The Four Color Media Monitor

Chris Claremont recently filmed a documentary about his past work on the X-Men books, and in this interview on Player One, even as he offered a few good points what's gone wrong with comicdom, he also made at least one comment proving why he's long past his prime:

“The thing about the X-Men is that it had a resonance to Jews, Muslims, to gays, to every outcast marginalized in aspects of society and personality in the modern pantheon. That’s who they are and they can’t change it. One of the primal mistakes that got made 15 years ago was the X-Men being totally outed for the convenience of a storyline. They weren’t clandestine any more, they were public. But by becoming public and entering into the mainstream, they have lost, over the last 15 years, their uniqueness. They lost what made them special and different from any other Avenger,” Claremont told Player.One.

I think he summed up in one word what's wrong with his personal politics, making him unfit at this point for writing X-Men. Forget about gays for a moment, what's galling is he puts Islam in the same boat as gays and Jews, and he may have done this as far back as 9-11, because if memory serves, he put such a character into the 2nd or 3rd volume of Gen13 from the early 2000s, for all the good it did in the end; it got nowhere in sales and was cancelled fast. How come he didn't bring up blacks, Latinos and Asians, let alone Roma in that same category? Why cite a religion that's hostile to the other two groups the word is between? And why not cite some of the nationalities I have at various times? What's really weird is that during the mid-80s, there was a story published in New Mutants #25 involving Gabrielle Haller's son David (Legion), who was the only survivor of an Islamic terrorist attack in which he incinerated the brains of the jihadists, and absorbed the mind of the leader into his. This suggests much has changed with Claremont's thinking, and that, like John Ostrander, he's the kind of liberal who disowns what could've been his best work for the sake of pleasing the establishment.

Claremont acknowledges that fans and creators will have diverse perspectives on this change. Still, he sees it as a kind of loss for the X-Men. ”From a purely dramaturgical standpoint, it took away the thing that made this book totally unique: that there was a group in the Marvel omniverse, conceptually, who were outcasts for no other reason than they were born. And the weird thing is, in real life, that seems to be a challenge and a conflict that has heartbreakingly become more and more relevant in recent years. We thought it was on the wane as the 20th century wound down, and now suddenly its come back up again. My sense is ‘oh golly, we lost something.’ There are no spokespeople for that perspective in the Marvel pantheon anymore. They are all homogenized together,” he said.

I haven't read every single X-Men story, but didn't he once write one in the 80s where Prof. Xavier went public about having mutant powers, if that's what he's talking about? After reading his stealth tactic in the earlier paragraph, that's why I think I'm not going to back him up on the notion the X-Men have to remain clandestine. Mainly because it led to the insularity that's become an overbearing staple for a lot of superhero comics. (Now that I think of it, did Scarlet Witch ever have a boyfriend who wasn't a superhero? Probably not.)

Still, he’s not certain how this shift will affect the X-Men going forward. “At this point, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s up to the writers and the editors how they choose to play with it as time goes on,” he added.

Hasn't the past decade or so proven where it's going, which is down? He came back to write the X-Men for about a year in 1999, to tie in with a movie that may not age well because of its director, and Claremont's stories were mostly panned; it didn't feel like he had the energy to make it work anymore. Heck, his last stories before that were in late 1991, on the sans-adjective spinoff which didn't even sell as many copies as were printed, and not many who did read it may recall its launch fondly.

In the film, Claremont compares the work environment when he first got on the X-Men books to the end of his run. The way Chris, along with editors Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson, Claremont was essentially left to his own devices when constructing stories, something he feels can’t be duplicated in today’s commercialized comics industry.

Well at least here, he's offered a valid point. Creative freedom has been trashed by a business model where strict editorial mandates are the norm. Actually, it all began with Secret Wars in 1984, which his books/characters played a part in, whether he liked it or not. And if he's got nothing negative to say about Jim Shooter's serious mistake that's led to the downfall of superhero comics, how can he expect to make a point effectively? Claremont hasn't been writing comics on a serious basis in nearly a decade, one more reason why it's a shame even he circles the wagons.

But from his comments on who he considers outcasts, it's clear he's not all that different from the more recent SJWs, and that's just why he's no longer a good fit for the X-Men. Terribly sad.

Labels: islam and jihad, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, X-Men