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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: November 13, 2003 at 1:07 am by Eve Tushnet

2003-11-13T01:07:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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SOAP OPERA SUPERHEROES: Forager23 is talking about the X-Men, which has prompted me to do my planned post about Chris Claremont–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good: If you like the X-Men, you pretty much have to give this guy props. He made them popular, he created characters that still resonate (Rogue, Wolverine [yeah, I know, but the basic idea is pretty good], Storm, Nightcrawler–yes, I did get into this stuff through the X-movies, why do you ask?) and deepened older characters.

He also broke away from stasis. He had characters actually, you know, change and develop. He made us see that Professor X has a villain’s personality and a hero’s philosophy, while Magneto has the opposite–a dichotomy I find hugely fascinating.

He wrote lots of powerful storylines. The ones I know are “Dark Phoenix” (no duh, huh?), “Days of Future Past” (ditto–it really is good), and “Exit Cyclops” (which I liked because it made sense of both Cyke, my favorite superhero, and Xavier). Actions had consequences (most notably, if like me you have only read those Claremont X-Men comics that are collected in the Essential X-Men series, in “What Happened to Kitty Pryde?”). The whole thing felt less trapped in amber, more moving (in both senses–the characters moved, and the characters moved us), less a frieze and more a rambly, tangled epic.

The Bad: Oy gevalt, though, how much soap opera does the world really need? There’s a middle ground between stasis and over-seriousness/adolescent angstfests, and CC, obviously, never found that ground. (I think Morrison has done better, though there are still problems there.)

With character development comes the temptation to retcon, to write events out of the history. You all are probably sick of hearing how much I hate that. But if you want readers to trust you, to invest any degree of themselves in your work, you get no do-overs. Sing it right, or don’t sing it at all. Related: Can anyone read the issue with the Summers/Pryor wedding (“’til death do you part”) without cringing?

He lacked the utter wig-insanity of the ’60s. Something about that era, captured in Essential Uncanny X-Men vol. 1, feels totally reckless to me, like driving too fast, and I love it–it’s the same “look ma, no hands!” feeling I get from New X-Men, and if I can ever figure out how to explain it, I will. These comics don’t take themselves too seriously, but they don’t make you feel stupid for reading them, either. They’re neither cheap irony nor cheap melodrama–they’re just insane in the membrane. Anyway, Chris Claremont lacks that, and I wish he had it.

CC is not as insanely distinctive as the best superhero comics. I get the impression that he wasn’t entirely committed to the world he was building. I was ranting about this stuff to a non-comics-reading friend, and then, later in the conversation, read her the awesome scene from the first Alias book where Jessica Jones says she won’t go on a date with Ant-Man. My friend made the connection that I hadn’t: Alias–like NXM, like the ’60s X-Men–has that nutso commitment to its world. Within the world, everything fits and makes sense: Of course Jessica Jones wouldn’t want to date the Ant-Man! (“He’s not even the real Ant-Man?”) And nothing from outside that world enters in.

By contrast, with CC, you get tons of stuff that doesn’t seem to fit within the X-Men framework: Dracula (at least twice!). A dragon (oh please, kill me now, I thought every time the dratted thing appeared on panel). Aliens and magic–yeah, I know, NXM has some aliens too, and I can’t stand ’em, but they somehow seem more peripheral there. The problem with aliens and magic is that they don’t have to play by any rules. “What do you mean it doesn’t make sense? They’re aliens!” So you get stupid, stupid stuff like Grant Morrison’s alien who doesn’t understand the concept of memory. (It’s the thing that allows you to string together coherent sentences, idiot.)

I know it’s unfair to blame Claremont for that. But I can’t help it. He took the stuff seriously, made actions have consequences, but then left this junk in that only makes sense if you completely ignore all realism.

Oh, and like I said, I haven’t read pretty much anything between 1983-ish and NXM, but so far the affair with Emma is the only one of Cyclops’s relationships that has made any sense at all. He makes sense with NXM-Jean because she’s judgmental, and I get the impression Cyclops seeks out people who will grade him on performance, but of course ’60s Jean was just a generic Marvel skirt, and neither Lee Forrester nor Madeleine Pryor (again, in Essential UXM vols. 1-3) have anything remotely resembling a personality. Scott + Emma makes an enormous amount of sense (more on this when Morrison’s run is finished), and the chick actually gets to have a distinctive personality! Anyway, I guess that’s a nitpick, but he is my guy and this is my blog, so hey.

The Ugly: Speaking of the fearless leader, his ’70s costume totally makes him look like The Tick. That’s not Claremont’s fault, but it’s also not something I can separate out from my experience of the comics. Sorry…. In the early ’80s, out of costume he starts looking like Alex P. Keaton, which is also a big problem.

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