This column started out as a Rise My Pets feature, similar
to the one I did a couple weeks ago on Peter
David. But, as happens sometimes, I got sucked down a research rabbit hole,
and something different came out on the other side.
It’s easy to geek out when talking about Chris Claremont.
Any comics fan worth his pull list could lecture you about the "Dark Phoenix
Saga" or "God Loves, Man Kills" or the "Mutant Massacre" or "Life-Death" or "Days of
Future Past," classic stories that have been revisited, What If’d and
strip-mined practically to death.
But the world has not always been kind to Claremont. And,
certainly, nor have I.
Sometime in the mid-2000s, I bestowed upon Claremont the
nickname Pappy. By this point, he had already returned to writing the X-titles
after a decade’s X-ile at the hands of editorial whim and the rise of the
rock-star artists who would go on to found Image Comics. After a far, far
shorter stint than his original run on Uncanny X-Men (10 months vs. 16 years),
he stepped aside again, this time in favor of rock-star writer Grant Morrison
and Joe Casey.
To quote then-new editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in an interview
in Wizard, Claremont’s new X-Men comics “were completely unreadable. Right
around the time of the movie, the heavy hand of continuity for whatever reason
just came crashing down on them.” And he wasn’t wrong. At the time, there was
no Cyclops, they were fighting the Neo, Wolverine had just done a stint as a
horseman of Apocalypse, Magneto wasn’t around, Rogue was kissing Colossus, Jean
Grey and Psylocke had switched powers, Cable had joined the team and was
wearing his missing dad’s visor like a chunky necklace, etc.
So Pappy was given his own book to play with, X-Treme X-Men,
that still had a few of the team’s heavy hitters, including Storm, Rogue and
Gambit, and a quality artist in Salvador Larocca (who left more than halfway
through the series). After that book ended with issue 46, he returned to Uncanny
from issues 444-473, starting with a good old-fashioned game of baseball and
going on to resurrect Psylocke, one of his most precious pets, though he was also
the one to kill her in the first place.
After Uncanny, Pappy disappeared again through a haze of
increasingly lower-tier and lower-continuity books, including New Excalibur,
Exiles, GeNext and X-Men Forever. Given his fondness for slapping his forehead
and shaking his head in interviews when asked about changes made to the
X-characters in his wake, taking a sort of “In my day” attitude, I started
using “Pappy” as shorthand when referring to him. But just like your
grandfather or great-grandfather, “in his day,” Claremont probably kicked way more
ass than you, and could arguably be considered among the Greatest Generation of
Marvel writers, making lasting contributions most of today’s crop can only
aspire to.
As I’ve likely made far too obvious in previous columns, I
grew up on the
’90s stuff, a decade that was far from perfect. It wasn’t until I started
collecting the Essential trades and actually read all 16 years of Claremont’s
Uncanny work that I realized how good the X-books were when they were at their
best. But, again, we’re not here to talk about the good times. Consider this
the second act of a Behind the Music,
when the drugs and alcohol take their toll and the album sales slip … except
there aren’t any drugs or album sales involved.
Herewith are some of the quirkier quirks of Pappy’s second
act:
The Neo: Claremont’s second tour of X-duty started with a
six-months-later time jump from the Apocalypse story "The Twelve," creating a
whirlwind of plot points and characters that have since been forgotten. Chief
among them was a new species called the Neo claiming to be the next
evolutionary step. The main problems with the notorious N-E-O were that each
issue featured a different group of characters claiming to be Neo and that they
were the major the threat for the X-Men at a time when the first movie was
introducing many to classic baddies such as Magneto, Mystique and Toad. They
have since been wiped out. P.S.: The Neo is a weird name for bad guys created
in 2000, just months after the release of The
Matrix, which featured a hero called Neo.
Sage: Though created early in Claremont’s time with the
X-Men, in 1980 as an aide to Sebastian Shaw named Tessa, Sage didn’t really get
her moment until the early 2000s, when Claremont revealed she had been working
as an undercover operative for Charles Xavier the whole time. The mutant with
the computer brain was then shipped off to the X-Treme team. As the decade
progressed, Sage, like Pappy himself, got pushed into more and more irrelevant
books, from X-Treme X-Men to New Excalibur to New Exiles, where she merged with
the computer on the team’s reality-hopping base … or something. Greg Pak later
used the character in a second volume of X-Treme X-Men, which was actually more
like Exiles. Either way, it was canceled.
Psylocke: As Claremont’s pets go, Betsy Braddock was one of
his oldest and dearest, having created her in the U.K. Captain Britain comics
in 1976, a full decade before she joined the X-Men, fulfilling their need at
the time for a telepath. The time jump helped Betsy continue her proud
tradition of being a convoluted mess, starting with the retconning of how
exactly she went from British noble with funny-colored hair to Asian bad girl
and Cyclops seducer. Post jump, she and Jean had switched powers, she got a new
boyfriend and, to ice the cake, she was killed by a new villain named Vargas in
X-Treme. Pappy later resurrected her in his return to Uncanny, in an arc that
included her brother Jamie Braddock, another thought-dead character.
Thunderbird III (Neal Sharra): To his credit, Claremont
liked to create characters who hailed from all over the world, to give the X-Men
a more global feel and appeal to the widest audience possible. Unfortunately,
sometimes, readers just don’t care. Pyrokinetic Neal Sharra appeared after the
time jump and took the code name of the team’s most consistently dead member, a
bad PR move made worse by the fact that this Thunderbird was the “other” kind
of Indian, from the Asian subcontinent. Thunderbird III sought the affections
of Psylocke, who had been paired off with Archangel in the ’90s, and succeeded
until Betsy was killed. Neal shrugged it off and went after X-Treme teammate
Lifeguard, another Claremont creation, and the two lived irrelevantly ever
after.
Acting like 1992 never happened: After bouncing from Uncanny
to X-Treme, back to Uncanny, to Excalibur, to Exiles, and so on, Claremont
bounced out of continuity entirely with X-Men Forever, a book intended to show
where he would have taken the band of merry mutants had Jim Lee not edged him
out in the first place. Hint: He would have killed Wolverine.
Nightcrawler: With any luck, the fuzzy elf is laying the
groundwork for Claremont’s third act, the part where the band gets back
together and talks about how the music they’re making now is better than ever,
regardless of whether it actually is. In April, he launched a Nightcrawler
ongoing that reviewers said harkens to classic Chris, in that it contains “a
heavy-handed narrative style and classic overexplanation.” Which could just
be code for “it has thought bubbles and yellow narrative boxes,” which went
passe sometime in the past decade.
Dan Grote has been a
Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four
Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.
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