Articles with the Tag Chris Claremont

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 47: Essential X-Men Vol. 07

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Essential X-Men Vol. 07
Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri, Jon Bogdanove and friends
Reprints: X-Men #214-228, #Annual 10-11, Fantastic Four v X-Men (February 1987 – April 1988)
Get this for: X-Men at their nadir — three stars

Let’s talk about why the X-Men went sour. Because it did turn sour, didn’t it, at some point in Claremont’s long, long run on Uncanny X-Men. At some point the long drawn out subplots no longer intrigued and mystified, but annoyed, the relentless grinding misery and inability of the X-Men to win their battles started to grind you down as well and the title just seemed to devolve into an endless series of inconclusive battles with ill defined villains. Different people reach this point sooner or later with Claremont, for me rereading some of the stories in this volume it was reached here.

I have to be honest however. Back when I first started following the X-Men, I got going with issue 220, the start of the whole Adversary Saga that was in itself turn of the socalled Fall of Mutants, the big 1988 Summer event in the mutant titles. At the time, dropping in with little real knowledge of the X-Men, I loved this story. Rereading it in context, it now serves as the climax of a long, painful two years of stories in which the X-Men only got more and more hurt. Especially the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series in retrospect is excruciating in its doom and gloom.

In that miniseries the X-Men call on Reed Richard’s scientific expertise to help save Shadowcat, stuck in phasing mode and slowly disappearing, but he’s uncharacteristic unsure of himself, the result of a longterm psychological trap set by Doctor Doom. Things get worse, the X-Men and Fantastic Four come to blows, Reed’s teammates desert him and Shadowcat’s fate seems sealed… But that psychological trap of Doom’s — a pre-FF journal supposedly written by Reed that shows he planned to turn himself and his friends into the Fantastic Four rather than it being an accident — just doesn’t work for me this time. It’s out of character for the Fantastic Four to believe this so suddenly, or for Reed not to realise it’s a fake straight away. Meanwhile the antagonism between them and the X-Men doesn’t ring true either. For one, Claremont had Johnny Storm use the word “muties”, which just doesn’t fit his character at all. He may be a hothead, but not a bigot.

In the main title, the X-Men are still recovering from the Mutant Massacre and their battles with the Marauders and still in disaster recovery mode. They’re still only reacting to threats, not gaining anything, though slowly trying to rebuild the team. Even then things go wrong, as when they recruit Havok, yet lose his girlfriend, Polaris, to the Marauders. It’s incredibly frustrating to read issue after issue of this sort of halfwins or outright defeats for the X-Men, especially since Claremont is a good enough writer to still make you care for them. That’s the worst part, those glimpses of how good Claremont can be when not obsessed with doom and gloom.

The art in this volume is a mixed bag, with a series of guest artists — Barry Windsor Smith, Alan Davis, Jackson Guice — before The Uncanny X-Men settles with Marc Silvestri, whose very very scratchy, semi-realistic style is quite different from John Romita Jr.’s art in the previous volume, but as good in its own right. So is Jon Bogdanove, on the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series, who has a more “cute” style. It makes for a less united look to this volume, but then these were never intended to be collected together in the first place…

So yeah, a frustrating, annoying final volume of Essential X-Men to be reviewed in this series. Yet Claremont still manages to hook me here, the bastard.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 41: Essential X-Men Vol. 06

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Essential X-Men Vol. 06
Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Arthur Adams and friends
Reprints: X-Men #199-213 and more (July 1970 – December 1972)
Get this for: X-Men fighting losing battles — four stars

And so we reach Late Period Claremont with Volume six of Essential X-Men, having of necessity skipped Vol. 5 — such is the danger of buying from a remainders shop. This is my least favourite period of Claremont’s X-Men even though this was also when I bought my first issues new off the rack, in Dutch translation, with #200 being my first one. Didn’t start to regularly buy the series until much later though; limited pocket money led me chose The Avengers and Spider-Man over The X-Men. At least they won their fights more often than not.

Because Late Period Claremont is a very depressing writer and the world he lets the X-Men operate in here is dark and bleak, where the villains have become much more dangerous and murderous, friends have all vanished and everything the X-Men do goes wrong. From the start of his run on X-Men Claremont had a tendency to make the X-Men’s battles ambiguous and them suffer, as well as a prediliction for long running and complicated subplots, with various threats kept simmering on the backburner for long stretches. In the current volume this has reached the point where it seems the X-Men are destined never to win another battle, or vanquish a foe. Meanwhile subplots over the course of the series have taken longer and longer to resolve and here they seemingly never do so…

So the volume starts with the inconclusive trail of Magneto in Paris in #199-200, for which the entire creative team actually got to fly to Paris for, as a reward for their succes with the X-Men. The trail is interrupted by a crossover with the New Mutants in Asgard, itself a followup to an earlier X-Men/Alpha Flight adventure. The trial ends inconclusive, professor Xavier has a health crisis and is taken into space by the Starjammers, while veteran X-Man Cyclops leaves next issue, after losing a leadership battle to the now powerless Storm. The next couple of issues has them tangling with the Beyonder, as Secret Wars II comes to visit. Two solo adventures of Nightcrawler and Wolverine, the latter being almost killed by some old enemies lead us into a confrontation with the socalled Freedom Force, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under a new name and sanctioned by the US government.

After that Rachel Summers, the daughter of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean “Phoenix” Grey from the “Days of Future Passed” alternate future, decides to take on the Hellfire Club on her own, to take her revenge on the psychic vampire and mass murdereress Selene, only to be almost killed herself by Wolverine as the only way to stop Rachel from becoming a murderer herself. This of course leads to a fullblown battle between the Hellfire Club and the rest of the X-Men, which in turn is interrupted by the attack of Nimrod, the ultimate Sentinel mutant hunter, which forces the two teams to work together to defeat him, barely. All of which is merely a prelude to the Mutant Massacre, the first proper mutant mega crossover, between the X-Men, New Mutants, Power Pack, Thor and X-Factor, the culmination of several years of subplots about the general public’s growing paranoia and hatred of mutants.

The crossover revolves around a new group of villains, the Marauders, largely new but with some old faces thrown in, who go on a killing spree against the Morlocks, mutant outcasts living in an old, abandoned fallout shelter underneath New York. Most of them have barely any powers and are easy prey for these killers, who strike without motive. Why the Marauders strike is never explained and the most the X-Men or any of the other heroes involved can do is damage control. The Mutant Massacre is everything The X-Men has been building towards for years: intense frustration.

Frustration, because Claremont keeps on twisting the knife. Throughout this volume the X-Men keep losing battles, keep getting wounded and nearly killed, keep failing to protect themselves and others from increasingly murderous villains. The Mutant Massacre is just the icing on the cake. Claremont is good at piling up the pressure month to month, but reading this in one sitting the frustration just gets too much. It’s the Joker problem as much as anything: if the Joker is killing people indiscriminately every time he breaks out of Arkham Asylum, Batman looks like a smuck rather than a hero if he doesn’t kill him in battle but delivers him back to Arkham to escape again. With the X-Men, you have them facing menaces able and willing to kill every mutie in the country, yet they’re still playing by superhero rules, not wanting to kill a mass murderer like Selene. What’s even worse about that issue is that Wolverine himself way back in #116 had been shown (offpanel) to kill a guard in the way when the X-Men were trying to sneak into a villain’s headquarters.

What also frustrated me was the theme of mutant paranoia. It was always present in the series of course, but here it completely dominates The X-Men. At times it seems every human, including superheroes like The Avengers or the Fantastic Four hates and fears the X-Men, no matter what they do. It feels manipulative at times.

Which brings me to that other mutant series, X-Factor, which has some of its issues collected here in the Mutant Massacre crossover. The creation of X-Factor, done largely without Claremont’s input, was a mistake, not in the least because it led to the cancellation of one of my favourite series, Defenders. The idea behind the series was ridiculous — the original X-Men regrouping and posing as the mutant hunters X-Factor, to find and train dangerous new mutants — and the fallout of it poisoned the X-Men for years, with the worst consequence being the whole “return of Jean Grey/Scott Summers leaving his bride Madelyne Pryor plus newborn baby” business.

All of which amounts to a lot of silent screaming at the comic, as my frustration gets the better of me. To be honest, this frustation is not all bad: Claremont must be doing something right to get thousands of fans buying the series month in month out despite it or perhaps because of it. He certainly kept me reading. It helps a lot to have John Romita Jr. doing the art: his dark, scratchy style fits the series well.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 37: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

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Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Michael Fleisher, Chris Claremont and friends
Reprints: Man-Thing #15-22, Giant-Size #3-5, Man-Thing v2 #1-11 (March 1975 – July 1981)
Get this for: The second part of Gerber’s run — four stars

The Marvel Essentials series is meant to sell you characters, rather than creators — buy a volume and you get a big slab of Spider-Man’s adventures, or the Fantastic Four’s — but with some series this approach just doesn’t work. Man-Thing is one such series. Only one writer ever got a handle on the muck monster and nobody before or after him really knew what to do with him. That writer was Steve Gerber of course, whose work dominated the first volume of Essential Man-Thing. The second volume collects the remainder of his run on the first Man-Thing, but also the complete second, 1979 series, written by Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont. It’s clear neither of them got the Man-Thing as Gerber got him.

Man-Thing is after all a difficult character to write. He’s completely passive, with no motives of his own, solely responding to the emotions of the people around him. You can’t have the usual Marvel soap opera with Man-Thing, it’s difficult to get him to fight recurring villains and really the best thing you can do with him is to use him in morality tales. Which both Gerber and his successors did, with the difference that Gerber had his finger on the pulse of the seventies and the talent to make use of it. He was also able to see the absurdity in his stories, which helps a lot when reading much dated relevant stories. But he also moved people with his stories, especially “the Kid’s Night Out” from Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, as witnessed in this remembrance by Fred Hembeck. In it Man-Thing is the avenger of a fat kid who died of exhaustion during gym class, while the people that tormented him mouth platitudes at his funeral, lashing out in anger when his one friend challenges their lies. It’s dated yes and I’ve read hundreds of such stories, but I can see the power it must have had on people like Hembeck back then

For an example of how not to do a Man-Thing story, we need look no further than Giant-Size Man-Thing #5 and a Len Wein story. Wein, who created Manny’s counterpart at DC, Swamp Thing, should’ve been able to handle him, but his story of two young lovers running away into the swamp to get away from their feuding parents is a) cliche and b) very very dull, a sort of third rate EC Comics shock story. That’s the mistake in many of the non-Gerber stories, taken it all too seriously and going for shock rather than creativity, upping the death count along the way. It doesn’t make them any better.

On the art side, most of it is by dependable Marvel veterans like Jim Mooney, Ed Hannigan and Don Perlin. None of them are bad and some like Hannigan do their best work here, but it’s not as good as the art in the previous volume, which of course boasted Mike Ploog, who is hard to improve on. It’s the standard seventies Marvel house style on display here, when Manny really needs something special.

Not a bad volume and Chris Claremont at least tries to do what Gerber does seemingly effortlessly, but in the end it shows that some characters can only be handled by one specific writer.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 36: Essential X-Men Vol. 04

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Essential X-Men Vol. 4
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #162-179, Annual #7, Marvel Graphic Novel #5 (October 1982 – March 1984)
Get this for: full blown mutant paranoia with the X-Men — four stars

The fourth volume of Essential X-Men starts with the tail end of Dave Cockrum’s second run on the title, and the Brood Saga. At the end of the previous volume the X-Men had been kidnapped into space, this volume opens with Wolverine discovering where they were: on the home planet of the Brood, Marvel’s very own Alien knockoff. On the run from them, lost and alone in a very hostile alien jungle Wolvie discovers things are even worse than he thought, as it turns out he and the other X-Men have been impregnated by the Brood Queen and are carrying an alien embryo. They’ll die giving birth to new queens but not before they might be able to hurt the Brood. It’s another X-Men space epic, but a much more depressive one than the previous ones.

It sets the tone for the rest of this volume, as the X-Men’s world gets progressively darker. After the Brood Saga and its aftermath, the next story is from Marvel Graphic Novel #5, “X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills”, which after “Days of Future Past” is the first story explicitely about mutant hatred. It’s not a good story, with the subtely of a sledgehammer and very eighties with its televangelist villain, but it’s a prelude of what’s to come. Though this had supposedly always been the theme of The X-Men, for the most part the classic X-Men had been a regular superhero title and mutant hatred even with Claremont at the helm it took to “Days of Future Past” in #141-142 that it became explicit. But while that story showed the nightmare future the X-Men fought again, it still wasn’t a big part of the series afterwards. With the graphic novel Claremont put mutant phobia in the spotlights again and in the regular title as well it became more prominent, as the X-Men became more and more mistrusted by the world they had saved so often

For example, even in the lighthearted story from Annual 7 this mistrust is shown. The Impossible Man, an old Fantastic Four villain, is on a scavenger hunt taking trophies from all his favourite superheros: the X-Men’s mansion, Nick Fury’s eye patch and the Wasp’s entire collection of costumes, with the X-Men chasing after him. When Rogue and Colossus follow him to the Avengers’ Mansion, they’re attacked by She-Hulk and Iron Man who mistake them for the thieves. It’s one small example of the mistrust between our favourite muties and the rest of the superhero community.

Another big change for the X-Men is that they’re no longer the only mutant team: while they were kidnapped by the Brood, Charles Xavier had assembled a team of New Mutants. It showed how popular the X-Men had become that there was now a second mutant title. It’s not immediately notable in the X-Men’s own title, except for the inevitable confrontation when they return from outer space.

Apart from the ongoing mutant paranoia, Claremont also heaps more personal troubles on his heroes. The X-Men and especially Storm start to change again during the Brood Saga, as they have to fight for their lives and kill as well. On Earth too they have to become harder, lose some of their idealism to survive. With Storm, always portrayed as an innocent abroad, this change hits hardest: in issue 170 she actually strikes to kill an opponent, Callisto of the Morlocks who had kidnapped the Angel to be her consort. She fights a knife duel with Callisto, the latter seems to have her on the ropes, but Storm manages to tangle Callisto’s arm in her cape and stabs her full in the heart. This moment is shown in a great six panel sequence by Paul Smith, the upper left panel showing Storm and Callisto as Storm prepares to strike, then a close up from behind Storm’s shoulder showing the expression on Callisto’s face as she’s stabbed in the chest. The third panel then shows them standing, Callisto starting to collapse. The bottom three panels has Storm walking to the camera, past Callisto falling down and with the Morlock crowd in the background. A great sequence and a example of Paul Smith’s talent.

Storm’s change into somebody much more harder, less naive (as symbolised by her new, street tough costume in #173) is not the only angst the X-Men go through. Wolverine sees his marriage to Lady Mariko Yashida fall through at the last moment, Mariko being manipulated by Mastermind, who’s back for vengeance. Even after this is cleared up Wolvie doesn’t get to marry his great love, as Mariko’s family is entangled with the Yakuza again and she feels her duty compels her to clean this up first. But all this is just collatoral damage in Mastermind’s real plot: to convince the X-Men Dark Phoenix is back and get them to kill an innocent woman.

Because on the last page of #168 Madeleine Pryor is introduced to Scott Summers and she is a dead ringer (no pun intended) for Jean Grey, his one true love who had killed herself rather than give in to the temptation to become Dark Phoenix again. Scott falls hard for Madeleine, with the next issue finding them slow dancing together, even though he had spent most of #168 being intimate with his previous girlfriend, Lee Forrester. Madeleine and Scott seem made for each other, but he cannot help but wonder… He finally asks the question he dreads, whether she is Phoenix and is answered by an energy blast. Issue 175 finds the X-Men fighting for their lives against a reborn Phoenix, or so things seem, but Scott finally figures things out and then has to fight for his life against the rest of the X-Men who are now convinced he‘s Phoenix… It all works out in the end, with a wedding for Maddy and Scott, but it was a long hard slog.

The third angst generator is the coming of Rogue, their old adversary from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who was the one who robbed Carol Danvers from her powers, memories and almost her life. She joins the X-Men out of desperation, with her powers out of control and confused about who she is thanks to Carol’s personality being entangled with her own. Xavier lets her joint against the wishes of most X-Men, who slowly have to learn to live with her. It’s a good example of Claremont’s great skill at soap opera and how he can manipulate his readers. It makes perfect sense for the X-Men to take in Rogue, with their mission of rehabilitation, but I’m sure many readers would’ve been as outraged as Carol at the unfariness of it all when she learned of it…

A quick word about the art to finish this off. As said, this volume starts with Dave Cockrum doing his usual excellent job, who is replaced by Paul Smith, then a complete unknown but who is just as good as Cockrum from the start. He has a smooth, semi-realistic style that’s sort of reminds me of Alan Davis, but not quite and he’s great at depicting subtle emotions with just a few lines. Smith in turn is replaced by John Romita Jr., who continues in his style but puts a slightly scratchier edge on it. All three artists work well with Claremont, who adapts himself in turn to each of them. A great volume again.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 31: X-Men Vol. 3

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Essential X-Men Vol. 3
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #145-161, Annual #3-5 (May 1981 – September 1982)
Get this for: more cosmic adventures with the X-Men — four stars

What a difference an artist makes. Was the previous volume of Essential X-Men all about John Byrne, in this volume Dave Cockrum is back and the X-Men change with him. Chris Claremont may have been the driving force behind The Uncanny X-Men for seventeen years, but he always adapts to his artists. With Byrne the stories were much more “realistic”, if that’s the right word to use about a series featuring mutant superheroes battling villains for the fate of the Earth or the Universe. As Cockrum comes aboard, the stories become more swashbuckling, less restrained and also somewhat less grim. Though to be honest, the X-Men still have difficulty winning their fights.

Claremont eases up a bit on the interconnectness of the stories in this volume, though various subplots do keep popping up from time to time. The most persistent of this is of course the whole issue of mutant prejudice, the reason why the X-Men existed in the first place. It’s far less in the foreground than under Byrne however. Apart from the X-Men’s climatic fight with Magneto leading up to issue 150, prejudice against mutants is kept in the background. With Cockrum back, the X-men fight menaces such as Doctor Doom and Arcade (#145-147), the mutant Caliban (148), Magneto (149-150), the Hellfire Club (151-152), Rogue (158), Dracula (159) and Belasco (160), the last two stories featuring artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz and Brent Anderson respectively. And of course, if Cockrum is back, the Shi’ar and the Starjammers can’t be far behind and indeed they feature in issues 154 to 157, with consequences lasting much longer.

Now the usual cliche about the X-Men under Claremont has always been about “heroes fighting to save a world that loathes and hates them for being mutants”, about fighting to prevent the future glimpsed in “Days of Future Past”. It all fits nicely with the original reason for the X-Men, of showing normal humans that mutants could be trusted and you wouldn’t think intergalactic space opera fits in with this and yet here we are again. There’s a plot against Lilandra, empress of the galaxy spanning Shi’ar empire and of course professor Xavier’s lover and Corsair of the Starjammers (Cyclops’ dad) comes to Earth looking for help, followed by a nasty new enemy: the Brood. They’re helped by an old Ms Marvel villain, Deathbird, also revealed to be of Sh’iar royal blood. It takes the X-Men three issues to defeat Deathbird and her co-conspirators, though they will be back in the last issue collected here, which is the leadin to the Brood Saga proper.

It’s not just space opera that the X-Men can be adapted to, as the two issues with Dracula and Belasco show, again feature enemies with no connection whatsoever with the supposed theme of Uncanny X-Men. The latter story however does showcase several of Claremont’s traits, to with his use of foreshadowing and his inability to let the X-Men properly win their fights. In the story Belasco kidnaps Illyana, Colossus kid sister, from the strange island in the Bermuda Triangle the X-Men now had made their headquarters. The X-Men go to her rescue and end up in Limbo, where they come across gruesome reminders of what might be their future: a Wolverine skeleton, a corrupt Nightcrawler in service to Belasco, an older Collossus who died impaled in Belasco’s palace. They manage to fight and win back Illyana, but when Kitty Pryude pulls her out, she lets go for a second and when she reaches her again, she has aged seven years — to find out what happened, you had to have read the Magik miniseries that Claremont would write later.

The X-Men then win the fight against Belasco, but he still has the last laught. Equally undecisive are their battles with Doom and Arcade as well as the Hellfire Club. They may be defeated, but are left alone to make more trouble later on. This is much more so the case than with any other superhero title, each of which has to strike a fine balance between giving villains their just desserts and leaving enough of them around to provide future menace. In the X-Men’s case it at times seems as if they’re never allowed to win their battles outright, always end up having to pay the price. It’s one of the things about Uncanny X-Men that would become incredibly frustrating to me over time, though here it has not reached that point yet…

Essential X-Men Vol. 3 ends with three annuals, slightly different stories with different artists, the first one featuring George Perez even. Each stands alone and offers some welcome change of pace for the X-Men. They round off the volume nicely.