X-Men

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Guest Blogger Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Chris Claremont’s X-Men run. For more in this series, see the toolbar on the right.] Claremont also makes this issue tie in to the “Dire Wraith war,” the premise of his friend Bill Mantlo’s action-figure-based comic book Rom. As...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Batman 681. Tim Callahan is a good critic when you give him a good comic book, but in my mind, particularly with Morrison, he is far too forgiving of error. I do not mean for this post to be an attack on Callahan, but since he is one of the few critics I read on a regular basis he is going to have to stan...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) The Colossus/Juggernaut fight is also brilliantly conceived and executed, by far the all-time greatest use of the Juggernaut in an X-Men comic book. A once-impressive villain made to look foolish over time because his “unstoppable” riff rings hollow after so many defeats, Cain Marko h...

By Geoff Klock Jason Powell has taken on the yeoman's job of doing an issue by issue analysis of Chris Claremont's 17 year Uncanny X-Men run in an effort to make me feel bad for saying Morrison invented all kinds of things he did not in his New X-Men ...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) In “Madness,” Claremont and his collaborators finally give the palpable sense of something truly awful having occurred, as the harshness of both Rogue’s assault and its after-effects are dramatized effectively for the first time. Employing a particularly oblique style of storytell...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) All in all, Uncanny X-Men #181 is a kind of throwback to ‘70s-era Claremont (hence the inclusion of Sunfire, whose last X-appearance was in 1979); the adventure is more light-hearted, brightly colored and fun, but with resonances that imply the superhero action has meaning beyond the o...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Having apparently struck upon the idea months ago to end Colossus and Kitty’s relationship, Claremont made the odd decision to lay much of the emotional groundwork for the idea in issues of New Mutants rather than X-Men. New Mutants #’s 13 and 14 see Kitty palling around with a fellow teen c...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Green’s organic and gesturely style is different from anything yet seen on Uncanny X-Men, which up to now has always been at its best when Claremont was paired with tidier artists like Byrne and Paul Smith. (Even when Green himself did fill-in inks for one X-Men comic back in 1977, it was in a...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) A 22-page story, “Sanction” wastes a ridiculous 12 pages on a dismally unimaginative scene depicting Mystique in training against Arcade’s X-Men robots. Romita’s choreography is stiff, and Claremont strains, but ultimately fails, to give Mystique a compelling first-person narrat...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Meanwhile guys like Bachalo and Ashley Wood languish without a writer to match their talents; Mignola does not even draw Hellboy anymore (though at least he found a suitable replacement). Brad told me that a lot of the best "comic book artists" do not even draw comics: story-boarding in Ho...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) X-Men Annual #7 is notable for its opening, which marks only the second time that Claremont’s X-Men begin a story playing baseball. In spite of the few times the author has used this particular image, the idea – such a quintessential example of “heroes at play” – has come to be emblematic of C...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Thus, Claremont is deliberately flagging up problematic moments in the story of the X-Men – moments that Claremont himself is responsible for – in order to plant the first seeds of a new kind of X-Men. In the coming years, Claremont will upset the status quo in significant ways. Valerie Coop...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) A shrewd plotter, Claremont also smartly weaves in other ongoing arcs into this climactic issue: His use of the recently-added cast-member Rogue is quite clever, as is the fact that Storm’s newfound affinity for “violent weather” becomes a key to the team’s victory.

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) As per the title, this is an issue focused entirely on the romantic relationships among the X-Men cast: Cyclops/Madelyne, Wolverine/Mariko, Kitty/Colossus, Nightcrawler/Amanda, and Charles/Lilandra. Partly marking time so that the climax to the “From the Ashes” storyline can occ...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) This and the previous issue make for one of Claremont’s best small-scale stories in the entire Uncanny X-Men canon, memorable enough that Bryan Singer even cannibalized it – specifically lifting the “Wolverine lets Rogue take his powers” dramatic beat – for the first X-Men film, made o...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Storm’s angst seemed so gradual, and repetitious, it makes for a wrenching surprise when the actual turn is so violent and so fast. What Claremont has created is an inverse of the “Dark Phoenix” cliffhanger at the end of Uncanny X-Men #134 (exactly three years earlier), where the sudden ch...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) But how, then, to still satisfy genre requirements? How can Claremont still utilize recurring villains, for example, but fight free of the “riff” paradigm, wherein every creator of X-Men offers a new spin on the same old chords? We get a taste of the answer here, as Claremont begins to rec...

By Geoff Klock(geoff.klock@gmail.com) Conceived as a comic book that would stand on its own entirely apart from the continuity of the serialized monthly, “God Loves, Man Kills” is a 64-page self-contained story by Claremont and artist Brent Anderson involving a bigoted Christian preacher, William Stryker, on a crusade aga...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Indeed, the scope of the characters’ ruminations and self-scrutiny is so broad that writer Mitch Montgomery, in his essay “X-traordinary People: Mary Tyler Moore and the Mutants Explore Pop Psychology,” was moved to suggest that what we are actually seeing in issue 168 is the X-Men dec...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Geoff has noted that Joss Whedon seems to have learned everything he knows about serial writing from Chris Claremont. But the lesson in how to do a good vampire story that also incorporates teen angst ...? Clearly Whedon picked that one up somewhere else.

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Uncanny X-Men #167 is the transitional issue marking the paradigm shift in Claremont’s approach to writing the series. However, thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules combined with the mysterious nature of comic-book chronologizing, a few blatantly superheroic epics fall i...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) By his own account, Claremont’s invention of the New Mutants was something of a pre-emptive strike, to prevent a misconceived “West Coast X-Men” spin-off that would have turned the X-Men universe into something too corporate in tone for the author’s liking. Opting instead to re-emphas...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Trivia: That the new X-Men’s superhero phase ends with #166 is a striking coincidence of numbering, given that the Silver Age X-Men were cancelled with #66. In a strange way, Uncanny #266 will mark a similar milestone as the first appearance of Gambit – the first Claremont X-character del...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Wolverine makes the surprising admission that he once, as a soldier, tried prayer himself and that it was “a mistake.” Kurt’s response is to pity Logan his lack of spirituality and his loneliness, and Wolverine replies by embracing Nightcrawler, saying, “I ain’t alone, bub – I got you.” Th...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) In terms of storyline, “Wolverine” is cannily conceived despite its unapologetically anachronistic portrayal of Japan. In fairness, Claremont is hardly the only comics author to portray all of his main Japanese characters as honor-obsessed clichés, but that context doesn’t necess...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Indeed, the seeds for the first arc of New Mutants are seen in issue 164, in a two-page sequence involving Xavier and Illyana. The latter makes some enigmatic references to her mutant power – to be revealed in the Magik miniseries that will in turn feed into the New Mutants title – while the fo...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) In the present issue, there are distinct shades of the middle act of the Dark Phoenix Saga, wherein Wolverine and Cyclops were the lynchpins of the X-Men’s escape from the Hellfire Club. Here, Wolverine is once again the catalyst for an escape, this time from the Brood (whom the X-Men all se...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) In the comments to Jason's post on Uncanny X-Men 160, Cove West wrote -- in three parts -- about the Lovecraft mythos as it appears in Marvel Comics. Comment pull quote? Comment pull essay.] Sound familiar? Claremont DID refer to both Magik and Phoenix as Darkchild.

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Claremont and Cockrum execute a sort of tonal segue into the Wolverine mini with Uncanny X-Men #162, a solo Wolverine story that utilizes the same first-person narrative captions, and also apes the miniseries’ use of Mariko Yashida as a touchstone for the deepening of Wolverine’s char...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Claremont gently segues readers into the meat of the issue – an extended flashback revealing how Xavier and Magneto first met. (When this issue was first published, that Xavier and Magneto had any history pre-Lee/Kirby’s X-Men #1 was a watershed revelation. But anyone reading this comic...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) If not immediately obvious from the opening seduction of Illyana, the theme is signaled in Claremont’s most shockingly explicit scene yet, when an alternate-reality version of Nightcrawler molests Kitty Pryde. Though the panels are conceived subtly enough to circumvent the Comics C...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Of course, the most significant aspect of issue 158 in X-Men history is that it contains the first appearance in the series of Rogue. She will go on to become the second member of the X-Men actually created by Chris Claremont (the first being Kitty Pryde), and actually emerge as a fan favorit...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) On the other hand, the tight plotting exhibited by Claremont in the previous two issues slackens a bit here. His impulse to again top himself by making the scope of the story even more vast now works against him, as the actual X-Men, who are meant to be the stars of the series, get lost among the...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) On the negative side, why is Kitty once again spending half the issue in a bikini? The repeated objectification of a 13-year-old girl is starting to become distinctly discomforting. (Kitty’s four-panel fashion show for Kurt is a joke for long-time readers, reprising Nightcrawler’s im...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) In mid-1981 – around the same time that Uncanny X-Men was seeing an expansion of the supporting cast in the form of such notable females as Stevie Hunter, Carol Danvers and Illyana Rasputin – Marvel’s black-and-white tabloid-size comic book Bizarre Adventures came out with an X-themed...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Claremont has some fun with the reactions of the eavesdropping “real” versions of Nightcrawler and Wolverine to their bedtime-story counterparts, but generally speaking proves incapable of matching his partner’s sense of whimsy. The author even admits as much in his intro to a reprin...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Guest blogger Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men Run. For more in this series, see the toolbar on the right.] It is interesting how the comic book idea that the villains are reflections of the heroes makes it easy to may characters like the White...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) “X-Men Minus One” Claremont also botches the reveal that Storm and Emma have switched bodies, with narration that cheats – why is Storm reluctant to break her loving embrace with Kitty if, at this point, she already has Emma’s mind?

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) To get to that point, however, Claremont first embarks on yet another homage to Neal Adams. It begins with Angel (plus Spider-Man) descending to the Savage Land and facing the Savage Land Mutates. Spider-Man leaves at the end of issue 2 but Angel sticks around, to be joined by the rest of the X...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) The greatest single accomplishment of Claremont’s original 17-year X-Men run is his character arc for Magneto, transforming a previously one-dimensional villain into one of the most powerful and tragic characters in Marvel’s vast stable. “I, Magneto” is a key chapter in Magneto’s tr...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Uncanny X-Men 500. My local comic shop lost a box or something, so you guys are going to have to review this one for me, at least until I get it. The Wolverine / Kitty Pride Miniseries. I have not read this republished 80s story yet, but it is all part of my plan to read all of Claremont's X-Men. I have l...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) The best part of “And the Dead” occurs on the third page, when Xavier thinks to himself, “In too many ways ... Magneto and I are uncomfortably alike.” At this point, Claremont and Cockrum have already begun to devise the Holocaust backstory for Magneto that will make its first appearance next i...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Claremont was superhero comics’ first feminist writer. He clearly had an affection for Storm -- the “new” X-Men’s only female member originally – right from the start. Indeed, it is Ororo who saves the day in Uncanny X-Men #96, the first X-Men issue that Claremont plotted. (Cockrum’s favor...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) A noteworthy step in Wolverine’s development occurs in this issue when Wolverine employs an “old ninja trick” that he “learned in Japan” during a duel with Nightcrawler. Logan’s affinity for Japan was first introduced during Byrne and Claremont’s Moses Magnum arc (issues 118-119), an...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) “Rogue Storm” It’s too bad, because “Rogue Storm” starts off so promisingly. The opening sequence with Nightcrawler escaping by teleporting “two miles above the ground” is very strong. (With Cockrum back on the book, Nightcrawler is back to being the series’ favorite son, rather than Wo...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Meanwhile, Claremont inches along the Cyclops/Lee Forrester romantic relationship in this issue, as Lee learns for the first time about Scott’s optic blasts. Like the material with Colleen Wing, the relationship with Lee gets a big buildup, but – as with all potential girlfriends for S...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Jim Shooter has commented in interviews that Claremont and Byrne became aggressively competitive once Byrne moved from X-Men to Fantastic Four, and that Byrne’s unprofessional ret-conning of Claremont’s story was a manifestation of that rivalry. It’s possible that Claremont’s sub...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) The use of the N’Garai is one of the more interesting things about the issue; they were the villains in Uncanny X-Men #96, the first issue of the comic fully plotted and written by Chris Claremont. That the same villains from Claremont’s first issue are reprised in John Byrne’s last is someh...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Claremont hints in this issue that she and Nightcrawler – both possessing blue skin and yellow eyes – might be related somehow. Unfortunately, just like the material about Nightcrawler’s origin in X-Men Annual #4, the Kurt-Mystique connection is something Claremont won’t explain, in...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) “Days of Future Past” “Days of Future Past” begins in the year 2013 with mutants – including the last few surviving X-Men – living in a concentration camp. The specific year was possibly chosen deliberately as the 50-year anniversary of the publication of X-Men #1.

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) A dramatic scene from Claremont and Bolton in Classic X-Men #1 featured Angel and Wolverine getting into a violent altercation over Jean Grey (both men nursed an unrequited love for her at different periods in the history of the franchise). It ends with Warren passionately denouncing Wo...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) The issue is an extended riff on Dante’s “Inferno,” right down to the baroque chapter notations: Part the Second, Part the Third, etc. (Claremont will notate his chapters of the 1988 “Inferno” crossover in the same fashion, but the only thing the latter “Inferno” shares with Dante is the t...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) Unfortunately, “Inferno” was so confusing as a story that the attempted fix of Cyclops got lost in the shuffle. Claremont’s work in the “Little Boy, Lost” two-parter is actually much stronger in terms of making Cyclops a great character again, but its publication in the low-selling Clas...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) John Byrne professes to have been a fan of the X-Men “from Day One.” That being the case, he was always keen – once he was assigned as artist on the “new” incarnation of the series – to eventually get all five of the original X-Men back into the comic. In the end, he managed to import all but Iceman (...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) But Peter’s unexpected uncomfortability with his family is brutally pre-empted when he learns that many of his friends – including his best friend, Sasha – were killed in Afghanistan. Soon after, Colossus is arrested on charges of being a traitor, and taken before Colonel Vazhin, the sa...

By Geoff Klock(noreply@blogger.com) The issue gave the 10-year-old me everything I could possibly have wanted from a superhero comic. Right from page 4, with Wolverine and Cyclops fighting Colossus, I was in Heaven. Wolverine even says, “I always wondered if my adamantium claws would cut your steel hide, Russkie.” I had wonde...

By Geoff Klock “Magneto Triumphant” is part one of a two-part story that is considered by a large number of X-Men fans to be the best straight-ahead “X-Men vs. Magneto” story. It is the last one Claremont will do – after this, Claremont begins the deepening of Magneto into a noble character, so the pure, “go...

By Geoff Klock The running gag here is that each dramatic turn keys off of Mesmero’s lack of imagination. He hypnotizes Jean Grey to have sex with her. When he can’t do that, he combines his hypnotic power with her telepathy to infiltrate the mansion and capture the rest of the X-Men. All he can think of to do th...

By Geoff Klock This issue, and the ones that follow it, are again best understood in Morrison’s schema of the X-Men being defined by certain “riffs.” It really does all go back to Lee-Kirby, who in their brief 17-issue collaboration on the X-Men gave us not only the basic premise (with Xavier, the school a...