstream MU, but Bishop worked for the XSE in the alternate future from which he came. Claremont is shows a lot of willingness to play with the toys that others added to the X-sandbox in his absence – even the stupidest ones, like Azazel. Though, now that I think about it, the issue of Nightcrawler’s parenthood is addressed only in the form of a joke – and this is probably as it should be.)
But there’s an even more important difference, here: it feels like Claremont is actually having fun. The first issues of “Revolution” were weighed down by the expectations that Claremont was feeling, and the first issue of X-Treme tried too hard to justify its own existence through painful exposition. This second return to Uncanny, on the other hand? It opens with a baseball game, and one that quickly devolves into a surprisingly and convincingly tense moment. And it should be added that this isn’t because a Sentinel crashes the party, or anything, but emerges in an entirely organic fashion between two people that were bound to butt heads. (Four words: Rachel pitching. Emma batting.) This is precisely the sort of character stuff that Claremont has always done so well.
I realize that I’ve done hardly anything to address the pictures that accompany Claremont’s stories – and when I do, it’s mostly to dismiss them as crap. Not so with Davis who, in the Rachel-Emma scene, does a wonderful job of playing up the fun and nonchalance before obliterating it: his Emma Frost looks homicidal, his Rachel positively eerie. Jason has noted in a lot of places that Claremont seems especially driven when he’s collaborating with a gifted artist, and I can only assume that the same effect is in evidence here.**
(**Just once, though, just once, I would like someone to look at a picture of a baseball game, of how the players line-up on the field, before attempting to actually draw people playing it. Because it’s clear that Davis probably has some kind of idea or visual references for how they should stand, but no idea where they should stand.)
As compared to the first issue of X-Treme, Claremont also manages to fit a remarkable amount of story and character stuff into the standard-size space. Even the obligatory scene-setting stuff is made interesting. The baseball game is an amusing, if a bit vacuous, way to establish the two factions within the X-Men, and in addition to the Emma-Rachel showdown Claremont and Davis get a chance to show that they can do more subtle emotions, too. When Emma brushes off the fight with the comment to Cyclops that “Rachel’s but a child. [whispered:] Who never should have been born,” Wolverine replies, to no one in particular, “Guess some folks have all the luck”. Davis reinforces the disconnect between the two by boxing Wolverine off in his own panel, despite the fact that he is literally standing beside Emma. (And so this wonderful scene also serves to answer Cyclops’ earlier, awkwardly staged question to Wolverine about why he would join Storm’s team.) Likewise, Sage’s surveillance review could easily be cluttered with tedious narration about who these people are and what they’re doing, but Claremont and Davis cleverly juxtapose scenes like Bishop silently leaving flowers at Jean’s grave (and, amazingly, they give us enough credit to realize that it is her grave, because we don’t actually see her name) with Scott and Emma “conferencing” in the dark in his office.
There are also a few call-backs to earlier Claremont eras that deserve mention. (And, unlike X-Men 100, where Claremont reuses the space station location but to little effect and even less purpose, these ones are meaningful.) First, Claremont puts Storm, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler together in a Danger Room scene in order to make it clear that, a) yes, these three 80s favourites are the core of the team once again, and b) even if there are only three of them, and even if the comic has seemed fluffy up to this point, they are dangerous as all hell. Second, Storm’s articulation of the team’s mission – “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs” – has a particular irony to it, insofar as this was X-Factor’s original purpose and that same mission was rebuked ferociously by Wolverine and Storm at the time. (I cover this period, briefly, in my own blog post.) It’s an interesting shift from the earlier version of Storm, in particular, but hardly a surprising one – Storm has been so badly mishandled since Claremont first left her that the days of proactive mutant-liberator/terrorist Storm have long since been forgotten and would seem wholly out of place. (Which is a shame, but...)
Third on this list, although we don’t yet know it in this first issue, Claremont is also returning to a storyline that he had to abort and re-write the first time around – The Fury. What inklings we do get of the story are brief but ominous and wonderfully wrought. When Sage asks Brian Braddock whether the X-Men can stop by, his two-panel response is off-screen. Which wouldn’t be all that weird, I admit, except that in one of those panels we see a rotary phone, front-and-center – and the receiver is still on the hook. It’s one of those things that’s subtle enough that you might miss it the first time, and then you get goosebumps when you look it over again and realize what they were trying to tell you.
One of the reasons that my brief series ends here, though, is that Claremont doesn’t really sustain this level of excitement or nuance. Davis leaves after barely more than half a year and Claremont seems to flounder a bit, playing to what I would imagine he perceives to be the desire of his readers or his artists and doing things like writing self-consciously decompressed stories that don’t play to his strengths. (His “24 seconds” in UXM 467 is particularly egregious, as the story is meant to cover exactly that length of time and you can read it in about twice that.) He leaves after only 30 issues, in the middle of a storyline that gets wrapped up by Tony Bedard, no less, but which he’ll kinda follow-up on when he takes over Exiles. That’s a partial victory, I guess, but it’s a long way from the promise shown in this first issue of his final run on the X-Men.
[I would also like to add that “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs” is also amusing insofar as Claremont is returning to the X-Men to take responsibility for his heirs who have done all kinds of things since he left.]
Showing posts with label Claremont. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claremont. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 5 (of 5)
[Jason Powell finishes, FOR NOW, his epiloguing to his look at EVERY Claremont X-Men issue from the initial mega-run. BUT, if you enjoy Jason Powell's writing and/or Claremont, and god knows you do, you should continue to check this blog on Tuesdays, because we hope to have an exciting thing for you soon; and in the mean time we may be offering more Powell Claremont blogs to tide you over till that THING arrives. Anticipation! Mystery!]
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART FIVE: 1988-1991
17
Uncanny X-Men Annual #12, 1988
Maybe this is a cheat, because this issue has two great Claremont stories for the price of one. And both are illustrated by Art Adams, which is awesome.
The first one is pretty straightforward – an all-out action story that hearkens back to the Claremont/Byrne days. But it’s doubly cool because – having been published after the Bolton Classic X-Men backups, in can actually incorporate elements of said back-ups, thus cementing those Bolton stories in the X-Men canon. This one is a great payoff for the Claremont loyalists.
Meanwhile, in glorious contrast to the un-self-conscious romp of the first story, the b-side here, “I Want My X-Men” is gloriously meta-texual, and looking at it 22 years later, one realizes that it was remarkably prescient. Via the media-parody character Mojo (created by Adams and Ann Nocenti), Claremont is mocks the commercial exploitation of the X-Men franchise. As I said in the original blog entry: ‘… Mojo creates one X-Men spinoff after another. Note that in 1988, the amount of X-Men spinoffs could still be counted on one hand. Though the writing was on the wall, the franchise was still relatively contained, and would not proliferate to absurd levels until the 1990s, soon after Claremont quit in frustration. Though he portrays himself as martyr in “I Want My X-Men” (albeit a whiny one), the fact is that Claremont – with this story – correctly sees where the franchise is heading. In the images of Mojo as he magically whips up one spin-off team after another – throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – we see the future of the X-Men: a franchise that has become the victim of its own “excess success.” Once the hottest thing in comics, the X-Men line is now a bloated parody of itself, as Marvel overstuffs the shelves with “... X-Men after X-Men. Mutants without end ... skinny X-Men, fat X-Men, giant X-Men, tiny X-Men, musical X-Men, dancing X-Men, X-Men fish, X-Men insects, chimps in X-men costumes, X-Men mimes ... midget X-Men, X-Men made of straw or brick or mint chocolate ice cream! Each group of X-Men more boring, more tiresome, more ... malodorous ... than the one before ...” Claremont saw it coming, all along.
18
Uncanny X-Men #236, 1988
This is part two of the original four-parter that introduced the concept of Genosha, a mutant-slave state. This was the ultimate expression of the “mutants as persecuted minority” metaphor, at least in Claremont’s run. Never was it more brutally conveyed, and never did the X-Men seem more perfectly placed, politically. The X-Men are truly morally outraged here by how they see their own kind being treated, and they genuinely become freedom fighters here.
Issue 236, titled “Busting Loose,” is the best of the story’s four chapters. What I said in the blog: ‘Ultimately then, “Busting Loose” has all the trappings of a conventional superhero story: There are evil masterminds, people in trouble, a city buried under moral corruption – and a bright, primary colored superhero who emerges toward the end to take care of everything. Claremont’s genius is in both complicating and enhancing all of these story beats, making the danger harsher, the morality murkier, the heroes more troubled – then clothing it all in a real-world allegory. With its powerfully realized antagonists, morally outraged heroes, breathtakingly designed setting, superbly complex character dynamics and surprising political astuteness, issue 236 is a true triumph on the part of Claremont and company. In some ways, “Busting Loose” is the apex of Claremont’s creativity and expression on the Uncanny X-Men series, a peak blend of intelligence, action and drama that few X-Men issues before or after would match.’
19
Uncanny X-Men #242, 1988
This and the next issue – parts of the “Inferno” crossover -- are actually the only times in Claremont’s run on “Uncanny” that all five of the original Silver Age X-Men are active protagonists. Indeed, they are more or less the heroes of this story, while Claremont’s team (the “Outback” lineup at this point) are mostly portrayed as demonic villains. Part of why I love this issue is just that continuity-geek aspect of it: It’s also the only time that Claremont has the “old” X-Men actually appear and fight the “new” ones. (It seemed to happen twice in the early Claremont days, but in one case the Silver Age team turned out to be robots; in the other, they were telepathic illusions.) The fight is quite excitingly rendered too, by Silvestri and Green, who were an underrated art team on the series.
I also love evil Madelyne Pryor here. Maddie probably qualifies as one of my “comic-book character crushes,” and while the “Goblin Queen” transformation was a bit of a travesty (done to make Scott look good by comparison), Claremont gives her such a righteous rage here that I find it a little bit intoxicating. She’s such a force of nature here, confronting characters with their own hypocrisies even as she attempts to kill them (or in Havok’s case, seduce him).
Like Uncanny 137, this is another one that I always think of as being like a Greek tragedy, particularly the “brother vs. brother” stuff with Havok and Cyclops. More on that in the original blog entry here: http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/2009/10/uncanny-x-men-242.html
Indeed, “Inferno” has many parallels with “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” The one is in many respects a sequel to the other. “Dark Phoenix” is regarded a classic while “Inferno” is considered one of the worst X-Men stories, but I think they are both fantastic. Indeed, there are some ways in which I find “Inferno” superior. But most rewarding (for me) is in looking at how the two stories play off of each other.
20
Uncanny X-Men #275, 1991
And we gotta get a Jim Lee one in there. This is perhaps another cheat, as it is a “double feature” again. And once again, one part is a bright, shiny action story that is content just to revisit the glory days (this time going all the way back to Claremont/Cockrum, and the Shi’ar and Starjammers stuff). That’s all well and good (in fact it’s beaucoup fun), but the other half is where the real gold is: Magneto and Rogue vs Zaladane in the Savage Land. This of course has its roots in Claremont/Byrne as well. But the emotional core of the issue – Magneto – is all thanks to Claremont’s vision of the character. This is the climax of his character arc under Claremont, as Magnus renounces his “heroism” phase without returning to villainy. It is here that Magneto – like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight – becomes “too big” for comic-book distinctions of morality. He is simply too complex for that. This is Claremont’s last genuinely moving issue of X-Men.
And there you have it. Jeremy, I hope you enjoyed it!
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART FIVE: 1988-1991
17
Uncanny X-Men Annual #12, 1988
Maybe this is a cheat, because this issue has two great Claremont stories for the price of one. And both are illustrated by Art Adams, which is awesome.
The first one is pretty straightforward – an all-out action story that hearkens back to the Claremont/Byrne days. But it’s doubly cool because – having been published after the Bolton Classic X-Men backups, in can actually incorporate elements of said back-ups, thus cementing those Bolton stories in the X-Men canon. This one is a great payoff for the Claremont loyalists.
Meanwhile, in glorious contrast to the un-self-conscious romp of the first story, the b-side here, “I Want My X-Men” is gloriously meta-texual, and looking at it 22 years later, one realizes that it was remarkably prescient. Via the media-parody character Mojo (created by Adams and Ann Nocenti), Claremont is mocks the commercial exploitation of the X-Men franchise. As I said in the original blog entry: ‘… Mojo creates one X-Men spinoff after another. Note that in 1988, the amount of X-Men spinoffs could still be counted on one hand. Though the writing was on the wall, the franchise was still relatively contained, and would not proliferate to absurd levels until the 1990s, soon after Claremont quit in frustration. Though he portrays himself as martyr in “I Want My X-Men” (albeit a whiny one), the fact is that Claremont – with this story – correctly sees where the franchise is heading. In the images of Mojo as he magically whips up one spin-off team after another – throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – we see the future of the X-Men: a franchise that has become the victim of its own “excess success.” Once the hottest thing in comics, the X-Men line is now a bloated parody of itself, as Marvel overstuffs the shelves with “... X-Men after X-Men. Mutants without end ... skinny X-Men, fat X-Men, giant X-Men, tiny X-Men, musical X-Men, dancing X-Men, X-Men fish, X-Men insects, chimps in X-men costumes, X-Men mimes ... midget X-Men, X-Men made of straw or brick or mint chocolate ice cream! Each group of X-Men more boring, more tiresome, more ... malodorous ... than the one before ...” Claremont saw it coming, all along.
18
Uncanny X-Men #236, 1988
This is part two of the original four-parter that introduced the concept of Genosha, a mutant-slave state. This was the ultimate expression of the “mutants as persecuted minority” metaphor, at least in Claremont’s run. Never was it more brutally conveyed, and never did the X-Men seem more perfectly placed, politically. The X-Men are truly morally outraged here by how they see their own kind being treated, and they genuinely become freedom fighters here.
Issue 236, titled “Busting Loose,” is the best of the story’s four chapters. What I said in the blog: ‘Ultimately then, “Busting Loose” has all the trappings of a conventional superhero story: There are evil masterminds, people in trouble, a city buried under moral corruption – and a bright, primary colored superhero who emerges toward the end to take care of everything. Claremont’s genius is in both complicating and enhancing all of these story beats, making the danger harsher, the morality murkier, the heroes more troubled – then clothing it all in a real-world allegory. With its powerfully realized antagonists, morally outraged heroes, breathtakingly designed setting, superbly complex character dynamics and surprising political astuteness, issue 236 is a true triumph on the part of Claremont and company. In some ways, “Busting Loose” is the apex of Claremont’s creativity and expression on the Uncanny X-Men series, a peak blend of intelligence, action and drama that few X-Men issues before or after would match.’
19
Uncanny X-Men #242, 1988
This and the next issue – parts of the “Inferno” crossover -- are actually the only times in Claremont’s run on “Uncanny” that all five of the original Silver Age X-Men are active protagonists. Indeed, they are more or less the heroes of this story, while Claremont’s team (the “Outback” lineup at this point) are mostly portrayed as demonic villains. Part of why I love this issue is just that continuity-geek aspect of it: It’s also the only time that Claremont has the “old” X-Men actually appear and fight the “new” ones. (It seemed to happen twice in the early Claremont days, but in one case the Silver Age team turned out to be robots; in the other, they were telepathic illusions.) The fight is quite excitingly rendered too, by Silvestri and Green, who were an underrated art team on the series.
I also love evil Madelyne Pryor here. Maddie probably qualifies as one of my “comic-book character crushes,” and while the “Goblin Queen” transformation was a bit of a travesty (done to make Scott look good by comparison), Claremont gives her such a righteous rage here that I find it a little bit intoxicating. She’s such a force of nature here, confronting characters with their own hypocrisies even as she attempts to kill them (or in Havok’s case, seduce him).
Like Uncanny 137, this is another one that I always think of as being like a Greek tragedy, particularly the “brother vs. brother” stuff with Havok and Cyclops. More on that in the original blog entry here: http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/2009/10/uncanny-x-men-242.html
Indeed, “Inferno” has many parallels with “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” The one is in many respects a sequel to the other. “Dark Phoenix” is regarded a classic while “Inferno” is considered one of the worst X-Men stories, but I think they are both fantastic. Indeed, there are some ways in which I find “Inferno” superior. But most rewarding (for me) is in looking at how the two stories play off of each other.
20
Uncanny X-Men #275, 1991
And we gotta get a Jim Lee one in there. This is perhaps another cheat, as it is a “double feature” again. And once again, one part is a bright, shiny action story that is content just to revisit the glory days (this time going all the way back to Claremont/Cockrum, and the Shi’ar and Starjammers stuff). That’s all well and good (in fact it’s beaucoup fun), but the other half is where the real gold is: Magneto and Rogue vs Zaladane in the Savage Land. This of course has its roots in Claremont/Byrne as well. But the emotional core of the issue – Magneto – is all thanks to Claremont’s vision of the character. This is the climax of his character arc under Claremont, as Magnus renounces his “heroism” phase without returning to villainy. It is here that Magneto – like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight – becomes “too big” for comic-book distinctions of morality. He is simply too complex for that. This is Claremont’s last genuinely moving issue of X-Men.
And there you have it. Jeremy, I hope you enjoyed it!
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 4 (of 5)
[Jason Powell continues to epilogue the hell out of his epic look at Claremont's X-Men.]
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART FOUR 1986-1987
12
New Mutants #40, 1986
When Claremont turned Magneto into the new headmaster for the New Mutants, it didn’t always work. (I think Scott Lobdell commented in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” interview book that there was something horrible in seeing Magneto folding laundry.) But the story here is right on: Magneto fights the Avengers, who refuse to believe that he has reformed. I think that by the mid-80s, Claremont must have been pretty immersed in his private mutant universe, as he seems to relish the idea of taking down Marvel’s mainstream heroes down a peg. Captain America and company come off as terribly smug and sanctimonious here, and it’s quite a joy to see Magneto (and the New Mutants, particularly Illyana) take the team down. There’s a quite wonderful moment when Magneto points out the Avengers’ hypocrisy, them having accepted the formerly villainous Sub-Mariner among their ranks yet refusing to believe that Magneto could reform. Captain America points out what he believes to be a key difference: With Namor, there is a precedence for heroism, as the Sub-Mariner actually fought against Nazis in World War II. Magneto’s reply – informed by his own history with the Nazi regime – is dryly perfect: “How fortunate for him, Captain.”
People have theorized that part of the X-Men’s popularity was due to their status as the outcasts of the Marvel Universe. Since comics fans themselves often feel like outcasts, it was easy for them to identify with the X-Men, and certainly must have felt empowered by the glamorization of the characters. This particular issue of New Mutants – with its group of teenage misfits rallying around a powerful leader to defeat and humiliate a group of smug authoritarians too blind to see how very wrong they are – surely must be a quintessential example of this phenomenon. I mean, I like to think I am reasonably well-adjusted and integrated into society, but I still want to cheer when I read this one.
13
Classic X-Men #7b, 1986
Ah, the Classic X-Men backups, illustrated by John Bolton. Some of Claremont’s best X-Men stories, these. Issue 7 introduces us to a Hellfire Club run by normal humans. Sebastian Shaw has worked his way into the inner circle, but the other mutants – Tessa, Harry Leland, Emma Frost, and another female mutant, called Lourdes – are still on the outside. But an attempt by the Club’s chairman, Edward Buckmann, to eradicate mutants with a new batch of Sentinels changes things. Shaw initiates a coup, and takes over the Inner Circle, thus leading to the Hellfire Club status quo we all know and love, as introduced in X-Men 129.
These back-up stories are a great example of Claremont’s ability to be economical when needed. Here’s what I said about this one: ‘There’s a fantastic bit of dialogue toward the end of the Sentinel sequence, when Shaw’s lover, a mutant named Lourdes, dies from wounds received during the fight. It begins with a fairly standard cliché: As she starts to fade, she flashes back to a happy time in her life, and wishes she could be there again. She then looks at Shaw and says, “Oh, Sebastian ... why does Buckman hate us ...” Shaw’s reply: “Fear. Of what we are, and what we represent.” And then he adds, “Now, I’ll give him cause.”
From a sentimental flashback to a gently plaintive indictment of the villain’s racism, to Shaw’s surprisingly pragmatic response, to a chilling set-up for the story’s final act. … And it all happens in just a few lines. The flow is fantastic, and a great example of Claremont at his absolute best.’
14
Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men #4, 1987
What worse name could there be for a touching, heart-warming, character-driven drama than “The Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men”? But there it is. The title teams do fight, both in issue 2 and issue 4, but the whole series is built on emotional moments, not physical ones. The series is actually packed with psychological drama -- another example of Claremont economy, as in terms of page count this story is not that long – and everything pays off beautifully in the fourth and final issue. I’ve read it many, many times, and it always makes me cry. I mean, literally cry. Beautiful, heartwarming stuff.
15
Classic X-Men #12b , 1987
Another twelve-page Claremont-Bolton collaboration, which lays out large parts of Magneto’s back-story. Magneto is Claremont’s greatest single achievement as writer of the X-Men – by far his most fleshed-out, most three-dimensional characterization. And this is one of Claremont’s best Magneto stories, although it is trumped by …
16
Classic X-Men #19b , 1987
This is my single favorite X-Men story, ever. I’ll just link to the full write-up.
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART FOUR 1986-1987
12
New Mutants #40, 1986
When Claremont turned Magneto into the new headmaster for the New Mutants, it didn’t always work. (I think Scott Lobdell commented in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” interview book that there was something horrible in seeing Magneto folding laundry.) But the story here is right on: Magneto fights the Avengers, who refuse to believe that he has reformed. I think that by the mid-80s, Claremont must have been pretty immersed in his private mutant universe, as he seems to relish the idea of taking down Marvel’s mainstream heroes down a peg. Captain America and company come off as terribly smug and sanctimonious here, and it’s quite a joy to see Magneto (and the New Mutants, particularly Illyana) take the team down. There’s a quite wonderful moment when Magneto points out the Avengers’ hypocrisy, them having accepted the formerly villainous Sub-Mariner among their ranks yet refusing to believe that Magneto could reform. Captain America points out what he believes to be a key difference: With Namor, there is a precedence for heroism, as the Sub-Mariner actually fought against Nazis in World War II. Magneto’s reply – informed by his own history with the Nazi regime – is dryly perfect: “How fortunate for him, Captain.”
People have theorized that part of the X-Men’s popularity was due to their status as the outcasts of the Marvel Universe. Since comics fans themselves often feel like outcasts, it was easy for them to identify with the X-Men, and certainly must have felt empowered by the glamorization of the characters. This particular issue of New Mutants – with its group of teenage misfits rallying around a powerful leader to defeat and humiliate a group of smug authoritarians too blind to see how very wrong they are – surely must be a quintessential example of this phenomenon. I mean, I like to think I am reasonably well-adjusted and integrated into society, but I still want to cheer when I read this one.
13
Classic X-Men #7b, 1986
Ah, the Classic X-Men backups, illustrated by John Bolton. Some of Claremont’s best X-Men stories, these. Issue 7 introduces us to a Hellfire Club run by normal humans. Sebastian Shaw has worked his way into the inner circle, but the other mutants – Tessa, Harry Leland, Emma Frost, and another female mutant, called Lourdes – are still on the outside. But an attempt by the Club’s chairman, Edward Buckmann, to eradicate mutants with a new batch of Sentinels changes things. Shaw initiates a coup, and takes over the Inner Circle, thus leading to the Hellfire Club status quo we all know and love, as introduced in X-Men 129.
These back-up stories are a great example of Claremont’s ability to be economical when needed. Here’s what I said about this one: ‘There’s a fantastic bit of dialogue toward the end of the Sentinel sequence, when Shaw’s lover, a mutant named Lourdes, dies from wounds received during the fight. It begins with a fairly standard cliché: As she starts to fade, she flashes back to a happy time in her life, and wishes she could be there again. She then looks at Shaw and says, “Oh, Sebastian ... why does Buckman hate us ...” Shaw’s reply: “Fear. Of what we are, and what we represent.” And then he adds, “Now, I’ll give him cause.”
From a sentimental flashback to a gently plaintive indictment of the villain’s racism, to Shaw’s surprisingly pragmatic response, to a chilling set-up for the story’s final act. … And it all happens in just a few lines. The flow is fantastic, and a great example of Claremont at his absolute best.’
14
Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men #4, 1987
What worse name could there be for a touching, heart-warming, character-driven drama than “The Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men”? But there it is. The title teams do fight, both in issue 2 and issue 4, but the whole series is built on emotional moments, not physical ones. The series is actually packed with psychological drama -- another example of Claremont economy, as in terms of page count this story is not that long – and everything pays off beautifully in the fourth and final issue. I’ve read it many, many times, and it always makes me cry. I mean, literally cry. Beautiful, heartwarming stuff.
15
Classic X-Men #12b , 1987
Another twelve-page Claremont-Bolton collaboration, which lays out large parts of Magneto’s back-story. Magneto is Claremont’s greatest single achievement as writer of the X-Men – by far his most fleshed-out, most three-dimensional characterization. And this is one of Claremont’s best Magneto stories, although it is trumped by …
16
Classic X-Men #19b , 1987
This is my single favorite X-Men story, ever. I’ll just link to the full write-up.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 3 (of 5)
[Jason Powell continues to epilogue the hell out of his huge look at Claremont's X-Men.]
PART THREE: 1984 - 1985
9
Uncanny X-Men #183, 1984
Kitty and Peter break up. Original blog entry says: “Thanks to Romita’s incredible talent for drawing a fist-fight, combined with Claremont’s peerless ability to write superheroes as real, psychologically credible human beings, this is the first issue of Uncanny X-Men that – instead of being weighted one way or the other – is truly equal parts superb melodrama and dynamic action story. The balance would never again be this perfect.”
10
New Mutants #27, 1985
It’s probably obvious that I’m sort of cherry-picking a favorite issue from each miniature “era” of Claremont’s run. Obviously Claremont/Sienkiewicz has to be represented somewhere, despite the relative brevity of their collaboration on New Mutants (it lasted just a little over a year, from issue 18 to issue 31). It was a really fantastic bit of synergy – Claremont was explicitly pleased with it when he talked about Sienkiewicz in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” book. I had always assumed that some of the wild concepts that cropped up over the course of that run were the result of Sienkiewicz co-plotting, but apparently I had it backwards. According to Nocenti in her interview with Patrick Meaney (as always, thanks, Patrick!), Claremont was just coming up with wilder and wilder ideas, so Nocenti felt obliged to seek out an artist whose sensibility was out-there enough to match with Claremont’s increasingly weirder ideas. (So, the next time you see someone online say that Warlock was created as a way to showcase Bill Sienkiewicz’s weirdness, be aware that it just ain’t so. Sienkiewicz was recruited so that Warlock would be portrayed according to Claremont’s vision.)
Anyway, this issue is my favorite of the Claremont/Sienkiewicz run – it’s the middle part of the “Legion” three-parter. It’s a stock plot, one of Claremont’s go-to’s: a journey through the astral plane, inside someone’s psyche. It allows for a lot of weird, dream-like imagery, which normally can feel a bit self-indulgent and wearying. But Sienkiewicz’s art style – so impressionistic in style, and so varied in form – really elevates the concept beyond what has become a superhero-genre cliché. The story is visually insane enough to actually feel like it might be taking place inside of someone’s mind. Meanwhile, Claremont’s characterization of Xavier, as he explores the mind of a son he didn’t know he had, is quite powerful and multi-faceted. Xavier has always been portrayed as the guy who knows more than he tells. He’s the one who knows all the secrets. But here, we see a fantastic reversal of that – we get to see Charles as the naïve one, for a change. And it’s all completely credible.
The issue also feels rather strikingly topical when reading it now, as part of David “Legion” Haller’s mental backdrop is informed by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
11
New Mutants Special Edition, 1985
Unlike with X-Men, where Claremont loved to shake up the roster on a regular basis, the New Mutants had a much more consistent line-up during Claremont’s tenure. Possibly because Claremont had a special affection for his own babies – the X-Men were largely created by other people, but all nine New Mutants were created or co-created by Claremont himself. (Except for Illyana Rasputin, technically, but she really was a cipher until Claremont did the Limbo story with her.)
Anyway, there is no better showcase for all nine New Mutants than the 64-page 1985 Special Edition, which drops each of them in a different domain of Asgard and then has fun watching as they attempt to survive and thrive in a realm of pure fantasy, slowly but surely making their way to each other.
What I said earlier: “Ann Nocenti once again earns her chops as an editor; she’s got every member of the creative cast working not only at peak efficiency, but seemingly in telepathic unison. The various design elements – layout, line, color, letters – complement each other so well, it’s almost hard to believe that so many different people were involved. The clarity of expression and continuity of design are breathtaking.”
Art Adams didn’t draw all that many mutant stories by Claremont, but whenever he did, the results were always gold. Adams’ depictions of the New Mutants are actually my favorites. I don’t think anyone drew these nine characters better.
PART THREE: 1984 - 1985
9
Uncanny X-Men #183, 1984
Kitty and Peter break up. Original blog entry says: “Thanks to Romita’s incredible talent for drawing a fist-fight, combined with Claremont’s peerless ability to write superheroes as real, psychologically credible human beings, this is the first issue of Uncanny X-Men that – instead of being weighted one way or the other – is truly equal parts superb melodrama and dynamic action story. The balance would never again be this perfect.”
10
New Mutants #27, 1985
It’s probably obvious that I’m sort of cherry-picking a favorite issue from each miniature “era” of Claremont’s run. Obviously Claremont/Sienkiewicz has to be represented somewhere, despite the relative brevity of their collaboration on New Mutants (it lasted just a little over a year, from issue 18 to issue 31). It was a really fantastic bit of synergy – Claremont was explicitly pleased with it when he talked about Sienkiewicz in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” book. I had always assumed that some of the wild concepts that cropped up over the course of that run were the result of Sienkiewicz co-plotting, but apparently I had it backwards. According to Nocenti in her interview with Patrick Meaney (as always, thanks, Patrick!), Claremont was just coming up with wilder and wilder ideas, so Nocenti felt obliged to seek out an artist whose sensibility was out-there enough to match with Claremont’s increasingly weirder ideas. (So, the next time you see someone online say that Warlock was created as a way to showcase Bill Sienkiewicz’s weirdness, be aware that it just ain’t so. Sienkiewicz was recruited so that Warlock would be portrayed according to Claremont’s vision.)
Anyway, this issue is my favorite of the Claremont/Sienkiewicz run – it’s the middle part of the “Legion” three-parter. It’s a stock plot, one of Claremont’s go-to’s: a journey through the astral plane, inside someone’s psyche. It allows for a lot of weird, dream-like imagery, which normally can feel a bit self-indulgent and wearying. But Sienkiewicz’s art style – so impressionistic in style, and so varied in form – really elevates the concept beyond what has become a superhero-genre cliché. The story is visually insane enough to actually feel like it might be taking place inside of someone’s mind. Meanwhile, Claremont’s characterization of Xavier, as he explores the mind of a son he didn’t know he had, is quite powerful and multi-faceted. Xavier has always been portrayed as the guy who knows more than he tells. He’s the one who knows all the secrets. But here, we see a fantastic reversal of that – we get to see Charles as the naïve one, for a change. And it’s all completely credible.
The issue also feels rather strikingly topical when reading it now, as part of David “Legion” Haller’s mental backdrop is informed by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
11
New Mutants Special Edition, 1985
Unlike with X-Men, where Claremont loved to shake up the roster on a regular basis, the New Mutants had a much more consistent line-up during Claremont’s tenure. Possibly because Claremont had a special affection for his own babies – the X-Men were largely created by other people, but all nine New Mutants were created or co-created by Claremont himself. (Except for Illyana Rasputin, technically, but she really was a cipher until Claremont did the Limbo story with her.)
Anyway, there is no better showcase for all nine New Mutants than the 64-page 1985 Special Edition, which drops each of them in a different domain of Asgard and then has fun watching as they attempt to survive and thrive in a realm of pure fantasy, slowly but surely making their way to each other.
What I said earlier: “Ann Nocenti once again earns her chops as an editor; she’s got every member of the creative cast working not only at peak efficiency, but seemingly in telepathic unison. The various design elements – layout, line, color, letters – complement each other so well, it’s almost hard to believe that so many different people were involved. The clarity of expression and continuity of design are breathtaking.”
Art Adams didn’t draw all that many mutant stories by Claremont, but whenever he did, the results were always gold. Adams’ depictions of the New Mutants are actually my favorites. I don’t think anyone drew these nine characters better.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 2 (of 5)
[Super-villains monologue. Jason Powell epilogues.]
PART TWO: 1982-1983
5
Uncanny X-Men #161 –1982
This is the best of the post-Byrne collaborations between Claremont and Cockrum, as they reveal the “secret origin” of Xavier and Magneto’s first meeting. Excerpt from my original blog entry: ‘That Magneto is two steps ahead of Xavier already speaks volumes about both of them – ingenious characterization on Claremont’s part – but just as clever is the contrast in their differing reactions to meeting a fellow mutant. For Magneto, it is not necessary to be commented upon; to Xavier, it is “fantastic!” That single image and its accompanying text -- Page 15, panel three – is one of my personal favorites in the entire Claremont X-Men canon. That one panel alone tells you almost everything you need to know about those two characters and their relationship. Absolutely brilliant.’
6-7
Uncanny X-Men #172-173, 1983
Wolverine and Rogue team up in Japan. Issue 172 is the standout of these two issues, but they are both fantastic, my favorite of the Claremont-Smith collaborations. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote about issue 172: “So, “Scarlet in Glory” brims with cross-connections, right from the start: Logan catches up on what has been happening in X-Men in continuity (his enemy, Rogue, is now a team member; Kitty has a pet dragon, etc.). Meanwhile Yukio, from the Wolverine miniseries, fights the Silver Samurai, etc. Also in the mix is the slow-burning “Phoenix resurrection” bit. There is a lot going on in this issue, but – buoyed by penciller Paul Smith’s ingenuity -- Claremont handles the disparate components gracefully, weaving them into a clockwork plot that still stands as one of the most elegant and precise that the series has ever seen. So meticulously thought-out is the story that Claremont and Smith are able to execute no less than five surprises/reveals over the course of Pages 12-18, each one perfectly set-up and brilliantly executed.”
8
Uncanny X-Men #179, 1983
Kitty is kidnapped by the Morlocks. What I said originally: “With its dark tone, its powerful (and powerfully arranged) sequences of both terror and tragedy, and its genuinely hard look at the skewed politics that comprise the series’ foundation, Uncanny X-Men #179 is a watershed issue for the canon, and an overlooked gem.”
PART TWO: 1982-1983
5
Uncanny X-Men #161 –1982
This is the best of the post-Byrne collaborations between Claremont and Cockrum, as they reveal the “secret origin” of Xavier and Magneto’s first meeting. Excerpt from my original blog entry: ‘That Magneto is two steps ahead of Xavier already speaks volumes about both of them – ingenious characterization on Claremont’s part – but just as clever is the contrast in their differing reactions to meeting a fellow mutant. For Magneto, it is not necessary to be commented upon; to Xavier, it is “fantastic!” That single image and its accompanying text -- Page 15, panel three – is one of my personal favorites in the entire Claremont X-Men canon. That one panel alone tells you almost everything you need to know about those two characters and their relationship. Absolutely brilliant.’
6-7
Uncanny X-Men #172-173, 1983
Wolverine and Rogue team up in Japan. Issue 172 is the standout of these two issues, but they are both fantastic, my favorite of the Claremont-Smith collaborations. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote about issue 172: “So, “Scarlet in Glory” brims with cross-connections, right from the start: Logan catches up on what has been happening in X-Men in continuity (his enemy, Rogue, is now a team member; Kitty has a pet dragon, etc.). Meanwhile Yukio, from the Wolverine miniseries, fights the Silver Samurai, etc. Also in the mix is the slow-burning “Phoenix resurrection” bit. There is a lot going on in this issue, but – buoyed by penciller Paul Smith’s ingenuity -- Claremont handles the disparate components gracefully, weaving them into a clockwork plot that still stands as one of the most elegant and precise that the series has ever seen. So meticulously thought-out is the story that Claremont and Smith are able to execute no less than five surprises/reveals over the course of Pages 12-18, each one perfectly set-up and brilliantly executed.”
8
Uncanny X-Men #179, 1983
Kitty is kidnapped by the Morlocks. What I said originally: “With its dark tone, its powerful (and powerfully arranged) sequences of both terror and tragedy, and its genuinely hard look at the skewed politics that comprise the series’ foundation, Uncanny X-Men #179 is a watershed issue for the canon, and an overlooked gem.”
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 1 (of 5)
[Jason Powell returns for this encore presentation. Because you demanded it! Neil should be back with the final part of his series soon.]
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART ONE 1975-1981
1
Uncanny X-Men #96 – from 1975
The first issue fully plotted by Claremont, and it introduces several motifs that will recur often over the next sixteen years: Demonic invasion (see also: X-Men 143, X-Men 184-188, “Fall of the Mutants” and “Inferno”); women kicking ass (note Moira coming out with the machine gun, and of course it is Storm who saves the day); Ororo’s claustrophobia; and the one-page cutaways that seed upcoming plots (not something invented by Claremont, but it’s a device that he loves, and this is the first issue in which he uses it).
When I first blogged about this, Josh Hechinger made a great comment about it. Here’s an excerpt …
“ … notice how everyone's attacks on the monster are mainly them trying to defend whoever just got smacked down by the monster? Storm goes down, Colossus saves her. He goes down, Nightcrawler lays into the monster. Nightcrawler goes down, Wolverine goes berserker. It escalates, to the point of overcompensation. … Everyone on the team clearly A) doesn't want to see another teammate die and B) is trying really, really, REALLY hard to make up for the fact that they sat on their thumbs when Proudstar went boom. … (Except for Banshee, who DID try to save Proudstar, and as such is barely involved in the fight.)”
2
Uncanny X-Men #113 – 1978
The quintessential X-Men vs. Magneto fight, by Claremont/Byrne/Austin. That team always did action really well, and this is one of their best fight scenes, and it’s against their arch-enemy! (It’s also pretty much the final appearance of the evil, Silver Age Magneto. His rehabilitation begins to take place over the course of his next few appearances.)
3
Uncanny X-Men #132 – 1980
Here’s what I wrote originally: “This issue is a triumph by Claremont and Byrne, containing an embarrassment of riches. With the exception of their utter masterpiece, Uncanny X-Men #137, this one’s their very best. It contains the return of the Angel, a beautiful love scene between Scott and Jean, a wonderfully suspenseful assault by the X-Men upon the Hellfire Club, the full unveiling of Sebastian Shaw (arguably Claremont/Byrne’s greatest addition to the X-Men rogues’ gallery), the payoff to Jason Wyngarde’s seduction of Jean along with the revelation that Wyngarde is actually Silver Age villain Mastermind, and to top it all off the best picture of Wolverine ever drawn.”
Then in the comments, Doug M pointed out the use of contrast in the issue: “ … it is structured, to a degree rare even for top-form Claremont & Byrne, and almost unknown in mainstream comics up to this time. … We have two parts to this issue -- the intro in New Mexico, and the attack on the Hellfire Club in New York. … New Mexico is sunny and warm and clean. In New York, it's night and cold and snowing, and some of the action takes place in a sewer. … In New Mexico the X-Men are casual, in jeans and bathing suits. In New York, they're formal, in uniform or in evening dress. … New Mexico is wide open and outdoors. All but a couple of panels in New York are indoors, and some are claustrophobically so -- Nightcrawler and Wolverine going through tunnels. … New Mexico is heavenly, with an angel soaring high above. The Hellfire Club is hellish, with the two least human members of the team -- the one who /looks/ horrible, and the one who really /is/ horrible -- creeping through the sewers. … The very first panel has Angel flying high. The very last panel has Wolverine emerging from the muck deep underground.” Doug goes on with some interesting observations about how these contrasts reinforce thematically what is happening with Jean … it’s all great stuff. Check it out if you haven’t.
4
Uncanny X-Men #137 – 1980
The issue that everything before it was leading up to. A Greek tragedy, with superheroes.
Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.
PART ONE 1975-1981
1
Uncanny X-Men #96 – from 1975
The first issue fully plotted by Claremont, and it introduces several motifs that will recur often over the next sixteen years: Demonic invasion (see also: X-Men 143, X-Men 184-188, “Fall of the Mutants” and “Inferno”); women kicking ass (note Moira coming out with the machine gun, and of course it is Storm who saves the day); Ororo’s claustrophobia; and the one-page cutaways that seed upcoming plots (not something invented by Claremont, but it’s a device that he loves, and this is the first issue in which he uses it).
When I first blogged about this, Josh Hechinger made a great comment about it. Here’s an excerpt …
“ … notice how everyone's attacks on the monster are mainly them trying to defend whoever just got smacked down by the monster? Storm goes down, Colossus saves her. He goes down, Nightcrawler lays into the monster. Nightcrawler goes down, Wolverine goes berserker. It escalates, to the point of overcompensation. … Everyone on the team clearly A) doesn't want to see another teammate die and B) is trying really, really, REALLY hard to make up for the fact that they sat on their thumbs when Proudstar went boom. … (Except for Banshee, who DID try to save Proudstar, and as such is barely involved in the fight.)”
2
Uncanny X-Men #113 – 1978
The quintessential X-Men vs. Magneto fight, by Claremont/Byrne/Austin. That team always did action really well, and this is one of their best fight scenes, and it’s against their arch-enemy! (It’s also pretty much the final appearance of the evil, Silver Age Magneto. His rehabilitation begins to take place over the course of his next few appearances.)
3
Uncanny X-Men #132 – 1980
Here’s what I wrote originally: “This issue is a triumph by Claremont and Byrne, containing an embarrassment of riches. With the exception of their utter masterpiece, Uncanny X-Men #137, this one’s their very best. It contains the return of the Angel, a beautiful love scene between Scott and Jean, a wonderfully suspenseful assault by the X-Men upon the Hellfire Club, the full unveiling of Sebastian Shaw (arguably Claremont/Byrne’s greatest addition to the X-Men rogues’ gallery), the payoff to Jason Wyngarde’s seduction of Jean along with the revelation that Wyngarde is actually Silver Age villain Mastermind, and to top it all off the best picture of Wolverine ever drawn.”
Then in the comments, Doug M pointed out the use of contrast in the issue: “ … it is structured, to a degree rare even for top-form Claremont & Byrne, and almost unknown in mainstream comics up to this time. … We have two parts to this issue -- the intro in New Mexico, and the attack on the Hellfire Club in New York. … New Mexico is sunny and warm and clean. In New York, it's night and cold and snowing, and some of the action takes place in a sewer. … In New Mexico the X-Men are casual, in jeans and bathing suits. In New York, they're formal, in uniform or in evening dress. … New Mexico is wide open and outdoors. All but a couple of panels in New York are indoors, and some are claustrophobically so -- Nightcrawler and Wolverine going through tunnels. … New Mexico is heavenly, with an angel soaring high above. The Hellfire Club is hellish, with the two least human members of the team -- the one who /looks/ horrible, and the one who really /is/ horrible -- creeping through the sewers. … The very first panel has Angel flying high. The very last panel has Wolverine emerging from the muck deep underground.” Doug goes on with some interesting observations about how these contrasts reinforce thematically what is happening with Jean … it’s all great stuff. Check it out if you haven’t.
4
Uncanny X-Men #137 – 1980
The issue that everything before it was leading up to. A Greek tragedy, with superheroes.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
X-Treme X-Men 1 (#3 in a four-issue limited series)
[Neil Shyminsky continues his look at Claremont's more recent return to the X-Men.]
In my blogs about Claremont’s return to X-Men and Uncanny, I spent a lot of space writing about how Claremont was never as tediously wordy or prone to allowing characters to soliloquize, and noted how those comics were themselves proof that fan claims had always been exaggerated. But a strange thing happens in the course of a year. Because by the time that Claremont, having been pushed from the core books for Jon Casey and Grant Morrison, transitions to X-Treme X-Men and launches it with a new first issue, his verbosity has become prolixity*, and the writer has become a stereotype of himself.
(* For those who also didn’t know this word existed – I found it by accident a few weeks ago – the dictionary tells me that prolixity is “boring verbosity.” Perfect.)
Of the 31 pages I count in the issue, fewer than half (14, and maybe 15 if you include the page where Thunderbird shoots a fireball) contain any action at all, much less a fight of any kind – and many of those pages of action consist of the X-Men getting pwned by goons in futuristic armor, which is hardly exciting stuff. That means that 17 pages feature characters who are only standing or sitting, all the while talking or thinking. Of those 17 pages, four are devoted to in-narrative storytelling that’s designed to fill-in the backstory for readers who are new to the X-Men (a one page summary of who the X-Men are) and/or wondering what makes X-Treme X-Men different from the other books (three pages about Destiny’s diaries and how they came to learn about them). And then there’s a couple pages where the characters discuss why they don’t trust Professor X anymore**. And a couple more pages where the local police and politicians explain and introduce themselves to one another for our benefit. This isn’t just a lot of exposition – it’s the exposition of your nightmares.
(**Which, on top of being unnecessarily long, also happens to be badly written, since it forces us to a) align ourselves, as the reader being filled in, with the surprisingly ignorant and personality-less Thunderbird who is asking the questions, and also b) believe that Thunderbird, having been on the team for at least a year at this point, is really that clueless and made the decision to join this mission without really knowing why they were doing it. Which is only possible to believe if Claremont thinks that either he or we are stupid.)
The characters that Claremont has chosen are a bit strange, too, given his characterization strengths and traditional favourites among the X-Men. Granted, Claremont was working under restraints, here – Morrison and Casey were given first pick, so Chris only had so many options. (This is why Beast appears only in the first couple issues – Morrison hadn’t yet put his claim in when Claremont started, and so he had to be hastily written out.) But for someone famed for writing so many varied voices, and writing them so well, the uniformity and blandness of his choices is underwhelming: the aloof ‘living-computer’, the aloof no-fun cop from the future, the aloof weather goddess, the aloof English ninja aristocrat, the slightly-less-aloof Indian aristocrat... stop me once you see the pattern. Aside from Rogue and the short-lived Beast, this is a team that is surprisingly (for Claremont) lacking in humor and, well, fun. And when you combine an exposition-driven issue with such seriousness, the result is less than exciting***. It is, in fact, just boring.
(*** Confession time: Even in re-reading this, so as to write about it, I couldn’t force myself to read every word bubble, much less every word. There are entire pages where, while I could tell you vaguely who was there and what was discussed, I couldn’t be compelled under threat of torture to tell you what they specifically talked about.)
This being, effectively, the second year of Claremont’s discontinuous return to the X-Men, it’s at least nice to see some familiar Claremontisms re-emerge in his writing:
Rogue informs us that she is both invulnerable and that her claws will “cut through anything – but ah won’t!” (though, to her credit, she makes a joke out of how she announced the former)
Sage uses the old cliché, “Not today, gentleman. And certainly not by the likes of you!”
This one, from Psylocke: “Weighed in that balance, our own fate, our very lives, they’re nothing”.
And from Beast: “Comes with the uniform, comes with the moniker of X-Men”.
It’s not enough to save the issue, of course, but it’s at least an indication that Claremont is no longer afraid to dip into his bag of old tricks. Too bad that, given the awfulness of its surroundings, this sounds more like a pale imitation of Claremont than it does Claremont himself.
In Jason’s final post on X-Men 1-3, he raves about how the qualities that made Claremont’s writing so well loved were in evidence right until the end of that 17 year run: “Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.” But in this, his second go at launching a new X-Men title, it’s not clear that more than one or two of those attributes have survived the intervening years.
I want to say something nice about this comic, but I don’t have much. I certainly have nothing nice to say about the non-Claremont aspects – I think Sal Larroca is a weak storyteller and the digitally ‘painted’ panels are muddy and clash badly with the crisp outlines of the text and their bubbles. But the important point is this – it feels, after a year, like Claremont has already run out of enthusiasm. And while it also seems that he recaptured some of his old form by the time that his run on X-Treme (which lasts four years) ended and he returned to Uncanny X-Men (for another two-and-a-half years), it’s not in evidence here and this comic is hardly better than fan fiction. Not good at all.
In my blogs about Claremont’s return to X-Men and Uncanny, I spent a lot of space writing about how Claremont was never as tediously wordy or prone to allowing characters to soliloquize, and noted how those comics were themselves proof that fan claims had always been exaggerated. But a strange thing happens in the course of a year. Because by the time that Claremont, having been pushed from the core books for Jon Casey and Grant Morrison, transitions to X-Treme X-Men and launches it with a new first issue, his verbosity has become prolixity*, and the writer has become a stereotype of himself.
(* For those who also didn’t know this word existed – I found it by accident a few weeks ago – the dictionary tells me that prolixity is “boring verbosity.” Perfect.)
Of the 31 pages I count in the issue, fewer than half (14, and maybe 15 if you include the page where Thunderbird shoots a fireball) contain any action at all, much less a fight of any kind – and many of those pages of action consist of the X-Men getting pwned by goons in futuristic armor, which is hardly exciting stuff. That means that 17 pages feature characters who are only standing or sitting, all the while talking or thinking. Of those 17 pages, four are devoted to in-narrative storytelling that’s designed to fill-in the backstory for readers who are new to the X-Men (a one page summary of who the X-Men are) and/or wondering what makes X-Treme X-Men different from the other books (three pages about Destiny’s diaries and how they came to learn about them). And then there’s a couple pages where the characters discuss why they don’t trust Professor X anymore**. And a couple more pages where the local police and politicians explain and introduce themselves to one another for our benefit. This isn’t just a lot of exposition – it’s the exposition of your nightmares.
(**Which, on top of being unnecessarily long, also happens to be badly written, since it forces us to a) align ourselves, as the reader being filled in, with the surprisingly ignorant and personality-less Thunderbird who is asking the questions, and also b) believe that Thunderbird, having been on the team for at least a year at this point, is really that clueless and made the decision to join this mission without really knowing why they were doing it. Which is only possible to believe if Claremont thinks that either he or we are stupid.)
The characters that Claremont has chosen are a bit strange, too, given his characterization strengths and traditional favourites among the X-Men. Granted, Claremont was working under restraints, here – Morrison and Casey were given first pick, so Chris only had so many options. (This is why Beast appears only in the first couple issues – Morrison hadn’t yet put his claim in when Claremont started, and so he had to be hastily written out.) But for someone famed for writing so many varied voices, and writing them so well, the uniformity and blandness of his choices is underwhelming: the aloof ‘living-computer’, the aloof no-fun cop from the future, the aloof weather goddess, the aloof English ninja aristocrat, the slightly-less-aloof Indian aristocrat... stop me once you see the pattern. Aside from Rogue and the short-lived Beast, this is a team that is surprisingly (for Claremont) lacking in humor and, well, fun. And when you combine an exposition-driven issue with such seriousness, the result is less than exciting***. It is, in fact, just boring.
(*** Confession time: Even in re-reading this, so as to write about it, I couldn’t force myself to read every word bubble, much less every word. There are entire pages where, while I could tell you vaguely who was there and what was discussed, I couldn’t be compelled under threat of torture to tell you what they specifically talked about.)
This being, effectively, the second year of Claremont’s discontinuous return to the X-Men, it’s at least nice to see some familiar Claremontisms re-emerge in his writing:
Rogue informs us that she is both invulnerable and that her claws will “cut through anything – but ah won’t!” (though, to her credit, she makes a joke out of how she announced the former)
Sage uses the old cliché, “Not today, gentleman. And certainly not by the likes of you!”
This one, from Psylocke: “Weighed in that balance, our own fate, our very lives, they’re nothing”.
And from Beast: “Comes with the uniform, comes with the moniker of X-Men”.
It’s not enough to save the issue, of course, but it’s at least an indication that Claremont is no longer afraid to dip into his bag of old tricks. Too bad that, given the awfulness of its surroundings, this sounds more like a pale imitation of Claremont than it does Claremont himself.
In Jason’s final post on X-Men 1-3, he raves about how the qualities that made Claremont’s writing so well loved were in evidence right until the end of that 17 year run: “Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.” But in this, his second go at launching a new X-Men title, it’s not clear that more than one or two of those attributes have survived the intervening years.
I want to say something nice about this comic, but I don’t have much. I certainly have nothing nice to say about the non-Claremont aspects – I think Sal Larroca is a weak storyteller and the digitally ‘painted’ panels are muddy and clash badly with the crisp outlines of the text and their bubbles. But the important point is this – it feels, after a year, like Claremont has already run out of enthusiasm. And while it also seems that he recaptured some of his old form by the time that his run on X-Treme (which lasts four years) ended and he returned to Uncanny X-Men (for another two-and-a-half years), it’s not in evidence here and this comic is hardly better than fan fiction. Not good at all.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Uncanny X-Men 381 (#2 in a four-issue limited series)
[Last week, when Neil Shyminsky started his look at The Second Coming of Claremont, Arthur commented "Welcome to the Uncanny X-Blogs, Neil ... Hope you survive the experience!" I wish I had thought to say that. Anyway here is Neil:]
If X-Men #100 was intended to feel epic in scale – and, regardless of whether it was a success, the choice of penciller and locale would seem to suggest that this was the intention – Claremont goes for a much more intimate feel with Uncanny X-Men #381. Or, at least, that’s how it begins.
One of the things that was seemingly forgotten about Claremont’s style on X-Men, even as his replacements – especially Scott Lobdell* – tried endlessly to recreate it, was that the scenes of melodrama or levity for which Claremont was famous were rarely the focus or majority of the individual issues. Take Grady Hendrix at Slate: “The classic Claremont pose is either a character, head hung in shame with two enormous rivers of tears running down the cheeks as he or she delivers a self-loathing monologue, or a character with head thrown back and mouth open in a shout of rage, shaking tiny fists at heaven and vowing that the whole world will soon learn about his or her feelings." But this is a gross exaggeration, if not entirely wrong. A ‘self-loathing monologue’ implies something lengthy and blustering, but Claremont always knew when to reign it in. For instance, when Scott and Jean share their memorable picnic in New Mexico immediately before the X-Men’s assault on the Hellfire Club, it’s only 8 panels long – less than two pages! And then there’s the iconic baseball game – would you believe that there were only three of them (issues #110 and #201 of Uncanny, as well as Annual #7) during Claremont’s whole run? (Thanks to Jason for confirming that for me!) And, yet, the frequency with which these things happened and their duration become organic things in our memories, growing in proportion to our affection (or distaste) for them. (Note, even, how Jason’s fantastic panel-by-panel analysis of the New Mexico scene is itself several times longer than the original scene – how delightfully apropos!)
(* Lobdell was the one who rammed Rogue-Gambit down our throats, and for whom the characteristic mise-en-scene was an X-Man sitting alone on the roof of a building. In the night. While it rained. During a storm. Real subtle stuff, that. And Fabian Nicieza was guilty of doing a bad impersonation of Claremont, too. In the comment thread to Jason’s summary, Arthur recalls that the xbooks newsgroup often playfully(?) referenced Fabian Nicieza's Sledgehammer of Angst(TM).)
Surely, Hendrix is thinking of Claremont’s successors and impersonators. I’m remembering, in particular, two Lobdell-penned issues devoted entirely to 22 pages of the most insufferable emo-whining: Uncanny 303, featuring Illyana’s death from the Legacy Virus, and a Lobdell-scribed issue that preceded Claremont’s second return to Uncanny X-Men, where he wastes an entire issue on a Cyclops-Corsair argument. (Don’t read them – just take my word for it.) For someone with a reputation for verbosity, Claremont could dispense with these kinds of moments both completely and with a remarkable economy of space. Not an easy balance to manage, and almost foreign to us in the age of decompressed storytelling.
I bring this up because the opening scene to this issue – a character piece in the classic Claremontian vein – is probably the best single scene that he’ll contribute during this short, second run. Coming in at an unusually long (for him) six pages – but two of which are a splash and only three of which are text-heavy – Claremont does a fine job of setting up the Phoenix-Cable relationship as the emotional center of the book. This is nicely tragic and complex stuff: Cable laments his inability to express love in any normative way, but wears his deceased dad’s visor around his neck like a soldier would dog-tags. (And as much as I dislike Adam Kubert’s pencils, the way he captures Cable’s hesitance to put his hand on Jean’s shoulder is pitch perfect.) Contrastingly, Jean espouses a sweet philosophy of hope in the face of impossible odds, a philosophy that would perhaps seem trite if not for a subsequent display of anger and aggression that would leave even Wolverine cold. Add to all this ambivalence Cable’s fear that his mother’s dark-side will overwhelm her, as well as the burden of knowing that, if and when that day comes, it’ll be his job to subdue her, and you can see that Claremont has a strong center to this team.**
(** I’ll admit, here, that while I kept up with Uncanny X-Men and X-Men in the interim, I read only scant issues of Cable’s own series and none of The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, wherein Cable’s relationship with his parents is actually (re)built in the future – that is, Cable’s own past in the future. So if Claremont is covering bases that have already been covered, or even contradicting them, I don’t know it.)
But, as with X-Men #100, we can’t give credit for what works without acknowledging that a lot of it doesn’t. Because, the Phoenix-Cable piece, while being the first proper scene in the comic, isn’t actually where it begins – it starts with narration from Gambit and an entirely predictable ‘life is like a hand of cards’ metaphor. But why is Gambit narrating at all, why are particular characters assigned to particular cards and is that meaningful in some way, and how is Gambit ‘dealing the cards’ in this story and why? And it’s both awfully convenient and left unexplained how a) Gambit knew Phoenix and Cable would already be in Venice, b) Gambit could somehow enter Phoenix’s mind (?!) to plant a card there, and c) the Shockwave Riders knew to find Phoenix in Venice, too. We do get some explanations at the end of the next issue, but too much of it relies on coincidence. It was an excuse to get this team together and get them into a fight, plain and simple. And that’s weak.
That Claremont has thrown multiple balls into the air before the first one has even had a chance to fall is a problem, and it’s a problem that will afflict him throughout this second go at the X-Men. Harras had pulled a 180 when he rehired Claremont: having hamstrung the writer in the late 80s with the requirement to recycle plots and characters from the Byrne days, he gave Claremont complete freedom the second time around. Which is too bad, because Claremont really could have used firmer editorial oversight when he created this series of dull, totally forgettable ciphers. (And I’m putting it gently – these characters were uniformly awful, awful, awful, and the Shockwave Riders are among the very worst. Cole, Macon, and Reese look wholly individuated in relation to these dudes.)
To Claremont’s credit, he apparently realized that there was a problem and was going to reintroduce Stryfe as the nemesis for the Uncanny team, but the realization came too late. This is because Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada, would resemble the younger Harras moreso than the older one and run the writer off almost immediately. Claremont’s return was met with huge fanfare, but the honeymoon ended fast and Claremont didn’t have the caché or power that he once did – and his new take on the team certainly couldn’t compete with the newly authoritative X-Men that were appearing on movie screens.
And, so, less than a year after his return, Claremont was off the core X-books again. (Of course, he was still playing in the X-Universe’s sandbox – but more on that later.)
If X-Men #100 was intended to feel epic in scale – and, regardless of whether it was a success, the choice of penciller and locale would seem to suggest that this was the intention – Claremont goes for a much more intimate feel with Uncanny X-Men #381. Or, at least, that’s how it begins.
One of the things that was seemingly forgotten about Claremont’s style on X-Men, even as his replacements – especially Scott Lobdell* – tried endlessly to recreate it, was that the scenes of melodrama or levity for which Claremont was famous were rarely the focus or majority of the individual issues. Take Grady Hendrix at Slate: “The classic Claremont pose is either a character, head hung in shame with two enormous rivers of tears running down the cheeks as he or she delivers a self-loathing monologue, or a character with head thrown back and mouth open in a shout of rage, shaking tiny fists at heaven and vowing that the whole world will soon learn about his or her feelings." But this is a gross exaggeration, if not entirely wrong. A ‘self-loathing monologue’ implies something lengthy and blustering, but Claremont always knew when to reign it in. For instance, when Scott and Jean share their memorable picnic in New Mexico immediately before the X-Men’s assault on the Hellfire Club, it’s only 8 panels long – less than two pages! And then there’s the iconic baseball game – would you believe that there were only three of them (issues #110 and #201 of Uncanny, as well as Annual #7) during Claremont’s whole run? (Thanks to Jason for confirming that for me!) And, yet, the frequency with which these things happened and their duration become organic things in our memories, growing in proportion to our affection (or distaste) for them. (Note, even, how Jason’s fantastic panel-by-panel analysis of the New Mexico scene is itself several times longer than the original scene – how delightfully apropos!)
(* Lobdell was the one who rammed Rogue-Gambit down our throats, and for whom the characteristic mise-en-scene was an X-Man sitting alone on the roof of a building. In the night. While it rained. During a storm. Real subtle stuff, that. And Fabian Nicieza was guilty of doing a bad impersonation of Claremont, too. In the comment thread to Jason’s summary, Arthur recalls that the xbooks newsgroup often playfully(?) referenced Fabian Nicieza's Sledgehammer of Angst(TM).)
Surely, Hendrix is thinking of Claremont’s successors and impersonators. I’m remembering, in particular, two Lobdell-penned issues devoted entirely to 22 pages of the most insufferable emo-whining: Uncanny 303, featuring Illyana’s death from the Legacy Virus, and a Lobdell-scribed issue that preceded Claremont’s second return to Uncanny X-Men, where he wastes an entire issue on a Cyclops-Corsair argument. (Don’t read them – just take my word for it.) For someone with a reputation for verbosity, Claremont could dispense with these kinds of moments both completely and with a remarkable economy of space. Not an easy balance to manage, and almost foreign to us in the age of decompressed storytelling.
I bring this up because the opening scene to this issue – a character piece in the classic Claremontian vein – is probably the best single scene that he’ll contribute during this short, second run. Coming in at an unusually long (for him) six pages – but two of which are a splash and only three of which are text-heavy – Claremont does a fine job of setting up the Phoenix-Cable relationship as the emotional center of the book. This is nicely tragic and complex stuff: Cable laments his inability to express love in any normative way, but wears his deceased dad’s visor around his neck like a soldier would dog-tags. (And as much as I dislike Adam Kubert’s pencils, the way he captures Cable’s hesitance to put his hand on Jean’s shoulder is pitch perfect.) Contrastingly, Jean espouses a sweet philosophy of hope in the face of impossible odds, a philosophy that would perhaps seem trite if not for a subsequent display of anger and aggression that would leave even Wolverine cold. Add to all this ambivalence Cable’s fear that his mother’s dark-side will overwhelm her, as well as the burden of knowing that, if and when that day comes, it’ll be his job to subdue her, and you can see that Claremont has a strong center to this team.**
(** I’ll admit, here, that while I kept up with Uncanny X-Men and X-Men in the interim, I read only scant issues of Cable’s own series and none of The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, wherein Cable’s relationship with his parents is actually (re)built in the future – that is, Cable’s own past in the future. So if Claremont is covering bases that have already been covered, or even contradicting them, I don’t know it.)
But, as with X-Men #100, we can’t give credit for what works without acknowledging that a lot of it doesn’t. Because, the Phoenix-Cable piece, while being the first proper scene in the comic, isn’t actually where it begins – it starts with narration from Gambit and an entirely predictable ‘life is like a hand of cards’ metaphor. But why is Gambit narrating at all, why are particular characters assigned to particular cards and is that meaningful in some way, and how is Gambit ‘dealing the cards’ in this story and why? And it’s both awfully convenient and left unexplained how a) Gambit knew Phoenix and Cable would already be in Venice, b) Gambit could somehow enter Phoenix’s mind (?!) to plant a card there, and c) the Shockwave Riders knew to find Phoenix in Venice, too. We do get some explanations at the end of the next issue, but too much of it relies on coincidence. It was an excuse to get this team together and get them into a fight, plain and simple. And that’s weak.
That Claremont has thrown multiple balls into the air before the first one has even had a chance to fall is a problem, and it’s a problem that will afflict him throughout this second go at the X-Men. Harras had pulled a 180 when he rehired Claremont: having hamstrung the writer in the late 80s with the requirement to recycle plots and characters from the Byrne days, he gave Claremont complete freedom the second time around. Which is too bad, because Claremont really could have used firmer editorial oversight when he created this series of dull, totally forgettable ciphers. (And I’m putting it gently – these characters were uniformly awful, awful, awful, and the Shockwave Riders are among the very worst. Cole, Macon, and Reese look wholly individuated in relation to these dudes.)
To Claremont’s credit, he apparently realized that there was a problem and was going to reintroduce Stryfe as the nemesis for the Uncanny team, but the realization came too late. This is because Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada, would resemble the younger Harras moreso than the older one and run the writer off almost immediately. Claremont’s return was met with huge fanfare, but the honeymoon ended fast and Claremont didn’t have the caché or power that he once did – and his new take on the team certainly couldn’t compete with the newly authoritative X-Men that were appearing on movie screens.
And, so, less than a year after his return, Claremont was off the core X-books again. (Of course, he was still playing in the X-Universe’s sandbox – but more on that later.)
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
X-Men 100 (#1 in a four-issue limited series)
[Guest blogger Neil Shyminsky With Two Ys heroically picks up where Claremont SuperBlogger Jason Powell leaves off.]
When Geoff asked me, many months ago, to cover Claremont’s return to the X-Men – 100 or so issues after he left – I told him that I would be glad to cover the issues where he set the new status quo, but that I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go beyond that. At the very least, I had genuinely fond memories of X-Men #100 and Uncanny X-Men #381.
But memories are a funny thing. There’s a University of Washington study that’s commonly taught to Intro Psych students where, under particular conditions, researchers found that they could convince nearly half of their subjects that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Which is, of course, impossible. I bring this up because, having re-read the issues that I agreed to write about, I can only assume that Jason’s series – and, of course, the issues that I’ve read alongside his analyses – somehow warped or otherwise compromised my sense of just how good these comics were. Which isn’t to say that they’re purely awful...
But let me back up. X-Men #100 shipped only a month after #99, but six months had passed since the High Evolutionary depowered and repowered all of mutantkind. The six month gap isn’t unprecedented – the X-books pulled something similar a few years after Claremont left, after the “Age of Apocalypse”, and also skipped an indeterminate amount of time prior to Giant Size X-Men, which immediately preceded Claremont’s first run – but there’s something lazy about it. Over at uncannyxmen.net, Peter Luzifer writes that the gap occurred in lieu of “slowly building up new plot elements and having the characters coming up with lame excuses for their new looks”, and the results are generally underwhelming: there’s no explanation for why this is the current line-up, who’s leading, and why it’s such an unusually small team; Psylocke has new powers, inexplicably; Rogue’s absorption power no longer affects Colossus; Colossus and Rogue hook up spontaneously*; a new Thunderbird appears and we’re given no reason to care about him; the new villains, the Neo, have no clear motivation, ambiguous powers, or stock-villain personalities and dialogue.
(*Okay, so this one could have been good, in the classically soap opera-ish way that CC really excels at: Claremont later explained that the idea was to give Rogue a choice between a man she loved but couldn’t touch and one she could touch but didn’t love. But it unfolds too quickly and awkwardly, and it’s never picked up again.)
It’s not all bad. Aside from Warren Ellis on Excalibur, it seems like no one since Claremont himself had done much (or ANYthing) to develop Shadowcat, so the change in her appearance and attitude and the central role are nice surprises, if awkwardly executed. (Of course, she would be separated from the team and wouldn’t reappear for the duration of Claremont’s stay on X-Men.**) Take the line of dialogue, given to Shadowcat, that would become emblematic, at least among people on internet message boards of the day, of how Claremont was pressing too hard: “Reboot your system, baby. ‘Cause time only goes in one direction.” Ugh. Nightcrawler’s turn as a priest is also a worthy development, even if it’s strange that Claremont effectively skips the developmental bits – why he left, how he’s changed – in order to “return” him to super-heroics after he had retired from it for... zero issues. These are minor victories, clearly.
(**I’ve read that this was due to – stop me if you’ve heard it before – editorial interference. Kitty was supposed to get a miniseries that would address where she went, why Seth said she was a Neo, and so on, but the L.S. was dropped and Claremont was told to move on. One other interesting side-note on editors: the X-editor who chased Claremont off in the first place, Bob Harras, was presiding as editor-in-chief and rehired him for this run. And it wasn’t his fault that CC’s second run was so short, either – Claremont was booted this second time by Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada.)
But for a Claremont reader with a long (if malleable) memory, these things shouldn’t be surprising. The first dozen or so issues of his original run have a similar slap-dash feel, as if Claremont is just throwing ideas against a wall as they come to him, knowing that most of them probably won’t stick. (Spoiler: most of them don’t, the second time OR the first.) We fans remember how early he planted the seeds for a Wolverine-Jean relationship and are impressed with his forward-thinking, but we forget that he did the same for Colossus and Storm; the first hints of what will eventually lead to the Phoenix Saga appear in Claremont’s first ten issues, but so is the suggestion that Wolverine is literally a mutant wolverine (though this was originally Len Wein’s idea), which will turn out to be much less fondly recalled. The point, simply, is that Claremont’s stories have always unfolded slowly and he needs time to set things up, to figure out what will work and what won’t. Whether this is an adequate defense of these newer issues or a knock against the older ones depends on how much patience you have as a reader.
In a move that’s entirely to be expected if you’re a long-time reader of either Claremont’s X-Men or Jason Powell’s re-evaluation of them, there is also a very deliberate effort on Claremont’s part to revisit his own work: the space station, Peter Corbeau, the telekinetic bubble to protect the team on re-entry – this stuff all recalls the first year of Claremont’s original run and the events that lead to the first appearance of Phoenix. (So, too, does the series of variant covers, each drawn by someone who had their own lengthy penciling gig during Claremont’s run, and often featuring the team as it existed when that penciler was on Uncanny X-Men. And so this has the effect of feeling like a tribute to the writer after-the-fact, a remembrance of what he’s done, which is a curious choice when you’re supposed to be pushing new stories with new characters and a new set of villains.)
What’s lacking here, though, is any obvious commentary on the older stuff. Jason’s series did a particularly good job of showing how Claremont’s backward glances were always meta-commentaries on where the team had been and where they were going – there are too many that fit the bill to list them all, but here are a few*** – but I don’t really see that meta-element, here. (Except, I suppose, in Kitty’s brief dialogue.) I’m not even sure that we can call this connection anything more than “interesting”, especially since it’s not clear that the events of the space station are meaningful outside this story – it provides a scene for a Neo terrorist attack, but why did it need to be a space station? It’s as if Claremont thought that a lazy gesture would be good enough.
(*** Thanks goes to Jason, once more, for helping me track down a lot of the posts that are found via these hyperlinks. There’ll be more of them, too.)
I should also add that Claremont is simply not the same narrator he once was. In the very confusingly rendered scene where Kitty descends into the, um, I guess the bowels of the space station, we would be forgiven for wondering whether we were watching a flashback. For a writer who was famous for over-narrating in order to compensate for poor art, Claremont is surprisingly unhelpful. More surprisingly, none of that purple, poetic language that Jason has noted numerous times is in evidence, here. The issue is set in outer-space, but he never describes it to us in anything but a perfunctory manner. It’s a notable absence.
A bit of good, a lot of bad, and the feeling that something is missing – it’s an auspicious start to Claremont’s second-coming.
When Geoff asked me, many months ago, to cover Claremont’s return to the X-Men – 100 or so issues after he left – I told him that I would be glad to cover the issues where he set the new status quo, but that I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go beyond that. At the very least, I had genuinely fond memories of X-Men #100 and Uncanny X-Men #381.
But memories are a funny thing. There’s a University of Washington study that’s commonly taught to Intro Psych students where, under particular conditions, researchers found that they could convince nearly half of their subjects that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Which is, of course, impossible. I bring this up because, having re-read the issues that I agreed to write about, I can only assume that Jason’s series – and, of course, the issues that I’ve read alongside his analyses – somehow warped or otherwise compromised my sense of just how good these comics were. Which isn’t to say that they’re purely awful...
But let me back up. X-Men #100 shipped only a month after #99, but six months had passed since the High Evolutionary depowered and repowered all of mutantkind. The six month gap isn’t unprecedented – the X-books pulled something similar a few years after Claremont left, after the “Age of Apocalypse”, and also skipped an indeterminate amount of time prior to Giant Size X-Men, which immediately preceded Claremont’s first run – but there’s something lazy about it. Over at uncannyxmen.net, Peter Luzifer writes that the gap occurred in lieu of “slowly building up new plot elements and having the characters coming up with lame excuses for their new looks”, and the results are generally underwhelming: there’s no explanation for why this is the current line-up, who’s leading, and why it’s such an unusually small team; Psylocke has new powers, inexplicably; Rogue’s absorption power no longer affects Colossus; Colossus and Rogue hook up spontaneously*; a new Thunderbird appears and we’re given no reason to care about him; the new villains, the Neo, have no clear motivation, ambiguous powers, or stock-villain personalities and dialogue.
(*Okay, so this one could have been good, in the classically soap opera-ish way that CC really excels at: Claremont later explained that the idea was to give Rogue a choice between a man she loved but couldn’t touch and one she could touch but didn’t love. But it unfolds too quickly and awkwardly, and it’s never picked up again.)
It’s not all bad. Aside from Warren Ellis on Excalibur, it seems like no one since Claremont himself had done much (or ANYthing) to develop Shadowcat, so the change in her appearance and attitude and the central role are nice surprises, if awkwardly executed. (Of course, she would be separated from the team and wouldn’t reappear for the duration of Claremont’s stay on X-Men.**) Take the line of dialogue, given to Shadowcat, that would become emblematic, at least among people on internet message boards of the day, of how Claremont was pressing too hard: “Reboot your system, baby. ‘Cause time only goes in one direction.” Ugh. Nightcrawler’s turn as a priest is also a worthy development, even if it’s strange that Claremont effectively skips the developmental bits – why he left, how he’s changed – in order to “return” him to super-heroics after he had retired from it for... zero issues. These are minor victories, clearly.
(**I’ve read that this was due to – stop me if you’ve heard it before – editorial interference. Kitty was supposed to get a miniseries that would address where she went, why Seth said she was a Neo, and so on, but the L.S. was dropped and Claremont was told to move on. One other interesting side-note on editors: the X-editor who chased Claremont off in the first place, Bob Harras, was presiding as editor-in-chief and rehired him for this run. And it wasn’t his fault that CC’s second run was so short, either – Claremont was booted this second time by Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada.)
But for a Claremont reader with a long (if malleable) memory, these things shouldn’t be surprising. The first dozen or so issues of his original run have a similar slap-dash feel, as if Claremont is just throwing ideas against a wall as they come to him, knowing that most of them probably won’t stick. (Spoiler: most of them don’t, the second time OR the first.) We fans remember how early he planted the seeds for a Wolverine-Jean relationship and are impressed with his forward-thinking, but we forget that he did the same for Colossus and Storm; the first hints of what will eventually lead to the Phoenix Saga appear in Claremont’s first ten issues, but so is the suggestion that Wolverine is literally a mutant wolverine (though this was originally Len Wein’s idea), which will turn out to be much less fondly recalled. The point, simply, is that Claremont’s stories have always unfolded slowly and he needs time to set things up, to figure out what will work and what won’t. Whether this is an adequate defense of these newer issues or a knock against the older ones depends on how much patience you have as a reader.
In a move that’s entirely to be expected if you’re a long-time reader of either Claremont’s X-Men or Jason Powell’s re-evaluation of them, there is also a very deliberate effort on Claremont’s part to revisit his own work: the space station, Peter Corbeau, the telekinetic bubble to protect the team on re-entry – this stuff all recalls the first year of Claremont’s original run and the events that lead to the first appearance of Phoenix. (So, too, does the series of variant covers, each drawn by someone who had their own lengthy penciling gig during Claremont’s run, and often featuring the team as it existed when that penciler was on Uncanny X-Men. And so this has the effect of feeling like a tribute to the writer after-the-fact, a remembrance of what he’s done, which is a curious choice when you’re supposed to be pushing new stories with new characters and a new set of villains.)
What’s lacking here, though, is any obvious commentary on the older stuff. Jason’s series did a particularly good job of showing how Claremont’s backward glances were always meta-commentaries on where the team had been and where they were going – there are too many that fit the bill to list them all, but here are a few*** – but I don’t really see that meta-element, here. (Except, I suppose, in Kitty’s brief dialogue.) I’m not even sure that we can call this connection anything more than “interesting”, especially since it’s not clear that the events of the space station are meaningful outside this story – it provides a scene for a Neo terrorist attack, but why did it need to be a space station? It’s as if Claremont thought that a lazy gesture would be good enough.
(*** Thanks goes to Jason, once more, for helping me track down a lot of the posts that are found via these hyperlinks. There’ll be more of them, too.)
I should also add that Claremont is simply not the same narrator he once was. In the very confusingly rendered scene where Kitty descends into the, um, I guess the bowels of the space station, we would be forgiven for wondering whether we were watching a flashback. For a writer who was famous for over-narrating in order to compensate for poor art, Claremont is surprisingly unhelpful. More surprisingly, none of that purple, poetic language that Jason has noted numerous times is in evidence, here. The issue is set in outer-space, but he never describes it to us in anything but a perfunctory manner. It’s a notable absence.
A bit of good, a lot of bad, and the feeling that something is missing – it’s an auspicious start to Claremont’s second-coming.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Justice League of America: Scary Monsters 1-6
[Jason Powell, in his final epilogue to his HUGE look at every issue of Claremont's initial X-Men run. This has been a tremendous ride. Thanks for everything Jason. And of course you are always welcome to come back and write about whatever you want, whenever you want.]
This one is from 2003, I believe. Claremont was well past the peak of his popularity, and I’m sure one could make a strong case that his writing skills had atrophied by this point as well.
I don’t care – I love these comics.
The premise here: A Lovecraftian race of otherworldly demons is attempting to make an incursion into our world, at a dimensional junction point located – conveniently – in the same physical space as a resort where Wally “Flash” West and Kyle “Green Lantern” Rainer are vacationing. (This trope is a Claremont favorite, of course. See: The N’Garai, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Star Trek: Debt of Honor, etc. ) (Alan Moore, an avowed Lovecraft devotee, also uses this one a lot.)
When it becomes clear to Wally and Kyle that something’s amiss here, they summon Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and Plastic Man to help out. And once again – just as with Renegade in “Aliens/Predator” and Huntsman in “WildCATs” – Claremont seems to be using this story as a pilot for his own original superhero. This time it’s a female cop – half-Black, half-Native American – whose tribal ancestors fought the Lovecraftian demons several generations back. So yeah, Claremont is doing the “magical Indian” cliché again. Not very politically correct, but … well, look, I happen to have dated a Native American for years, and hell I’ll just say it: they ARE pretty darn magical.
At six issues, the story is maybe a little long given the straightforward nature of the premise. As the simplistic title suggests, this is just the JLA fighting monsters for six issues. Still, I very much like how Claremont uses his large page-count: He demonstrates a really shrewd understanding of the iconic DC characters, and he fills this series with truly charming character bits. Oh, and since I’ve gone to such pains to suggest that Grant Morrison did absolutely nothing “new” on New X-Men, that it was all just a recycling of Claremont … it’s only fair to concede here that Claremont’s JLA characterization in “Scary Monsters” has got to have been influenced here by Morrison’s revisionary take.
Claremont’s vision of the Superman/Batman relationship I find particularly convincing. As someone who has come to hate the whole “Batman is an ass-kicking genius, and Superman is a hick and a wimp” line of thought (thanks a lot, Frank Miller), I love Claremont’s intelligent, articulate Superman. Clark and Bruce are intellectual equals in this story – and they both know it -- yet each is able to offer something unique to the situation at hand. (Unfortunately I don’t have the issues in front of me, else I’d quote some dialogue from my favorite Batman/Superman scene in the series.)
The other characters are done just as well by Claremont. This is a superhero writer who knows how to craft a story so that each member of the team has something significant to contribute, and at his best he comes up with some delightfully original stuff. Claremont’s use of Plastic Man at one point is hilariously novel, and the use of the Martian Manhunter – not only his powers, but his alien origin – is marvelously creative.
No hidden Easter eggs here for X-Men fans, although there is a more blatant nod to Claremont’s roots: At one point, during a very inventive use of The Flash, Wally comments that what he’s doing is straight out of “Lee and Kirby.” I love a reference to the founding fathers of the Marvel Universe, right smack in the middle of a story starring DC’s biggest icons. Nice one, Chris.
Despite leaving matters perhaps a bit too open-ended in order to set up a solo series for his new super-heroine (which he must’ve known was unlikely to ever see fruition), the story nonetheless ends extremely satisfyingly, with a neat twist that even explains a slight inconsistency in the nature of the Martian Manhunter. (Not being a DC fan, I have no idea if Claremont’s take on DC’s martians accords with canon, but personally I thought it was fantastic.)
Although “Scary Monsters” was published in the era of TPBs, I guess the miniseries didn’t sell well enough to warrant a collected edition. That makes this a fairly obscure little gem, and one I’d heartily recommend. The individual issues are worth picking up anyway, just for the awesome covers, all six of which are drawn beautifully by Art Adams. God, it would have been great if Adams could’ve been convinced to do the interiors as well … !
And so ends my little post-1991 Claremont examination.
I think I have now said all I can say about Claremont’s work. And about comics in general, to be quite honest. With this, I’m hanging up my comics-blogger hat. Thanks for reading, guys!
-- fin --
This one is from 2003, I believe. Claremont was well past the peak of his popularity, and I’m sure one could make a strong case that his writing skills had atrophied by this point as well.
I don’t care – I love these comics.
The premise here: A Lovecraftian race of otherworldly demons is attempting to make an incursion into our world, at a dimensional junction point located – conveniently – in the same physical space as a resort where Wally “Flash” West and Kyle “Green Lantern” Rainer are vacationing. (This trope is a Claremont favorite, of course. See: The N’Garai, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Star Trek: Debt of Honor, etc. ) (Alan Moore, an avowed Lovecraft devotee, also uses this one a lot.)
When it becomes clear to Wally and Kyle that something’s amiss here, they summon Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and Plastic Man to help out. And once again – just as with Renegade in “Aliens/Predator” and Huntsman in “WildCATs” – Claremont seems to be using this story as a pilot for his own original superhero. This time it’s a female cop – half-Black, half-Native American – whose tribal ancestors fought the Lovecraftian demons several generations back. So yeah, Claremont is doing the “magical Indian” cliché again. Not very politically correct, but … well, look, I happen to have dated a Native American for years, and hell I’ll just say it: they ARE pretty darn magical.
At six issues, the story is maybe a little long given the straightforward nature of the premise. As the simplistic title suggests, this is just the JLA fighting monsters for six issues. Still, I very much like how Claremont uses his large page-count: He demonstrates a really shrewd understanding of the iconic DC characters, and he fills this series with truly charming character bits. Oh, and since I’ve gone to such pains to suggest that Grant Morrison did absolutely nothing “new” on New X-Men, that it was all just a recycling of Claremont … it’s only fair to concede here that Claremont’s JLA characterization in “Scary Monsters” has got to have been influenced here by Morrison’s revisionary take.
Claremont’s vision of the Superman/Batman relationship I find particularly convincing. As someone who has come to hate the whole “Batman is an ass-kicking genius, and Superman is a hick and a wimp” line of thought (thanks a lot, Frank Miller), I love Claremont’s intelligent, articulate Superman. Clark and Bruce are intellectual equals in this story – and they both know it -- yet each is able to offer something unique to the situation at hand. (Unfortunately I don’t have the issues in front of me, else I’d quote some dialogue from my favorite Batman/Superman scene in the series.)
The other characters are done just as well by Claremont. This is a superhero writer who knows how to craft a story so that each member of the team has something significant to contribute, and at his best he comes up with some delightfully original stuff. Claremont’s use of Plastic Man at one point is hilariously novel, and the use of the Martian Manhunter – not only his powers, but his alien origin – is marvelously creative.
No hidden Easter eggs here for X-Men fans, although there is a more blatant nod to Claremont’s roots: At one point, during a very inventive use of The Flash, Wally comments that what he’s doing is straight out of “Lee and Kirby.” I love a reference to the founding fathers of the Marvel Universe, right smack in the middle of a story starring DC’s biggest icons. Nice one, Chris.
Despite leaving matters perhaps a bit too open-ended in order to set up a solo series for his new super-heroine (which he must’ve known was unlikely to ever see fruition), the story nonetheless ends extremely satisfyingly, with a neat twist that even explains a slight inconsistency in the nature of the Martian Manhunter. (Not being a DC fan, I have no idea if Claremont’s take on DC’s martians accords with canon, but personally I thought it was fantastic.)
Although “Scary Monsters” was published in the era of TPBs, I guess the miniseries didn’t sell well enough to warrant a collected edition. That makes this a fairly obscure little gem, and one I’d heartily recommend. The individual issues are worth picking up anyway, just for the awesome covers, all six of which are drawn beautifully by Art Adams. God, it would have been great if Adams could’ve been convinced to do the interiors as well … !
And so ends my little post-1991 Claremont examination.
I think I have now said all I can say about Claremont’s work. And about comics in general, to be quite honest. With this, I’m hanging up my comics-blogger hat. Thanks for reading, guys!
-- fin --
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
WildCATs 10-13
[Jason Powell writes his second to last Claremont X-Men epilogue. Though I was instant messaging him the night before last and he was reading the Claremont Willow novels, threatening to blog about them. The man is an addict, I tell you, an addict.]
Back when these comics were published – 1994, I believe – I was still not entirely recovered from the sad way that Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s collaboration on X-Men was cut so short. This four-issue “WildCATs” arc was a nice gift from Lee to Claremont fans, reuniting the team from the author’s final issue of X-Men – not just the writer and penciler, but inker Scott Williams and letterer Tom Orzechowski as well.
I hadn’t read any previous WildCATs stuff, so the characters were pretty unfamiliar. And there were a LOT of characters in these four issues. Generally speaking, the story is a bit over-stuffed. For someone coming in fresh, it was too much. Not that the story is hard to follow, really – just that the surfeit of characters made it hard to latch onto any one and find them sympathetic.
Still, it’s a great action movie. The Claremont/Lee chemistry had not atrophied in the three years between X-Men 3 and WildCATs 10. And Claremont certainly seems to be having fun with Lee’s creations (although who knows, maybe he was faking it just for the paycheck).
The point of this storyline was actually to introduce an original Claremont character, the Hunstman, who was theoretically going to be spun off into his own solo series. Had this happened, I believe Claremont would have been the first non-artist to bring an original character and series into the Image fold. For whatever reason, though, the Huntsman solo series never materialized. There WAS a later Huntsman appearance after WildCATs, in a Claremont-penned 3-issue “Cyberforce” arc. Cyberforce was Marc Silvestri’s series, so it was another reunion between the author and a former X-Men collaborator. As a huge devotee of Claremont/Silvestri, I was really looking forward to the Cyberforce arc, but it turned out just terribly.
This WildCATs arc, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. The Huntsman character is your basic “awesome at everything” action hero, very much cut from the Wolverine or Gambit cloth. He is a striking member of Claremont’s ouvre simply in that he is male – though he does have a female companion (“Tai”), and there are implications that she is actually the really significant half of the pair, in some oblique way.
The plot here is all over the place: There are something like six or seven different villains, an alternate timeline, and maybe an evil duplicate at some point too. Despite that, there is a spine to the story, and it leads to a turning point in the relationship of Zealot and Voodoo, two female members of the team (surprise). There is also, if I’m remembering right, an easter egg for X-Men fans at one point. When we’re in the office of Savant, one of the several WildCATs cast members that is much older than she looks, one of the photos on her desk is of her and Wolverine. The image is very reminiscent of the photo of Logan and Rose Wu in Uncanny X-Men 257 (Jim Lee’s third X-Men issue, and his first time drawing Claremont’s Wolverine).
If one is not a fan either of Claremont or of WildCATs, this little arc might read as just a lot of mindless action. But if one is willing to put in the concentration, it’s a fairly rewarding piece, and a fun addendum to the Claremont/Lee X-Men run.
Back when these comics were published – 1994, I believe – I was still not entirely recovered from the sad way that Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s collaboration on X-Men was cut so short. This four-issue “WildCATs” arc was a nice gift from Lee to Claremont fans, reuniting the team from the author’s final issue of X-Men – not just the writer and penciler, but inker Scott Williams and letterer Tom Orzechowski as well.
I hadn’t read any previous WildCATs stuff, so the characters were pretty unfamiliar. And there were a LOT of characters in these four issues. Generally speaking, the story is a bit over-stuffed. For someone coming in fresh, it was too much. Not that the story is hard to follow, really – just that the surfeit of characters made it hard to latch onto any one and find them sympathetic.
Still, it’s a great action movie. The Claremont/Lee chemistry had not atrophied in the three years between X-Men 3 and WildCATs 10. And Claremont certainly seems to be having fun with Lee’s creations (although who knows, maybe he was faking it just for the paycheck).
The point of this storyline was actually to introduce an original Claremont character, the Hunstman, who was theoretically going to be spun off into his own solo series. Had this happened, I believe Claremont would have been the first non-artist to bring an original character and series into the Image fold. For whatever reason, though, the Huntsman solo series never materialized. There WAS a later Huntsman appearance after WildCATs, in a Claremont-penned 3-issue “Cyberforce” arc. Cyberforce was Marc Silvestri’s series, so it was another reunion between the author and a former X-Men collaborator. As a huge devotee of Claremont/Silvestri, I was really looking forward to the Cyberforce arc, but it turned out just terribly.
This WildCATs arc, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. The Huntsman character is your basic “awesome at everything” action hero, very much cut from the Wolverine or Gambit cloth. He is a striking member of Claremont’s ouvre simply in that he is male – though he does have a female companion (“Tai”), and there are implications that she is actually the really significant half of the pair, in some oblique way.
The plot here is all over the place: There are something like six or seven different villains, an alternate timeline, and maybe an evil duplicate at some point too. Despite that, there is a spine to the story, and it leads to a turning point in the relationship of Zealot and Voodoo, two female members of the team (surprise). There is also, if I’m remembering right, an easter egg for X-Men fans at one point. When we’re in the office of Savant, one of the several WildCATs cast members that is much older than she looks, one of the photos on her desk is of her and Wolverine. The image is very reminiscent of the photo of Logan and Rose Wu in Uncanny X-Men 257 (Jim Lee’s third X-Men issue, and his first time drawing Claremont’s Wolverine).
If one is not a fan either of Claremont or of WildCATs, this little arc might read as just a lot of mindless action. But if one is willing to put in the concentration, it’s a fairly rewarding piece, and a fun addendum to the Claremont/Lee X-Men run.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Star Trek: Debt of Honor, from DC
[Jason Powell continues his Claremont epilogues.]
This one is a relatively short graphic novel (96 pages, I think?) set after Star Trek IV (the whale one), and published around 1992, maybe. (Sorry, these dates are easily found online, I realize, but I’m just kinda cruising through this stuff.)
People who are Claremont fans but not Star Trek fans possibly need not apply to this one. Claremont is very clearly a huge devotee of Star Trek, and this book is in many ways just authorized fan fiction. (But then, that is true of a lot of the licensed Star Trek stuff, really.)
On the other hand, if you’re a Trek fan (which I am), this is great fun. The gimmick here is that at key moments in Star Trek history (which we are shown in sequential flashbacks), Captain Kirk had multiple encounters with the same species of hostile alien. But so shrewd were these creatures that they were always able to cover their tracks, and Kirk has never been able to prove that these guys exist, or convince anyone that they pose a credible threat. (We learn that they inhabit another dimension, much like the limbo demons and N’Garai in X-Men, which is an idea I liked so much I pinched it for my musical, “Invader? I Hardly Know Her.”)
The only other person who knows about these aliens is another starship captain: Basically a female equivalent of Kirk (of course!) who also happens to be a Romulan. Kirk goes rogue to team up with both her and a Klingon captain (whom I think Claremont made up, although he might be from an old “Trek” episode …) to take down these aliens once and for all.
The fan-fictional elements include cameos by a ton of old Trek characters, an explanation for why Klingons used to have smooth foreheads and now don’t (years before “Enterprise” offered a different explanation; I like Claremont’s better). And I think there is at least one Mary Sue in this book as well. (Not being an expert on original Trek, I have trouble distinguishing the cameos of canonical characters from the Claremont originals … there are a LOT of people who turn up here.)
Oh, and there is also a reference to “Cat’s Laughing,” a band whose members Claremont is personal friends with, and who also have cameos in issues of Claremont’s “Excalibur” series in 1988. Claremont likes to link his different stories via musicians.
Despite all the indulgences, though, this is a tight adventure story, a great example of intelligent and rousing space opera. The artwork here is by human dynamo Adam Hughes (with inks by Karl Story), which means that the evil other-dimensional aliens are suitably terrifying, and the sexy Romulan captain is suitably gorgeous. Just visually alone, this is a beautiful package, but the intelligent story is what makes it worth the read. Plus, Claremont writes an awesome Spock. In another universe, a movie adaptation of this book would have made a spectacular Star Trek V or VI, and a much better final adventure for the original crew.
Sometime later, Claremont contributed a story to an issue of DC’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” comic series (one of the annuals), wherein a teenage ensign from Debt of Honor (very Kitty Pryde-esque) comes back – now much older, of course – and resolves a semi-dangling thread from the original graphic novel. The details are fuzzy in my memory, though I think they involve the woman – a human -- getting adopted by a Klingon house, which leads to her crossing paths with Worf, a Klingon adopted by humans.
I guess you could call it an epilogue to “Debt of Honor.” It’s a well-written piece, with a very satisfying ending, although I don’t think it would make even the tiniest impression on anyone who hadn’t already read “Debt.” But it is a great little addendum. I personally would have preferred a full-length sequel to “Debt” set in the Next Generation era, but perhaps that was not viable.
This one is a relatively short graphic novel (96 pages, I think?) set after Star Trek IV (the whale one), and published around 1992, maybe. (Sorry, these dates are easily found online, I realize, but I’m just kinda cruising through this stuff.)
People who are Claremont fans but not Star Trek fans possibly need not apply to this one. Claremont is very clearly a huge devotee of Star Trek, and this book is in many ways just authorized fan fiction. (But then, that is true of a lot of the licensed Star Trek stuff, really.)
On the other hand, if you’re a Trek fan (which I am), this is great fun. The gimmick here is that at key moments in Star Trek history (which we are shown in sequential flashbacks), Captain Kirk had multiple encounters with the same species of hostile alien. But so shrewd were these creatures that they were always able to cover their tracks, and Kirk has never been able to prove that these guys exist, or convince anyone that they pose a credible threat. (We learn that they inhabit another dimension, much like the limbo demons and N’Garai in X-Men, which is an idea I liked so much I pinched it for my musical, “Invader? I Hardly Know Her.”)
The only other person who knows about these aliens is another starship captain: Basically a female equivalent of Kirk (of course!) who also happens to be a Romulan. Kirk goes rogue to team up with both her and a Klingon captain (whom I think Claremont made up, although he might be from an old “Trek” episode …) to take down these aliens once and for all.
The fan-fictional elements include cameos by a ton of old Trek characters, an explanation for why Klingons used to have smooth foreheads and now don’t (years before “Enterprise” offered a different explanation; I like Claremont’s better). And I think there is at least one Mary Sue in this book as well. (Not being an expert on original Trek, I have trouble distinguishing the cameos of canonical characters from the Claremont originals … there are a LOT of people who turn up here.)
Oh, and there is also a reference to “Cat’s Laughing,” a band whose members Claremont is personal friends with, and who also have cameos in issues of Claremont’s “Excalibur” series in 1988. Claremont likes to link his different stories via musicians.
Despite all the indulgences, though, this is a tight adventure story, a great example of intelligent and rousing space opera. The artwork here is by human dynamo Adam Hughes (with inks by Karl Story), which means that the evil other-dimensional aliens are suitably terrifying, and the sexy Romulan captain is suitably gorgeous. Just visually alone, this is a beautiful package, but the intelligent story is what makes it worth the read. Plus, Claremont writes an awesome Spock. In another universe, a movie adaptation of this book would have made a spectacular Star Trek V or VI, and a much better final adventure for the original crew.
Sometime later, Claremont contributed a story to an issue of DC’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” comic series (one of the annuals), wherein a teenage ensign from Debt of Honor (very Kitty Pryde-esque) comes back – now much older, of course – and resolves a semi-dangling thread from the original graphic novel. The details are fuzzy in my memory, though I think they involve the woman – a human -- getting adopted by a Klingon house, which leads to her crossing paths with Worf, a Klingon adopted by humans.
I guess you could call it an epilogue to “Debt of Honor.” It’s a well-written piece, with a very satisfying ending, although I don’t think it would make even the tiniest impression on anyone who hadn’t already read “Debt.” But it is a great little addendum. I personally would have preferred a full-length sequel to “Debt” set in the Next Generation era, but perhaps that was not viable.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Fantastic Four 17-18
[Jason Powell continues his Claremont epilogues. This is a good case for these issues. I want them now.]
Okay, this is kind of a weird one, I’ll admit.
Remember in 1996, when Marvel reunited with all those Image artists, and gave them control of “Heroes Reborn,” a quasi-reboot of their major characters? Liefeld got Captain America, Portacio got Iron Man, and Jim Lee got the Fantastic Four. Then when they collapsed the “Heroes Reborn” idea, they rebooted everything *again.* Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis were given control of the Fantastic Four this time, but after only three or four months, that team was replaced by Chris Claremont and Salavador Larocca.
Apparently the assignment just sort of dropped into Claremont’s lap; this was 1998, when – as I recall -- Claremont was working as an editor for Marvel rather than a freelance writer. He didn’t seem to have any FF ideas, and so for the first few months the title was in danger of becoming Excalibur redux. Perversely, Claremont started using material from the Alan Davis-penned issues of Excalibur, as well as the issues he wrote himself. There was even talk of Kitty Pryde joining the cast. The first full FF arc that Claremont wrote took them to Genosha of all places. It was a mess.
Eventually Claremont started to find his FF voice, and while he never came close to making any kind of masterwork, there were two issues wherein I think he just nailed it.
FF 17-18 seem to have been influenced by The Matrix. That’s assuming the dates work out … I’m not sure if the movie was in theaters yet at this point in 1999, but if not Claremont could easily have been influenced just by teaser information about the film’s premise. It’s possible that Dark City was influencing Claremont here as well.
So the FF end up in a shared virtual reality scenario. As in the Wachowski Bros. film, the populace of this world are actually all unconscious, each one secure inside one individual chamber of a massive hive. They are all plugged into a fake city, playing roles that they do not know are fake.
But here’s the twist: The city in question is basically a virtual Gotham, complete with its own versions of Batman and Robin, called – respectively – Lockdown and Rosetta Stone. (There are shades here as well of the old Bottle City of Kandor stories where Superman used to become a Batman-like figure to protect the Kandorian populace.) When the FF – during one of their characteristic treks across various dimensions – wind up getting plugged into this virtual scenario, the master computer that runs the show does the logical thing: Makes each member of the FF into a new villain for Lockdown’s rogues gallery. And while Sue, Johnny and Ben are brainwashed into playing these new roles, Reed manages to retain his own identity – but he still has to play along in order to figure out a way to escape.
Lockdown, meanwhile, becomes fascinated with Reed, realizing that this is the first “villain” he’s ever faced that qualifies as his intellectual equal. He’s found his perfect arch-enemy basically, and he doesn’t want to let him leave.
So it’s Batman vs. Mr. Fantastic inside The Matrix. That’s the kind of high concept that would have the modern-day comics community going insane if it was being done by, say, Matt Fraction or Jeff Parker [Ed. note: Fair point.]. Claremont, however, just doesn’t inspire that kind of excitement in modern fandom. (And I understand there are reasons for that, I am simply not persuaded by any of them.)
It just ain’t right. This story is kick-ass by any standards. Everyone should go grab these out of their local LCS’s dollar bin. Granted, it is part of a longer arc that features the FF wandering through different worlds, and because of that there are a few subplots that are brought in from earlier installments. And FF #18 kind of ends on a cliffhanger as the FF move on to the next weird world.
It doesn’t matter. These two issues can easily be enjoyed on their own terms, without buying any of the rest of the run. And Salvador Larocca’s art is really fun, too. Go get these comics, guys. They’re a hoot!
Okay, this is kind of a weird one, I’ll admit.
Remember in 1996, when Marvel reunited with all those Image artists, and gave them control of “Heroes Reborn,” a quasi-reboot of their major characters? Liefeld got Captain America, Portacio got Iron Man, and Jim Lee got the Fantastic Four. Then when they collapsed the “Heroes Reborn” idea, they rebooted everything *again.* Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis were given control of the Fantastic Four this time, but after only three or four months, that team was replaced by Chris Claremont and Salavador Larocca.
Apparently the assignment just sort of dropped into Claremont’s lap; this was 1998, when – as I recall -- Claremont was working as an editor for Marvel rather than a freelance writer. He didn’t seem to have any FF ideas, and so for the first few months the title was in danger of becoming Excalibur redux. Perversely, Claremont started using material from the Alan Davis-penned issues of Excalibur, as well as the issues he wrote himself. There was even talk of Kitty Pryde joining the cast. The first full FF arc that Claremont wrote took them to Genosha of all places. It was a mess.
Eventually Claremont started to find his FF voice, and while he never came close to making any kind of masterwork, there were two issues wherein I think he just nailed it.
FF 17-18 seem to have been influenced by The Matrix. That’s assuming the dates work out … I’m not sure if the movie was in theaters yet at this point in 1999, but if not Claremont could easily have been influenced just by teaser information about the film’s premise. It’s possible that Dark City was influencing Claremont here as well.
So the FF end up in a shared virtual reality scenario. As in the Wachowski Bros. film, the populace of this world are actually all unconscious, each one secure inside one individual chamber of a massive hive. They are all plugged into a fake city, playing roles that they do not know are fake.
But here’s the twist: The city in question is basically a virtual Gotham, complete with its own versions of Batman and Robin, called – respectively – Lockdown and Rosetta Stone. (There are shades here as well of the old Bottle City of Kandor stories where Superman used to become a Batman-like figure to protect the Kandorian populace.) When the FF – during one of their characteristic treks across various dimensions – wind up getting plugged into this virtual scenario, the master computer that runs the show does the logical thing: Makes each member of the FF into a new villain for Lockdown’s rogues gallery. And while Sue, Johnny and Ben are brainwashed into playing these new roles, Reed manages to retain his own identity – but he still has to play along in order to figure out a way to escape.
Lockdown, meanwhile, becomes fascinated with Reed, realizing that this is the first “villain” he’s ever faced that qualifies as his intellectual equal. He’s found his perfect arch-enemy basically, and he doesn’t want to let him leave.
So it’s Batman vs. Mr. Fantastic inside The Matrix. That’s the kind of high concept that would have the modern-day comics community going insane if it was being done by, say, Matt Fraction or Jeff Parker [Ed. note: Fair point.]. Claremont, however, just doesn’t inspire that kind of excitement in modern fandom. (And I understand there are reasons for that, I am simply not persuaded by any of them.)
It just ain’t right. This story is kick-ass by any standards. Everyone should go grab these out of their local LCS’s dollar bin. Granted, it is part of a longer arc that features the FF wandering through different worlds, and because of that there are a few subplots that are brought in from earlier installments. And FF #18 kind of ends on a cliffhanger as the FF move on to the next weird world.
It doesn’t matter. These two issues can easily be enjoyed on their own terms, without buying any of the rest of the run. And Salvador Larocca’s art is really fun, too. Go get these comics, guys. They’re a hoot!
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Post 1991 Claremont part 2
[Jason Powell continues to epilogue away. Three more after this one.]
Continuing a look at Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work …
This week, the “High Frontier” trilogy.
Claremont wrote three sci-fi novels all set in the same universe that was – at one point – marketed by publisher Ace under the umbrella title “High Frontier.” The individual titles are:
FirstFlight (1987)
Grounded (1991)
Sundowner (1994)
It’s cheating a bit to include FirstFlight in this “post-1991” series, but what the hell. Grounded I guess technically shouldn’t count either, as I think it was released before Claremont’s last X-Men issue was published. Ah well.
This series is probably the very best demonstration of Claremont’s ability to create a fully-fleshed out fictional universe, something he wasn’t able to ever fully show off when writing within the Marvel Universe.
The world of “High Frontier” is marvelously well-realized in Claremont’s prose, each novel building consistently on earlier material, making it clear that even from page one of FirstFlight, Claremont had put a lot of work into developing a coherent milieu.
The timeframe in which the books take place is never explicitly spelled out, though most of the clues suggest sometime circa 2050 (which, of course, felt a lot further away then than it does now). The backstory for “High Frontier” involves the unexpected invention, well ahead of its time, of a practical means of faster-than-light travel, which has in turn led to radical upheavals in the space program. Claremont’s lead character is a female (naturally) pilot named Nicole Shea, whom we encounter just as she’s about to be given her first off-world mission.
FirstFlight is a straightforward adventure story detailing the increasingly surprising events of that mission (well, surprising if you don’t read any of the spoilers on the back cover or front-page teaser). X-Men fans will enjoy Claremont’s dedication in FirstFlight – “to Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt …”. And there are some Easter eggs (or, less charitably, just plain old duplicates of X-Men characters) amongst the novel’s cast. The Wolverine analogue, Ben Ciari, is particularly noteworthy. And there’s another familiar name dropped right in the opening chapter, when we learn who Nicole’s favorite musician is.
The book is a brisk 250 pages, and the story jumps quickly from one set-piece to the next. The tangled complexities that one expects from a Claremont story are mostly missing here – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The prose is strong, albeit not nearly as solid as Claremont’s concurrent comic-book work was.
Grounded is something else. This one features a Claremont who seems very assured in the medium of prose, and he produces a much more characteristic piece here. His use of language is masterful, expertly exploiting the poetry inherent in both sci-fi and real-world technical jargon. The cast this time around is quite a bit more well-realized, and the storyline more layered and complex. Compared to the narrative straight-line of FirstFlight, the trajectory of Grounded is multi-vectored, even recursive at times. But the pay-off is there: an exciting, fully realized climax that incorporates every narrative thread, even those that seemed more like digressions at the time. A spectacular effort, this one is; the best of the three books.
(And as with any good speculative fiction, Grounded features some shrewd predictions about the world to come. Published in ’91, it gives us a universe of PortaComps – basically iPhones and Blackberries – and cars with built-in GPS trackers. There is even a direct reference to the Second Gulf War, which seemed like a perfunctory “Look, we’re in the future!” sort of detail when I read the book in 1991. Rereading it in 2010, I found it pretty darn striking.)
Sundowner ended up being the final volume of a trilogy, though I am not sure Claremont planned on stopping at three books initially. The story certainly leaves things open, but at the same time there is an “everything but the kitchen sink” quality to this novel that makes it feel suitably “grand finale”-ish. The major characters from FirstFlight that had been absent from the sequel return here, and the villain from Grounded is given a chance to be redeemed. The ending actually recalls that of Deadliest of the Species, basically leaving things open for the cast to engage in more adventures. Come to think of it, this is how his X-Men run ended as well: All three of these Claremont epics feature the cast in an aircraft, flying optimistically toward the future.
Overall, the ending of Sundowner feels a bit rushed to me, and I think Claremont kind of botches what should’ve been a really fantastic twist in the final chapter, because his writing is too opaque. Still, it is one eventful finale – kind of reminiscent of the final episode of Angel, with that same spirit of “the adventure isn’t over yet.” A worthy ending to the saga, albeit Grounded is more the quintessentially perfect Claremont sci-fi novel.
Overall, like “Deadliest,” this trilogy is a great sci-fi epic, loaded with great ideas and clever twists.
Continuing a look at Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work …
This week, the “High Frontier” trilogy.
Claremont wrote three sci-fi novels all set in the same universe that was – at one point – marketed by publisher Ace under the umbrella title “High Frontier.” The individual titles are:
FirstFlight (1987)
Grounded (1991)
Sundowner (1994)
It’s cheating a bit to include FirstFlight in this “post-1991” series, but what the hell. Grounded I guess technically shouldn’t count either, as I think it was released before Claremont’s last X-Men issue was published. Ah well.
This series is probably the very best demonstration of Claremont’s ability to create a fully-fleshed out fictional universe, something he wasn’t able to ever fully show off when writing within the Marvel Universe.
The world of “High Frontier” is marvelously well-realized in Claremont’s prose, each novel building consistently on earlier material, making it clear that even from page one of FirstFlight, Claremont had put a lot of work into developing a coherent milieu.
The timeframe in which the books take place is never explicitly spelled out, though most of the clues suggest sometime circa 2050 (which, of course, felt a lot further away then than it does now). The backstory for “High Frontier” involves the unexpected invention, well ahead of its time, of a practical means of faster-than-light travel, which has in turn led to radical upheavals in the space program. Claremont’s lead character is a female (naturally) pilot named Nicole Shea, whom we encounter just as she’s about to be given her first off-world mission.
FirstFlight is a straightforward adventure story detailing the increasingly surprising events of that mission (well, surprising if you don’t read any of the spoilers on the back cover or front-page teaser). X-Men fans will enjoy Claremont’s dedication in FirstFlight – “to Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt …”. And there are some Easter eggs (or, less charitably, just plain old duplicates of X-Men characters) amongst the novel’s cast. The Wolverine analogue, Ben Ciari, is particularly noteworthy. And there’s another familiar name dropped right in the opening chapter, when we learn who Nicole’s favorite musician is.
The book is a brisk 250 pages, and the story jumps quickly from one set-piece to the next. The tangled complexities that one expects from a Claremont story are mostly missing here – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The prose is strong, albeit not nearly as solid as Claremont’s concurrent comic-book work was.
Grounded is something else. This one features a Claremont who seems very assured in the medium of prose, and he produces a much more characteristic piece here. His use of language is masterful, expertly exploiting the poetry inherent in both sci-fi and real-world technical jargon. The cast this time around is quite a bit more well-realized, and the storyline more layered and complex. Compared to the narrative straight-line of FirstFlight, the trajectory of Grounded is multi-vectored, even recursive at times. But the pay-off is there: an exciting, fully realized climax that incorporates every narrative thread, even those that seemed more like digressions at the time. A spectacular effort, this one is; the best of the three books.
(And as with any good speculative fiction, Grounded features some shrewd predictions about the world to come. Published in ’91, it gives us a universe of PortaComps – basically iPhones and Blackberries – and cars with built-in GPS trackers. There is even a direct reference to the Second Gulf War, which seemed like a perfunctory “Look, we’re in the future!” sort of detail when I read the book in 1991. Rereading it in 2010, I found it pretty darn striking.)
Sundowner ended up being the final volume of a trilogy, though I am not sure Claremont planned on stopping at three books initially. The story certainly leaves things open, but at the same time there is an “everything but the kitchen sink” quality to this novel that makes it feel suitably “grand finale”-ish. The major characters from FirstFlight that had been absent from the sequel return here, and the villain from Grounded is given a chance to be redeemed. The ending actually recalls that of Deadliest of the Species, basically leaving things open for the cast to engage in more adventures. Come to think of it, this is how his X-Men run ended as well: All three of these Claremont epics feature the cast in an aircraft, flying optimistically toward the future.
Overall, the ending of Sundowner feels a bit rushed to me, and I think Claremont kind of botches what should’ve been a really fantastic twist in the final chapter, because his writing is too opaque. Still, it is one eventful finale – kind of reminiscent of the final episode of Angel, with that same spirit of “the adventure isn’t over yet.” A worthy ending to the saga, albeit Grounded is more the quintessentially perfect Claremont sci-fi novel.
Overall, like “Deadliest,” this trilogy is a great sci-fi epic, loaded with great ideas and clever twists.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Post-1991 Claremont Part 1
[Jason Powell continues to talk about Claremont. And we will listen to him forever because he is awesome.]
In the spirit of not-wanting-to-quit, and as a testament to the addictiveness of Claremont’s writing, I thought I’d follow up the end to the Claremont/X-Men blog series with a few epilogues, if you will. (Epi-blogs?)
First off, people at one point were asking if I was going to look at any of Claremont’s “return to X-Men” work that started in 1998 and has pretty much continued non-stop since then. As noted, this simply isn’t in me, because I don’t have any interest in that material.
But I do hate that it makes me sound as if I find none of Claremont’s post-1991 work edifying. Quite the opposite, actually. There is much of it that I enjoy – it’s just that none of it is “X”-related.
So I thought I’d do a multi-part run-down of what I consider the best of Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work.
First up:
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: DEADLIEST OF THE SPECIES 1-12
This was released by Dark Horse over the course of more than a year (a monthly schedule, with a few delays). I think it was over 1995-1996 … ? Art was supplied by Jackson Guice for the first issue or two, then quickly transitioned to Eduardo Barretta for the bulk of it. (Hope I got that name right … a lot of these comics are in storage …)
Clocking in at 300 very text-heavy pages, this is pretty much a full-on sci-fi novel. The use of the respective mythologies from the two movie franchises is canny and accurate without being overwhelming, so that the story can stand as a solid, self-contained epic in its own right. (Really no more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Aliens or Predator films is required.)
Set in a future wherein the aristocracy live in giant, luxury space-stations while the planet Earth itself is an alien-overrun slum, “Deadliest” takes as its departure point the concept of the “trophy wife,” which here is explored to a science-fictional extreme: women who are genetically engineered to be the ideal mates for the billionaires who requisition them – “perfect” not just physically but psychologically as well.
Interestingly, the storyline also involves Predator/Alien hybrids, which I seem to recall reading was the macguffin of the most recent crossover film. Claremont did it first AGAIN! Ten years ahead of Hollywood! (Although this strikes me as such a no-brainer of an idea for a crossover between the two franchises that I doubt Claremont was really the first to do something with it.)
For the Claremont fan, characteristic touches here include the strong feminist agenda: Beyond the critique of the whole trophy-wife phenomenon, there is also the title’s implicit pushing of the female gender as the more formidable one, and the fact that the three protagonists are, as Claremont put it when he plugged the series in an interview, “a female human, a female Predator, and a female Alien.” (The latter, of course, is a perfectly natural choice, as the original films already established the “Queens” as the dominant creatures.)
The storyline gets characteristically complex too, with a large cast and several nicely fleshed-out settings. Claremont’s talent for world-building is shown off to good effect here (a skill he never got to demonstrate much in X-Men, since he was operating in the already-established Marvel Universe). It’s not all just flash and dazzle, either. Every detail gets woven into the overarching mystery, all feeding into a strong payoff.
For X-Men fans, the series also features lettering by Tom Orzechowski, which is awesome. And there is something fun about seeing Claremont being able to write actual “Aliens” after having contented himself previously on doing his pastiches via The Brood. Each issue also features a beautiful cover by John Bolton (my favorite of all of Claremont’s artistic collaborators, on X-Men or anything else).
The series is still in print, courtesy of Dark Horse’s “Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 2,” which features all twelve issues of “Deadliest.” (Sadly, though, it omits the Bolton covers.) I have the original issues, but I’ve often been tempted to buy the Omnibus, just to have the whole epic in one handy little volume.
Then there’s …
DARK HORSE PRESENTS 1-2
The ending of “Deadliest of the Species” reads very much like an “origin” story for a new sci-fi/superhero comic-book. It’s even got the superhero name spoken melodramatically as the last line of dialogue in the story: “RENEGADE!” Apparently at one point there were plans for Claremont to do a comic with this title for Dark Horse – in fact, a year or two before “Deadliest” was published, Claremont did a sixteen-page Renegade story published in the first two issues of a Dark Horse anthology comic entitled DARK HORSE PRESENTS (which also, somewhat coincidentally, featured a Predator story drawn by Claremont’s occasional X-collaborator Rick Leonardi).
This li’l tale (titled simply “Renegade,” appropriately enough) appears to be set years after the events of “Deadliest of the Species,” despite being published first, so it stands as kind of an odd quasi-prologue/epilogue to the longer work. I think I’d suggest reading it AFTER “Deadliest” even though I personally read it first. (I picked up all this stuff as it came out, ‘cause I was all Claremont-crazy back then).
As a story in its own right, it’s quite brisk and exciting. At its core a basic construct of superhero versus supervillain (both of them female, unsurprisingly), it’s notable for the larger universe hinted at. Claremont seems to have an elaborate backstory/history/milieu all worked out, and even in the space of sixteen pages he paints a compelling portrait of it, through only a few deft strokes. A shame this one never got off the ground, as it had a lot of intriguing potential.
Can’t remember who supplies the artwork to “Renegade,” but I quite like it. It’s rather sleek and sexy (but not at all doing the pandering Image art style so en vogue at the time), particularly the design of the antagonist. And once again, lettering is by Tom Orzechowski (yeah!).
Taken all in all, the above two works comprise a fabulous sci-fi graphic novel, well worth the time of any fan of the genre.
JLA: Scary Monsters 1-6 (these have kick-ass covers too, this time by Art Adams)
Fantastic Four 17-18 (most of Claremont's Fantastic Four run from 1998-2000 is too mired in confusing subplots, but right in the middle he does this fantastic "Matrix meets Batman" two-parter that is just amazingly entertaining)
WildCATS 10-13 (good solid action, feels like a direct continuation of the slam-bang Claremont/Lee stuff at the tail end of Claremont's Uncanny run)
The "High Frontier" trilogy of novels (FirstFlight, Grounded, Sundowner). (The last one gets just a *tad* confusing at times, but overall this is great, pulpy sci-fi material.)
The Black Dragon and Marada the She-Wolf (Claremont's fantasy collaborations with John Bolton. Fantasy is not my favorite genre, but the combo of Claremont and Bolton is awesomeness that can't be denied)
Star Trek: Debt of Honor (Set after Star Trek IV, a really brilliant synthesis of Star Trek mythology up to that point and great space opera in its own right as well. Art is by the awesome Adam Hughes, who really goes all out. Claremont even gives us the best-ever explanation for why Klingons look different now than they did in the 1960s. A beautiful graphic novel, all across the board -- exciting, clever, touching. Who'd have thought a comic book would turn out to be the best Star Trek movie ever made?)
Gen13 issues 0-7 (I think ... whatever is collected in the September Song trade. I honestly think this had the potential to become a really fantastic team book. The characters were fun, the Manga-inspired art was bright and attractive, the writing was snappy and engaging. The September's Song arc is loads of fun. But I get the impression that when sales dipped on this series, Claremont changed his focus mid-stream, so that a story about a whole new team instead became a confusing arc about revivifying the original Gen13, who I don't think were all that great. That's why issues 8-16 don't make the list. Very frustrating to read these comics now, because it all seemed to be heading somewhere really interesting.)
In the spirit of not-wanting-to-quit, and as a testament to the addictiveness of Claremont’s writing, I thought I’d follow up the end to the Claremont/X-Men blog series with a few epilogues, if you will. (Epi-blogs?)
First off, people at one point were asking if I was going to look at any of Claremont’s “return to X-Men” work that started in 1998 and has pretty much continued non-stop since then. As noted, this simply isn’t in me, because I don’t have any interest in that material.
But I do hate that it makes me sound as if I find none of Claremont’s post-1991 work edifying. Quite the opposite, actually. There is much of it that I enjoy – it’s just that none of it is “X”-related.
So I thought I’d do a multi-part run-down of what I consider the best of Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work.
First up:
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: DEADLIEST OF THE SPECIES 1-12
This was released by Dark Horse over the course of more than a year (a monthly schedule, with a few delays). I think it was over 1995-1996 … ? Art was supplied by Jackson Guice for the first issue or two, then quickly transitioned to Eduardo Barretta for the bulk of it. (Hope I got that name right … a lot of these comics are in storage …)
Clocking in at 300 very text-heavy pages, this is pretty much a full-on sci-fi novel. The use of the respective mythologies from the two movie franchises is canny and accurate without being overwhelming, so that the story can stand as a solid, self-contained epic in its own right. (Really no more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Aliens or Predator films is required.)
Set in a future wherein the aristocracy live in giant, luxury space-stations while the planet Earth itself is an alien-overrun slum, “Deadliest” takes as its departure point the concept of the “trophy wife,” which here is explored to a science-fictional extreme: women who are genetically engineered to be the ideal mates for the billionaires who requisition them – “perfect” not just physically but psychologically as well.
Interestingly, the storyline also involves Predator/Alien hybrids, which I seem to recall reading was the macguffin of the most recent crossover film. Claremont did it first AGAIN! Ten years ahead of Hollywood! (Although this strikes me as such a no-brainer of an idea for a crossover between the two franchises that I doubt Claremont was really the first to do something with it.)
For the Claremont fan, characteristic touches here include the strong feminist agenda: Beyond the critique of the whole trophy-wife phenomenon, there is also the title’s implicit pushing of the female gender as the more formidable one, and the fact that the three protagonists are, as Claremont put it when he plugged the series in an interview, “a female human, a female Predator, and a female Alien.” (The latter, of course, is a perfectly natural choice, as the original films already established the “Queens” as the dominant creatures.)
The storyline gets characteristically complex too, with a large cast and several nicely fleshed-out settings. Claremont’s talent for world-building is shown off to good effect here (a skill he never got to demonstrate much in X-Men, since he was operating in the already-established Marvel Universe). It’s not all just flash and dazzle, either. Every detail gets woven into the overarching mystery, all feeding into a strong payoff.
For X-Men fans, the series also features lettering by Tom Orzechowski, which is awesome. And there is something fun about seeing Claremont being able to write actual “Aliens” after having contented himself previously on doing his pastiches via The Brood. Each issue also features a beautiful cover by John Bolton (my favorite of all of Claremont’s artistic collaborators, on X-Men or anything else).
The series is still in print, courtesy of Dark Horse’s “Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 2,” which features all twelve issues of “Deadliest.” (Sadly, though, it omits the Bolton covers.) I have the original issues, but I’ve often been tempted to buy the Omnibus, just to have the whole epic in one handy little volume.
Then there’s …
DARK HORSE PRESENTS 1-2
The ending of “Deadliest of the Species” reads very much like an “origin” story for a new sci-fi/superhero comic-book. It’s even got the superhero name spoken melodramatically as the last line of dialogue in the story: “RENEGADE!” Apparently at one point there were plans for Claremont to do a comic with this title for Dark Horse – in fact, a year or two before “Deadliest” was published, Claremont did a sixteen-page Renegade story published in the first two issues of a Dark Horse anthology comic entitled DARK HORSE PRESENTS (which also, somewhat coincidentally, featured a Predator story drawn by Claremont’s occasional X-collaborator Rick Leonardi).
This li’l tale (titled simply “Renegade,” appropriately enough) appears to be set years after the events of “Deadliest of the Species,” despite being published first, so it stands as kind of an odd quasi-prologue/epilogue to the longer work. I think I’d suggest reading it AFTER “Deadliest” even though I personally read it first. (I picked up all this stuff as it came out, ‘cause I was all Claremont-crazy back then).
As a story in its own right, it’s quite brisk and exciting. At its core a basic construct of superhero versus supervillain (both of them female, unsurprisingly), it’s notable for the larger universe hinted at. Claremont seems to have an elaborate backstory/history/milieu all worked out, and even in the space of sixteen pages he paints a compelling portrait of it, through only a few deft strokes. A shame this one never got off the ground, as it had a lot of intriguing potential.
Can’t remember who supplies the artwork to “Renegade,” but I quite like it. It’s rather sleek and sexy (but not at all doing the pandering Image art style so en vogue at the time), particularly the design of the antagonist. And once again, lettering is by Tom Orzechowski (yeah!).
Taken all in all, the above two works comprise a fabulous sci-fi graphic novel, well worth the time of any fan of the genre.
JLA: Scary Monsters 1-6 (these have kick-ass covers too, this time by Art Adams)
Fantastic Four 17-18 (most of Claremont's Fantastic Four run from 1998-2000 is too mired in confusing subplots, but right in the middle he does this fantastic "Matrix meets Batman" two-parter that is just amazingly entertaining)
WildCATS 10-13 (good solid action, feels like a direct continuation of the slam-bang Claremont/Lee stuff at the tail end of Claremont's Uncanny run)
The "High Frontier" trilogy of novels (FirstFlight, Grounded, Sundowner). (The last one gets just a *tad* confusing at times, but overall this is great, pulpy sci-fi material.)
The Black Dragon and Marada the She-Wolf (Claremont's fantasy collaborations with John Bolton. Fantasy is not my favorite genre, but the combo of Claremont and Bolton is awesomeness that can't be denied)
Star Trek: Debt of Honor (Set after Star Trek IV, a really brilliant synthesis of Star Trek mythology up to that point and great space opera in its own right as well. Art is by the awesome Adam Hughes, who really goes all out. Claremont even gives us the best-ever explanation for why Klingons look different now than they did in the 1960s. A beautiful graphic novel, all across the board -- exciting, clever, touching. Who'd have thought a comic book would turn out to be the best Star Trek movie ever made?)
Gen13 issues 0-7 (I think ... whatever is collected in the September Song trade. I honestly think this had the potential to become a really fantastic team book. The characters were fun, the Manga-inspired art was bright and attractive, the writing was snappy and engaging. The September's Song arc is loads of fun. But I get the impression that when sales dipped on this series, Claremont changed his focus mid-stream, so that a story about a whole new team instead became a confusing arc about revivifying the original Gen13, who I don't think were all that great. That's why issues 8-16 don't make the list. Very frustrating to read these comics now, because it all seemed to be heading somewhere really interesting.)
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
In Summary …
[Jason Powell CONCLUDES his look at every issue of Claremont's 17 year X-Men run. I literally don't know what to say, other than thanks Jason. And thanks to everyone reading. You guys generated 2,826 comments on Jason's work and I know both he and I appreciate it. Even though at least a chunk of that was spambots and Jason taking the time to respond to basically every single person who commented, it is still goddamn tremendous.]
I’ve written so many words about Claremont at this point – and I know I’ve repeated myself a lot from entry to entry, far moreso than was necessary I’m sure – and the result is that a summary is probably not necessary. I think I’ve said all I wanted to say about Claremont at this point, despite the fact that he has a huge body of material outside of Uncanny, much of which is very, very good. And even within the X-sphere, there is stuff like The New Mutants, Excalibur, the Wolverine ongoing, which I didn’t talk about.
Still, I think I have done what I set out to do here. My feeling was and is that Claremont gets short shrift as a comics writer. This is someone who defined for more than one generation how to do mainstream superhero comics, particularly team books. From “New Teen Titans” on down through “Gen13,” his influence can be felt. (Claremont actually wrote a “Gen13” series in 2003 that wasn’t half bad. Well, okay, actually the second half was pretty bad. But the first half was good.)
The list of X-characters that Claremont created or co-created is rather amazing, and consider how many of these characters are still hugely important components of the franchise: Kitty Pryde, Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Rogue, Mystique, Pyro, Sabretooth, Mr. Sinister, Forge, Jubilee, Gambit … plus Dani Moonstar, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, Cannonball, Cypher, Warlock, Magma, etc. Add to that all the characters for whom Claremont gave us the definitive incarnation, including Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, Nightcrawler … Also, it is Claremont who made Magneto a survivor of the Holocaust, who made Charles and Magnus into old friends, who created the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle. These are contributions not just to the relatively insular world of comic-books, but to pop culture in general: So many elements of the Bryan Singer films (and even the Ratner one) are drawn from Claremont’s material.
A recent article on Singer – who was slated at the time to direct the upcoming “X-Men: First Class” film -- gave the director literally all of the credit for the opening scene of the first X-Men film: young Magneto in a concentration camp. The article makes no note of Claremont, although there is a sentence noting that Jeff Parker wrote a comicbook called “X-Men: First Class.” Parker gets name-checked for a title. The man who produced the material that set the entire tone for Singer’s take on the franchise? Not a mention. Meanwhile, jokey-joke internet pieces about the ten lamest comic-book characters, or whatever, will gleefully use Chris Claremont’s name as a punch-line in their entry on The Dazzler.
Via the work of Joss Whedon, Chris Claremont has impacted pop culture even beyond X-Men. The character of Buffy is an avowed Kitty Pryde analogue (based on Claremont’s characterization), an entire season of “Buffy” riffed on Claremont’s Dark Phoenix Saga, and Whedon’s “Firefly” has a heavy Claremont influence as well. (That show also has boasts a clear Kitty analogue as well, in the character Kaylee.)
Claremont’s use of women in “X-Men” was ahead of its time 30 years ago, and I feel that modern comics are still catching up. During his tenure, Claremont populated the X-universe with so many female characters that were well-realized in their own right, and not defined by how they related to their male counterparts. The females of Claremont’s X-Men were essential to that mythos, far moreso than in any other franchise. A great test of this is the film adaptations, which so often have to pare down the continuity to the core elements. For the first X-Men film, this gave us an ensemble including Storm, Jean Grey, Rogue and Mystique, all key players in the action – to be joined in the sequels by Kitty Pryde and Callisto. Contrast with the Spider-Man films, in which the only major female character is Mary Jane, whose job it is to get captured in the third act – every time. The third film added Gwen Stacy. Her purpose: To be a romantic foil for Spider-Man, just like Mary Jane.
Cartoon adaptations are just as telling. The X-Men cartoons again feature Rogue, Storm, Kitty Pryde and Mystique prominently, just for a start – again, as heroes fighting alongside the males. In Spider-Man, the women exist for no other reason than to be attracted to Peter Parker.
I don’t see much different in contemporary comics (though I confess I am hardly an expert). In team books, the males always outnumber the females. If it’s the opposite, usually there is some kind of gimmick involved, or it is a series aimed specifically at “girls.” Has anyone other than Claremont ever given us a mainstream super-team in which females outnumbered the males (and in which this wasn’t any kind of ironic twist or something that needed to be commented on, it simply WAS) … ?
And finally, there is the sheer length of the run, which Claremont never seems to get credit for. He wrote X-Men uninterrupted for 17 years. No one has duplicated that length of time on a mainstream superhero comic. Factor in all the X-related spinoff series, and you get something in the area of 380 comics, which far outweighs any other run in terms of quantity. Claremont has said that he considers everything from his first issue (Uncanny X-Men 94) to his last (X-Men 3) as one single story. On these terms, then, he even beats Dave Sim’s 300-chapter “novel.” Claremont’s “novel” is not only longer, but he also finished first. No one since Claremont has even come close to this.
For all that, the guy is mocked. As the world turns and the X-franchise continues to forge ahead -- and the time since Claremont’s original run ended becomes longer than the time he spent crafting it – less and less people seem to remember or care that he built the X-universe from only a few seeds. On comic-book message boards everywhere, idiots who think of themselves as die-hard X-Men fans decry Claremont’s work and diminish his contribution, apparently not realizing the irony that if Claremont hadn’t done what he did, they wouldn’t even BE die-hard X-Men fans.
With all the poison directed at Claremont on the net, I wanted to put something out there that redressed the balance somewhat. And an issue-by-issue look seemed to make the most sense, as it was a way to truly emulate the massiveness of Claremont’s accomplishment.
Now I’ve done that. At the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like enough. I still feel like the positive is outweighed by the negative regarding Claremont, particularly on the internet. But hey, I did my best.
Thanks to everyone who read and commented. It was heartening to read other people speaking positively about Claremont, and it was always particularly nice to be given new insights that made me appreciate his work even more. Thanks to Art, Dave, Neil S, Douglas, Nathan A., Scott, and all the other incredibly erudite and fantastic commentators, who really made this whole project come to life with their addendums, corrections, arguments and elucidations.
And my eternal gratitude to Geoff Klock for hosting this blog. Putting these writings here gave them a much larger audience than they’d have gotten had I posted them at my old Live Journal. More importantly, his deadline forced me to stick with this even at times when I started to think this was a gigantic fool’s errand. And his encouraging comments on the content itself were immensely gratifying, particularly given how much a fan I am of Geoff’s own writing. Thanks so much, Geoff!
And even though he’ll probably never read this or any other the other 230-plus (!) blog entries … Thank you, Chris Claremont, for the hundreds and hundreds of awesome superhero comics.
-- fin --
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
X-Men 1-3, part 3
[Jason Powell started writing these from Wisconsin, years ago. He came to New York City this summer because his science fiction musical, which I will review soon, was accepted to the New York City Fringe Festival. Today he leaves New York City, on the same day his blog about the final Claremont X-Men issue in the initial run goes up. There will be like 6 more posts from him in the next six weeks, epilogue type stuff, but we have reached the end of an era folks.]
“Mutant Genesis”
(Part Three of a Three-Part Blog)
I do wish to end on a positive note after the last two entries about this arc. So let it be said that -- troublesome politics and backstage dramas aside -- “Mutant Genesis” is a genuinely fun superhero story. Jim Lee and Scott Williams were at the top of their game in 1991, and their enthusiasm is evident in every panel of X-Men 1-3. The artists adorn both the plot and the visuals with a lot of slick, sci-fi trappings: Note the abundance of sci-fi technology in almost every setting, and how many of the characters wear brand-new costumes, tricked out with extra bucks and pouches (common in 90s superhero couture). Even Professor Xavier’s chair is now a piece of science-fiction machinery.
Claremont, while not nearly so enthusiastic about the comic at this point, clearly has no intention of being outpaced by his young collaborators. Displaying all the confidence of a master craftsman, the author produces text that matches the visuals at every turn. Lee and Williams clearly want the X-Men to seem as futuristic and “cool” as possible, so that’s what Claremont delivers. Even Xavier, the perennial “mentor” figure, has become something of a bad-ass (continuing the characterization that began with his pummeling of a Skrull in Uncanny 277).
By the same token, he also still has a huge emotional investment in these characters, having lived with them for a decade and a half. By all accounts, including his own, Claremont thought of them almost as real people. (His first prose novel, First Flight, is dedicated to “Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt, Sean, Kitty, Rogue, Betsy, Alex, Ali – and all the rest – who helped (and help) pay the rent!”). That affection shines through to the end as well. For all that they are infused with Lee’s sense of contemporary coolness, the X-Men are still portrayed with characteristic sensitivity and depth: Consider Rogue’s plea to Magneto, which displays continuity from the recent Savage Land arc that increased the two characters’ emotional closeness. At every turn, Claremont and Lee strike a beautiful balance between characters who seem remarkably sexy and hip yet still emotionally relatable. Of course, this is, to some degree or another, what Claremont had been doing for the entire 17 years.
Note also that despite the fact that he’s leaving, Claremont still employs his favorite trick of sprinkling smaller mysteries amongst the broader goings-on, to be explicated at some later date: The “Delgado” mystery in the first issue is absolutely Claremontian; while I have no evidence to back it up, I’d bet money it was Claremont’s idea and not Lee’s.
Darragh Greene, a favorite comics commentator of mine, writes about his experience of the first issue of X-Men, saying:
Though Greene is perhaps singularly eloquent in the expression of it, his experience is far from unique. Upon its release in 1991, X-Men #1 was the best-selling comic ever. Many people bought and read it, including scores of fans who had never read an X-Men comic-book before. And unlike two earlier massive Marvel best-sellers, McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 and Liefeld’s X-Force #1, Claremont and Lee’s series actually delivered on the hype. The issue was so effervescent and absorbing that it turned brand-new readers into lifelong X-Men fans.
This is part of the brilliance of Claremont’s departure – to leave on such an extraordinarily high note. His seventeen years as writer of The X-Men is not only remarkable just for the sheer length of time itself, but for the fact that – from his first issue to his last – he was hooking vast amounts of readers. As he noted himself in an interview in 1992, the average X-Men fan when he quit hadn’t been born yet when he first started.
Having spent years now attempting to enumerate what makes each individual chapter of Claremont’s opus a unique jewel unto itself, I feel qualified to argue that just about any given issue – including his very last -- contains all the qualities that made the series a success: Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.
The final monologue of X-Men #3 contains an unabashedly humanist message, a call for everyone in the world to do everything he or she can “to leave our world better than we found it.” The very fact that we live, Xavier says, “gives us the obligation to try.” Considering just how many people have been positively affected by the X-Men franchise – especially after the widespread dissemination of the mythos thanks to television and film adaptations – and considering just how much of that franchise is the invention of Claremont, it seems fair to say that the author has certainly followed his own advice. Claremont put his heart and soul into The X-Men, and infused the entire mythology – for all time, I would argue – with an irresistible power and pull. John Byrne once said that every writer and artist who worked on The X-Men after Neal Adams were just riding the wave that Adams created, but I disagree. Adams’ influence was strong, but eventually it dissipated in the wake of a much larger phenomenon. It is Christopher S. Claremont who built this mythology to last.
“Mutant Genesis”
(Part Three of a Three-Part Blog)
I do wish to end on a positive note after the last two entries about this arc. So let it be said that -- troublesome politics and backstage dramas aside -- “Mutant Genesis” is a genuinely fun superhero story. Jim Lee and Scott Williams were at the top of their game in 1991, and their enthusiasm is evident in every panel of X-Men 1-3. The artists adorn both the plot and the visuals with a lot of slick, sci-fi trappings: Note the abundance of sci-fi technology in almost every setting, and how many of the characters wear brand-new costumes, tricked out with extra bucks and pouches (common in 90s superhero couture). Even Professor Xavier’s chair is now a piece of science-fiction machinery.
Claremont, while not nearly so enthusiastic about the comic at this point, clearly has no intention of being outpaced by his young collaborators. Displaying all the confidence of a master craftsman, the author produces text that matches the visuals at every turn. Lee and Williams clearly want the X-Men to seem as futuristic and “cool” as possible, so that’s what Claremont delivers. Even Xavier, the perennial “mentor” figure, has become something of a bad-ass (continuing the characterization that began with his pummeling of a Skrull in Uncanny 277).
By the same token, he also still has a huge emotional investment in these characters, having lived with them for a decade and a half. By all accounts, including his own, Claremont thought of them almost as real people. (His first prose novel, First Flight, is dedicated to “Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt, Sean, Kitty, Rogue, Betsy, Alex, Ali – and all the rest – who helped (and help) pay the rent!”). That affection shines through to the end as well. For all that they are infused with Lee’s sense of contemporary coolness, the X-Men are still portrayed with characteristic sensitivity and depth: Consider Rogue’s plea to Magneto, which displays continuity from the recent Savage Land arc that increased the two characters’ emotional closeness. At every turn, Claremont and Lee strike a beautiful balance between characters who seem remarkably sexy and hip yet still emotionally relatable. Of course, this is, to some degree or another, what Claremont had been doing for the entire 17 years.
Note also that despite the fact that he’s leaving, Claremont still employs his favorite trick of sprinkling smaller mysteries amongst the broader goings-on, to be explicated at some later date: The “Delgado” mystery in the first issue is absolutely Claremontian; while I have no evidence to back it up, I’d bet money it was Claremont’s idea and not Lee’s.
Darragh Greene, a favorite comics commentator of mine, writes about his experience of the first issue of X-Men, saying:
“My first American superhero comic was adjectiveless X-Men 1, so I just caught the tail-end of Claremont's long run writing those characters; but those three issues made an indelible impression on me. (Indeed, without them, I probably would not have gone so deep into either the genre or the medium.) They were a swansong, of course, but they were all the more powerful and passionate for that. Naturally, I was blown away by Jim Lee's art, but Claremont's assured command of language, the theatrical fluency and elegant rhythm of the words, elevated the collaboration to a dazzling work of art/literature whose epic grandeur and deep humanity fired my fourteen-year-old imagination.
I had to hunt down the back issues of Uncanny X-Men, of course, and when I did, I realized that there had been a slump in quality prior to Lee coming onboard. After he came on as regular penciller, and began taking a hand in the plotting, the book began to fizz again. I think Claremont certainly became better with the right collaborator, and I think Lee was such a collaborator even if I now know that Claremont was not happy with Lee's plotting and plot changes. Whatever the situation, there was a synergy that worked, and the book was better for it.
So, as a reader, I think Claremont's run ended on a high whatever his own thoughts were at the time. Certainly, ever afterwards, I judged the quality of the X-Books with reference to those first three startling issues of X- Men, but nothing came close.”
Though Greene is perhaps singularly eloquent in the expression of it, his experience is far from unique. Upon its release in 1991, X-Men #1 was the best-selling comic ever. Many people bought and read it, including scores of fans who had never read an X-Men comic-book before. And unlike two earlier massive Marvel best-sellers, McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 and Liefeld’s X-Force #1, Claremont and Lee’s series actually delivered on the hype. The issue was so effervescent and absorbing that it turned brand-new readers into lifelong X-Men fans.
This is part of the brilliance of Claremont’s departure – to leave on such an extraordinarily high note. His seventeen years as writer of The X-Men is not only remarkable just for the sheer length of time itself, but for the fact that – from his first issue to his last – he was hooking vast amounts of readers. As he noted himself in an interview in 1992, the average X-Men fan when he quit hadn’t been born yet when he first started.
Having spent years now attempting to enumerate what makes each individual chapter of Claremont’s opus a unique jewel unto itself, I feel qualified to argue that just about any given issue – including his very last -- contains all the qualities that made the series a success: Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.
The final monologue of X-Men #3 contains an unabashedly humanist message, a call for everyone in the world to do everything he or she can “to leave our world better than we found it.” The very fact that we live, Xavier says, “gives us the obligation to try.” Considering just how many people have been positively affected by the X-Men franchise – especially after the widespread dissemination of the mythos thanks to television and film adaptations – and considering just how much of that franchise is the invention of Claremont, it seems fair to say that the author has certainly followed his own advice. Claremont put his heart and soul into The X-Men, and infused the entire mythology – for all time, I would argue – with an irresistible power and pull. John Byrne once said that every writer and artist who worked on The X-Men after Neal Adams were just riding the wave that Adams created, but I disagree. Adams’ influence was strong, but eventually it dissipated in the wake of a much larger phenomenon. It is Christopher S. Claremont who built this mythology to last.
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