This year at C2E2 I had the honor of tabling next to one of the great minds of comics- Chris Claremont who wrote for Marvel, primarily for The Uncanny X-men as well as other titles like Excalibur, New Mutants, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Ms. Marvel, Spider-woman, and tons more. His work on the X-men from 1975-1991 took a faltering super-hero team, and revamped it into a complex web of stories and relationships between people who just happened to have super powers that at most times seemed to over-complicate their lives and occasionally save the day.
He created many of the stories that first got me into comics, mainly with the hand-me-down X-men books that my uncle would give me whenever we got down to Florida. In elementary school my friends and I traded and read each other’s comics. Without all the issues (or the internets), we didn’t always know what was going on in the X-verse, and I remember the experience of reading the comics as being distinctly non-linear. We got glimpses of over-arching story-lines that ran between issues but reading them out of order distorted timelines (and it only got more confusing when the characters themselves were jumping timelines- thanks, Bishop!) We knew shifts in time obviously by issue number but were guided through the chronology primarily by Storm’s haircuts (the mohawk was the best) and where there were holes in what we knew- we made up stories to connect missing issues or just to create our own wild adventures based on what we could see of the characters.
On the playground we played X-men, each assuming the identities of our favorite characters. I was usually the Beast, Longshot (it was the 80s and he rocked an awesome rat tail), or Captain Britain (though, also Daredevil when not in the X-Universe). My best friend who was always Nightcrawler tried forever to get his mom to make us costumes. In fact the X-men so fully consumed us that our after school teacher banned us from even talking about them, so we had to develop our own way of writing in code to pass messages to each other about the X-men, that I’m not entirely sure we really knew how to read.
While some may compare Claremont’s writing and baroque storylines to soap operas (which is shorthand for bad writing), his care to craft characters’ lives helped revitalize an industry at a time when its readership was growing older. As a kid reader I maybe didn’t know everything that was going on but beyond the sublime joy of mutants staving off mayhem (and Mojo) with magenta eye beams, adamantium claws, and sulphurous bamphfs, the X-men provided a cast of vastly differing personalities that I could identify with. They didn’t have to look like me, be the same gender as me, or even come from the same planet- but I could see through their fantastic experiences beyond their appearances.
In my comics classes, I emphasize how we think of round characters with more depth- and his Marvel characters are good examples of how a cliche like the superhero can become something more when we consider them as people beneath their facades of power. His characters have mental, emotional, and even spiritual lives that make them more real and creates conflicts in their stories that can’t be easily blasted to resolution. To do that you have to think through the characters as you write them as living breathing beings.
At the table, while signing old books when a woman cos-playing walked by he called out, “Nice Rogue.” She gave a half-hearted wave and walked on, not realizing that the guy who had created her character was giving her props for her costume-making. As the characters of mainstream comics find new lives in movies, video games, and cheap Target tees, they take on new lives that transcend their creators. Whereas 20 years ago, an X-men fan would know who Chris Claremont was, now an X-men fan might ask, “What’s a comic?”From all the conversations, I overheard between Claremont and fans, I got a sense that he resented not still being in control of the characters. Not entirely because he would be making a killing on licensing them in the multi-media-verse- but because he genuinely cared at how other writers (in the movies and comics) were screwing up the lives he had imagined for his creations.
Yet there were enough fans of comics to keep Chris’ line going strong the whole weekend. I heard time and again 30-40 yo men declaring, “You’re why I’m into comics” as he signed their stacks of books. Having written so many books when he got to one he hadn’t seen in a while he would look back over it, reading dialogue like he was visiting an old friend.
While I’d like to say we buddied up and chatted asides back and forth behind our respective tables, that never happened. I mean, he is a legend in comics, and he knows it. I was to him just another guy at a convention. When I first talked to him by the end of the first day, I didn’t want to be like the other fanboys, but I did confess when I had him sign some books, “You’re why I write comics.” Which is totally true.
Eventually I lost interest in mainstream, superhero comics as storylines got over-complicated and I didn’t have the budget to keep up with multi-title narratives. I still have a fondness for the X-men since they were the some of the first archetypal heroes of my childhood and when kids come up to my table screaming that they pretend to be Dragon and Goat on the playground, I figure I must be doing something right.
