Articles with the Tag Chris Claremont

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 25: Essential X-Men Vol. 2

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 2


Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 2
Chris Claremont, John Byrne and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #120-144 (April 1979 – April 1981)
Get this for: Byrne and Claremont at their peak together — five stars

Essential X-Men Vol. 2 contains the first X-Men comics I had ever read, which was also one of the very few superhero stories that ever gave me nightsmares: X-Men #141-142, “The Days of Future Past”. It’s the story in which the X-Men found the nemesis they would be fighting for the next two decades, the inevitable future that would await them if they slipped up, that for all their victories they might not be able to prevent happening. It’s a great story, perhaps the best Byrne and Claremont ever did together and it captured the essence of the X-Men.

And here it comes at the end of a great run of stories. While the first volume saw Claremont still finding his feet, here both he and John Byrne are fully in control and confident of their craft. The volume starts with the last leg of the X-Men’s world tour that had begun in the previous collection, as the X-Men run into Alpha Flight attempting to take back Wolverine into the Canadian secret service. This followed by their first match against Arcade, the murderer for hire who likes to kill his victims by funfair. Barely recovered from these fights, they discover Jean Grey, whom they had thought had died in the climatic fight against Magneto a dozen issues or so again, was still alive and kicking at Muir Island, but menaced by a new menace: Mutant X. Defeating him turns out to be the heaviest fight and costliest victory they have known yet, but that’s just the start.

Now things kick into high gear, as professor X is back, two new mutants, Kitty Pryde and the Dazzler are found and turn out to be bait in a trap a new group of villains, the Hellfire Club, has set. Meanwhile this same club turns also be behind a long running subplot in which Jean “Phoenix” Grey has had multiple flashbacks to the live of one of her ancestors, which turns out to be the result of manipulation by Mastermind, in order to recruit her for the Club. The X-Men manage to defeat the Hellfire Club in their first encounter, go on offensive but this turns into tragedy as Jean Grey is indeed turned to the dark side, so to speak. Their second clash with the Hellfire Club sets in motion two new menaces, one longterm as senator Robert Kelly is confirmed in his suspicions about the X-Menb and mutants in general, the second an immediate threat as Mastermind’s manipulations awaken Jean Grey’s cosmic powers and she turns into the evil Dark Phoenix.

The Dark Phoenix Saga is the end point of more than two years of stories and subplots coming together, as Jean’s powers ultimately consume her in one of the most moving issues in the entire X-Men run. Reading these stories in one sitting, all the way from the still fairly mundane fight with Alpha Flight in #120 to the end of Phoenix in #137, you can see how Claremont and Byrne slowly but relentlessly speed up the action and danger until at the end the X-Men have no breathing space whatsoever going from one menace to another. Whereas other heroes, other teams might get some time to savour their victories, the X-Men never get to catch their breaths until it is too late. Even after the climax of the Dark Phoenix saga, there’s only one issue of recaps and half an issue of Kitty’s introduction to the X-Men before the race starts again. First it’s Wolverine and Nightcrawler up in Canada helping out Alpha Flight with Wendigo, then as said, it’s “Days of Future Past”.

Now from the start the X-Men had had as their hook, the thing that made them unique, that they were mutants, heroes different from normal people not through some unlucky accident, study of magic or high tech battlesuits, but because of what they were born with. For a long part this aspect, that they were supposed to be the team that made mutants acceptable to a world that might otherwise hate and fear them, was only paid lipservice to, the occasional Sentinel appearance not withstanding. Under Claremont this aspect had become more prominent, but it was only with “Days of Future Past”, which showed a nightmare future in which the X-Men had not succeeded in their mission and the Sentinels had wiped out most mutants and taken over the world, that this became the cornerstone of the series. With the original X-Men, all that suspicion and fear people felt was just a typical Lee shtick to handicap his heroes: here it became something real and tragic. You could call it a metaphor for racial or sexual prejudice, or more cynically, a metaphor for adolescence, but this is a metaphor made concrete: in the end it is a story about how we might react to the discovery of a mutant race of superpowered beings living amongst us…

That delayed future would become everything the X-Men fought against, though it was still some time away before it would really dominate the series — we must also remember that basically this future denies the very reason of the X-Men’s existence. As long as it is still a possible outcome, it means that all their victories are hollow…

Back to the current volume, the “Days of Future Past” is followed by a perfect one issue story, as Kitty Pryde takes on a demon that does looks nothing like the Alien from the Sigourney Weaver movies at all, uh huh. It’s a textbook example of an “outmatched hero uses the environment and her brains to defeat her almost invincible foe” story. This is followed by another one issue story, a solo Cyclops story following his adventures after he left the X-Men what with Jean’s dead and all, which ends the volume.

That last story is the only one not to feature Byrne on the art. It’s not always easy to appreciate him, what with the great volume of mediocre work he has done since X-Men, but he starts great and keeps getting better each issue. You understand why he set the style for at least one generation of superhero artists. He takes the best aspect of the Marvel Housestyle of the seventies, that clear, easy to follow style of layout and drawing that means you can immediately understand what’s happening on any page and puts it together with his own flair for composition and figure drawing. His work is always in the service of the story but he always makes it look good as well. He has that knack that so few artists have, of not only making you see the world in his art, but seeing the world through his art. Reading a huge chunk of his work in one go like this means I will see Byrne poses everywhere for the next few days.

A small sacrifice.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 22: Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 01

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1


Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1
Chris Claremont, Jo Duffy, Trevor Von Eeden, Kerry Gammill and friends
Reprints: Power Man and Iron Fist #50-75 (April 1978 – November 1981)
Get this for: a series that should not work, but does — four stars

Right. Back in 1972 Marvel launched a series called Hero for Hire, starring Luke Cage, Marvel’s third Black superhero after Black Panther and the Falcon and the first African-American superhero to get his own title. Depending on your outlook this was either a noble experiment to broaden diversity in comics or a cynical attempt to cashin on the blacksploitation craze of the early seventies. In any case it never was a great series — white writers trying to write a “gritty” Black hero within the confines of the Comics Code– but popular enough to be kept going for a few years. Now there was also another seventies Marvel title born out of a craze, the Kung Fu craze in this case: Iron Fist, starring white boy Danny Rand who had learned the secret of the iron fist from the mystical city K’un-Lun. And when both titles got into problems in 1977, some bright spark got the idea to combine them. Iron Fist was cancelled, he and his creative team joined Power Man and with issue fifty it became Power Man and Iron Fist.

Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1 starts with that issue by Chris Claremont and John Byrne: the first would stay on for a few more issues, the latter left after this one. After Claremont left as well Ed Hannigan took over writing duties for two issues, but with #56 Power Man and Iron Fist had the writer who would guide the title the longest: Mary Jo Duffy. She would make the series work, establishing the formula that would guide the later writers on the title while building on the work Claremont and Hannigan had already done. They had created the bare bones, Duffy would flesh it out.

Because really, this is not a title that should work. Power Man and Iron Fist had nothing in common until they were shoved together. The gritty inner city Luke Cage, born and bred in Harlem, never quite comfortable leaving his neigbourhood and the white multimillionaire boy who grew up in an extradimensional city and learned to fight there, somewhat naive about the Big City. It was pure commercial motives that mashed them together, but it worked. They might have been an odd couple but they complemented each other and also had the advantage of a strong supporting cast, including fellow heroes Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, Bob Diamond of another old kung fu series sons of the Tiger and others. The series also benefited from a strong sense of place: it’s recognisably New York and Harlem, but not the New York of e.g. Spider-Man or Daredevil. It does make use though of non-series specific supporting cast like D. A. Towers, somebody who could pop up in any late seventies/early eighties Marvel superhero title set in New York and often did. I miss this sort of thing.

Mary Jo Duffy (just plain Jo Duffy later on) is a writer who’s been somewhat overlooked. She has never quite has had the break to become as well known as say Kurt Busiek (to name another PM/IF alumnus), never quite had a hit series that was uniquely hers. Power Man and Iron Fist came closest. She does very well establishing a good mixture of soap opera and superheroic action that was the hallmark of late Bronze Age Marvel and there wasn’t any issue in this collection that was a chore to read. She has a good blend of supervillains and more mundane threats, sometimes overclassing our heroes completely, as with the Living Monolith in #56-57. No real classic villains, but no duds either.

The art throughout the volume is good. It starts on a high point with that one Byrne issue, moves through Mike Zeck, Sal Buscema and Lee Elias before settling in for a more extended run by Trevor von Eeden (who still has some Byrne influences visible here), which is followed by a fill-in issue by Marie Severin until finally Kerry Gammill sets in for the long haul. Gammill is an artist who like Duffy never quite made it into the big time, never an “exciting” artist, but certainly a good artist here. His realistic, no nonsense style, ably inked by Ricardo Villamonte, suits the series well. It’s completely in service to the story, never flashy but always good, decent work.

Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1 is typical of the Marvel I grew up with: well crafted superheroics embedded in soap opera, set as much as possible in the world outside our window, no matter the amount of weird stuff going on in the foreground. It’s the sort of storytelling that’s hugely old fashioned now and no longer practised at Marvel. A pity.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 18: Ms Marvel Vol. 01

books and books review, Comix
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Essential Ms Marvel 01
Gerry Conway, Chris Claremont, Jim Mooney and friends
Reprints: Ms. Marvel 1-23 and more (January 1977 – April 1979)
Get this for: seventies feminist superheroics — Four stars

Now for a complete change of pace, from the heart of the Silver Age taking a giant leap forward into the Bronze Age, long after the people who had laid the foundations of the Marvel Universe had left (and had come back and left again) and some of the creativity and magic had gone out of it. The mid to late seventies were a rough patch for both Marvel and DC, as the old newsstand distribution networks were in upheaval, inflation and economic depression made comics expensive and there was little room to experiment with new titles. So what you get is attempts to play it safe, through either cashing in on some trend or by creating a spinoff — Ms. Marvel is a combination of both: a spinoff of Captain Marvel and an attempt to cash in on the resurgence of second wave feminism, as seen through a comics prism. Despite this the title would last barely two years, being canceled with #23 and with the last two issues, already prepared only seeing print two decades later, in the early nineties Marvel Super-Heroes Magazine.

I don’t know why M.s Marvel failed the first time around: perhaps it could never find an audience out on the newsstands, or people didn’t buy it because it featured a girl (Marvel never having had much luck with female headliners) or just because not enough newsstands stocked it. But one thing I know, quality couldn’t have been the issue. True, it took a couple of issues for Ms. Marvel to find its feet, but once Chris Claremont comes onboard with issue 3 it settled into a nice rhythm. I’ve certainly read much worse titles from that time which were much more succesful.

Ms. Marvel is Carol Danvers, an old supporting character from the sixties Marvel Captain Marvel series, reintroduced in Ms. Marvel as the eponymous superheroine, in the first three issues suffering from amnesia and not knowing she’s Carol. Carol meanwhile gets a job as the editor of Now Magazine, Jolly Jonah Jameson’s woman’s magazine. He wants the traditional subjects: cooking, fashion, gossip, she wants it to make a hardhitting, proper news magazine: soap opera gold, though as per usual with superhero jobs it plays second fiddle to Carol’s other career and its complications.

The whole amnesia/two people angle doesn’t really work and is quickly abandoned once Claremont takes over the writing. He does keep the conflict between Carol and Ms. Marvel however, each with a distinctive personality and not always liking the other that much. Personally I never like this sort of forced conflict or handicap so I’m glad to see this slowly disappearing over time here.

On the supervillain side of things, Conway introduces A.I.M. as a recurring foil and Claremont keeps them around, as well as adding MODOK to the mix. Other established villains, including the Scorpion, obscure X-Men foe Grotesk as well as a couple of badniks from the old Living Mummy series from Supernatural Thrillers also appear. Claremont had a knack for getting tough, physical threats for Ms. Marvel to actually beat with her fists like any other strong male hero would do, rather than the usual non-physical threats reserved for superheroines. There are few original creations here, with Deathbird introduced in #9 and Mystique from #16 the most significant, Claremont using both of them in Uncanny X-Men later on. For the most part however Ms. Marvel is mutant free.

But Claremont was leading Ms. Marvel into that territory though, through the long running subplot of some unknown enemy (which turned out to be Mystique) targeting both Carol Danvers and Ms. Marvel. However Ms. Marvel before that subplot reached fruition and it took Avengers Annual #10 two years later to tie up these loose ends. That one starts with Carol being thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge, rescued by Spider-Woman (who Claremont was also writing) and brought to Prof Xavier to be examined mentally. Meanwhile the Brotherhood of Evil, led by Mystique attack the Avengers and its newest member Rogue turns out to have stolen Carol’s powers.

Apart from housecleaning however and revealing the final fate of Ms. Marvel Claremont had an ulterior motive for writing this annual. Between the end of her own series and the annual Ms. Marvel had been a member of the Avengers and in a particularly bad storyline had been raped and impregnated (all off panel), gone through the full pregnancy and given birth in a day to a boy who turned out to be her rapist, using her to be able to live on Earth, but when this fails he takes her with her to Limbo, where they live happily ever after, or so the Avengers think, never having spent a minute to think things through. Claremont had done this, had gotten offended and used the final part of the story to spell it all out. It’s one of the best “fuck you” moments in comics I’ve read.

Claremont would return to Ms. Marvel even later, in the early nineties in the anthology title Marvel Super-Heroes, which reprinted both the final finished but never published issue, as well as a followup bridging the gap between her series and Avengers Annual #10. Here they’re presented in chronological order, before the annual.

The final verdict is that this was a perfectly enjoyable series, nothing much out of the ordinary, but never bad either. The art, first by John Buscema, followed by Jim Mooney, Keith Pollard, Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino, Dave Cockrum and finally Mike Vosburg is decent to good, but with so many artists in such a relatively short period it’s hard to create a real style for Ms. Marvel. Essential Ms. Marvel vol 1 is a nice view of what a lesser title of the seventies looked like.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 15: Essential X-Men Vol. 1

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 1


Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 1
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and friends
Reprints: Giant-Size X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #94-119 (July 1975 – March 1979)
Get this for: the start of the X-Men revolution — four stars

Hard to imagine now, but once upon a time The X-Men were a failure, never having been more than a cult hit throughout the Silver Age, even becoming a reprint series with #67. It limped along for a couple of years, up until issue 93, while the team showed up here and there as guest stars in other titles, some members becoming Champions, well The Beast had his own solo series in Amazing Adventures before joining the cast of The Avengers. It all seemed over for the X-Men, but like good superheroes they came back in the nick of time and it all started with Giant-Size X-Men #1, the first issue reprinted here.

Giant-Size X-Men was followed by a renewed X-Men series, started with #94. While these first two issues were written by Len Wein, by #95 Chris Claremont had come aboard and he would remain the X-Men’s writer for some seventeen years. It takes him a while to find his voice and the first few issues are on the rough side, but it really doesn’t take long for the mutant juggernaut to start rolling. Claremont’s writing on X-Men revolutionised superhero comics and it’s here that it started: by the end of the volume the classic Claremont is established.

Some elements of it pop up even earlier. Both the most loved and hated characteristic of Claremont’s style is having long, drawn out plots and subplots, stacked on top of each other, with one menace fading into the background earning the heroes only a little respite before the next one, long foreshadowed, has to be fought. Here Claremont starts doing this as early as #96-97, the first of which foreshadows the return of the Sentinels, with #97 introducing the menace of Eric the Red, while Prof Xavier was plagued with strange dreams of a Galaxy far, far away. The first threat takes until #100 to be resolved and of course leads to the metamorphosis of Marvel Girl into Phoenix, which comes in handy for defeating the second villain, who turns out just to be a pawn of a mad emperor of the alien Sh’iar Empire, who in turn threatens to unleash the end of everything. It all gets fixed by #108.

Said issue incidently features something I wish was still used in modern Marvel stories, the half page or full page looking in at the rest of the Marvel Universe while the heroes of the comic you’re reading are struggling to defeat the menace du jour. In this case you have Peter Corbeau onboard the Sunwatch space station briefing Mr Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, Beast and Captain America of the Avengers as well as then president Jimmy Carter via teleconference, explaining that yes, the strange blip felt at the end of the last issue was indeed the entire universe ceasing to exist for half a second and that if it happens again, the universe may not come back… This kind of scene always helped emphasise the seriousness of a threat, that it was not just the X-Men’s fate that mattered, but everybody’s. But it also helps build up a sense of interconnectness, that these adventures are not taking place in a vacuum.

From the start the X-Men are kept busy here; there are no quiet issues. After establishing the new team and sending them on their first mission in Giant-Size X-Men, they immediately have to defeat Count Nefaria’s threat of nuclear annihilation in the next two issues, deal with the death of a teammate, fight the sentinels over multiple issues, see Professor Xavier deal with futuristic nightmares, deal with old enemies gunning for them, first Black Tom and the Juggernaut waiting for them in Ireland, only defeated with the help of leprechauns (not their finest houre), then Magneto returns, but their fight with him is cut short as they’re swept up in the intergalactic adventure mentioned above. Once finished with that, Wolverine has to deal with the Canadian government wanting him back, before yet another old enemy turns up and makes the X-Men into funfair performers. The Magneto turns up again, kidnaps them to his secret base near the Savage Land, which blows up and leaves two sets of X-Men, as the Beast and Phoenix manage to return home, while the rest helps Ka-Zar fight a would be conqueror in the Savage Land, before being picked up by a Japanese vessel who drops them off in Japan just in time to fight Moses Magnum, which ends the volume. It’s all fastpaced and incredibly busy, but Claremont always remains in control and keeps things understandable.

He’s helped in this by the art, which from Giant-Size X-Men #1 up to X-Men #107 is in the hands of Dave Cockrum, with the rest of the issues drawn by John Byrne. Quite different artists of course, with Cockrum having a much looser, cartoony and swashbuckling style, lending itself well to widescreen space opera, while Byrne is more realistic in his art. Byrne is also one of those artist who, like Jack Kirby have the effect on me that if I read a large run of their stories in one go, I start to see the world through their art. So now suddenly everybody on tv is standing around in those typical widelegged, slighty skewed Byrne poses… Both Cockrum and Byrne are wonderful artists here, well suited to Claremont, who adapts his stories to their strengths. Of the two I prefer Byrne, just because he does things for me Cockrum can’t.

Sadly, some of Claremonts more annoying tics are also in evidence here, especially in the characterisation. There’s a lot of ill established antagonism between characters, which especially in the earlier issues was wearisome. There are also the first glimmers of another bad Claremont habit, the subtle and not so subtle references to the past lives of some of the X-Men, especially Wolverine. Some idiot plotting as well, where Claremont goes for the “make life more complicated for the characters through bad communication and drawing out of misunderstandings”. It’s bearable here, but I do remember at the end of his X-Men run, when it just became too annoying.

One other complaint I had was the misuse of Jean “Phoenix” Grey. Supposedly the most powerful person on the team, story after story has her being taken out easy or struggle to defeat villains she should have been able to take with one arm tied behind her back. The same goes for Storm, though to a lesser extent. Also very powerful, she again is kept out of action more than she should have been. If you have strong female heroes, use them, don’t find contrived ways to keep them out of action to keep the story going for longer…