Powell - The Best There is at What He Does: Examining Chris Claremonts X-Men

In my 2002 book How to Read Superhero Comics and Why , I said a dumb thing: I said that Mark Millars The Authority , a book no one remembers or talks about,

is a perverse response to the many soap opera plots that have become the staples of superhero team books, the most prominent example being Chris Clairmonts run on The XMen . His work on that title is an important foil for The Authority, because Ellis and Millar overturn not only The XMens angst filled teenage morality (oh how can I even think of kissing him when he is with her?) but its impenetrable continuity as well. In shedding the superhero soap opera, The Authority writes whole new terms for the team superhero comic book. A single issue, even one in the middle of a plot arc, can be enjoyed by itself, picked up and put down. Clairmonts XMen , in contrast, can barely be followed by new readers unfamiliar with the vast network of unresolved tensions among a huge cast of characters spanning decades.

I used Chris Claremont as a straw man to make my point that The Authority was a key part of a new age of superhero comics (its not) and it achieved that status by defeating Claremont (it didnt). And I spelled Claremont wrong. (This is a mistake I continue to make: I spelled Michael Moorcock wrong in my new book, apparently thinking he was some kind of a porn star.)

I became an XMen reader late in life, like halfway through high school. I was introduced to them, and to comics in general, through the 1993 Sega video game and the cartoon. I got sick and my mom got me medicine from a drug store and bought me, as an impulse buy, because she recognized the logo from my game, my first ever comic book. That first comic book propelled me forward into some of my biggest obsessions. I fell in love with the XMen, reading only and all XMen titles for the next five years. And after that I got into Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon, Chris Bachalo, Ashley Wood, Paul Pope and so on. The comic that sent me on that journey, the one from the drug store, was Uncanny XMen #301. Jason Powell followed Chris Claremonts XMen for 17 years and his last issue of XMen ? Uncanny XMen #300, if you can believe it. This all happened 15 years before we met.

David Foster Wallace, at the start of his heartbreaking commencement address, tells a joke: Two young fish are swimming along and an old fish swims by and says Waters nice today! and he swims off and one young fish turns to the other young fish and says What the fuck is water? Claremont was the water and I was too young and dumb to know he was what I was swimming in, as Uncanny XMen #301 came out about 18 months after Claremont ended his run. So everything I was reading, my whole childhood, was the House that Claremont Built. But his name was not on anything I was reading.

His influence looms too large for many to see. A lot of folks dont know that Joss Whedon would not have created Buffy or Angel were it not for Claremonts XMen, that Angels Connor (Pete from Mad Men !), for example, draws a lot from Illyana Rasputin. The Legend of Korra, one of the best shows on television, is pure Claremont-era XMen: the teamwork, especially the coordination of powers; the strong female characters all over the place; the complex villains like Zahir, maybe my favorite bad guy, and one in a class with Nolans Joker, Shakespeares Iago and Cormac McCarthys Judge, and Claremonts Magneto his closest precursor. Youve got to know the history to see where it goes, and I didnt know it well enough.

In the age of prestige television and prestige comic books, Claremonts run can be daunting because there is just so damn much of it. With tightly focused shows like Game of Thrones , Deadwood , The Wire and Breaking Bad on the air, the charms of something like Arrow , or one of Jasons favorite shows, Smallville , go unnoticed. Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns and All Star Superman and Sex Criminals : You get in, you read something great, and you get out, maybe in one intense sitting. But Claremont wrote 186 issues of XMen . And they were not, and insanely are not, available in some kind of intuitive series of graphic novels, like Chris Claremont Invents the XMen volumes 1-16. I read mine on some crazy CD-ROM Marvel put out, where they were poorly scanned by some Marvel intern. The sheer amount of Claremonts XMen means reading all of Claremont is a very different reading experience than reading Battling Boy. Appreciating the long-form storytelling of Claremont is out of the box for most of us taught to appreciate literature in college, great masterworks usually in one volume. Samuel Johnson said of Milton, It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing than that the sun should always stand at noon but soap operas going on past the decade mark are filled with amazing material if you have the dedication to go deep into that water.

In December 2006, I did an issue-by-issue look at Grant Morrisons New XMen on the blog I had at the time. Morrisons run does great battle with the spirit of Claremont, who invented everything Morrison is trying to screw with. And I did not appreciate the depth of it. I thought Morrison was building adult castles out of childrens blocks, not realizing that these were ornate wooden childrens blocks hand-carved by a master who, oh yeah, by the way, invented the concept of childrens blocks. Jason Powell, who read my book and my blog and who stumped for Claremont like he was running for president there, decided I needed to be taught a lesson for misspelling the name of his hero, and for a weapon he chose not the gun or the psychic knife, but hundreds of blog entries, essentially taking over my blog and making it his, making it better.

Jason is smart and kind and dedicated and attentive to detail and the nicest person on the Internet; he lives in Wisconsin, where taxicabs are feared and hunted for the delicious meat under their hoods, and winter is the best seven months of the year. (As an example of Jason being attentive to detail and the nicest person on the Internet: I originally wrote best eight months of the year, and Jason, recognizing I was using a line from one of our favorite shows, NewsRadio , wrote back to say I really like that part where you said winter was the best seven months of the year and of course he is right that the line from the show is seven, not eight, months, but that was his comically gentle form of correction when anyone else would have started their response with the comic book nerds condescending Actually)