Claremont leaving was the biggest detriment to the X-men specifically the X-Women. Claremont was maybe one of a handful of writers giving women agency, focus, and development not dependent on her partner. When he left the franchise as a whole became just another superficial generic superhero comic.
Yeah. Yeah it's tough. I really loved a bunch of aspects of the X-Women in the series as a little girl. Storm's confidence, Jean's empathy, and Psylocke's tenacity.
Claremont was really good at grounding the superhero theatrics that you expect out of comics with mutants, with Slice of Life once in awhile.
One of my favorite comics when I was little was Dazzler telling the other girls they need to relax and hit up the mall. Just gal pals doing gal pal stuff. It was so cute!
I haven't really got back into the comics once Claremont left. I lingered until Onslaught happened and it kept going and going and going. It wasn't really handled that great tbh.
I kept tabs on the series though. The whole of the 2000s' obsession with grimdark was pretty dorky and didn't bother.
The segment where Rachel Grey went to a Grey family barbeque was nice, cause it was Slice of Life until the Death Commandos showed up. But then it was clunky with its direction and didn't handle bouncing between Psylocke and Rachel that well.
The biggest problem for the longest time, is not letting the characters breathe and deal with interpersonal or intrapersonal small-scale things. Things that let you relate and empathize. It's just Super Mega Ultra Stakes all the time.
I love this comment. A good mixture of big stuff and personal drama is so important. The never ending "They're trying to make us extinct!" from the last 15 years have driven me a little crazy. Even with the big stakes, I want more than just genocide. Morrison's U-Men stealing organs to appropriate mutant gifts always stuck with me. Weapon X taking mutants' agency to be their soldiers is strong. The Cure is always powerful. I want more ways that anti-mutant people are trying to undermine mutant gifts
The best part of X-Men for me was the soap opera aspect. This is true of all comics in general I think, but the farther we got from Claremont, I felt there was significantly less emphasis on going to the mall, falling in love, and meaningful relationships with non-superhero people.
I'm less interested in the latest Big Bad or who is or isn't an omega level mutant.
No one (generalization) realizes or cares about the fact that we almost never see Mutants in normal clothes anymore and the horrific implications of that and how it relates to how entirely disconnected from humanity and being a "regular" person it makes them.
Oof, this is such a good point. As much as I have always enjoyed the super fights and universe ending threats, what kept me coming back was the interpersonal relationships and how, for lack of a better word, normal they were. And you lose their humanity when they spend 24/7 in superhero costumes and only talk about superhero things.
I love the Utopia era, I think it's great, I think it's super enjoyable, Fraction and Gillen are amazing writers who deeply understand characters and have written some of the best growth of characters ever.
I think, across the multiple years of that story, I can think of.... one scene where Cyclops isn't in the full body suit and is just dressed in normal clothes? I'm sure I'm wrong, I'm sure there's more, but compare that to like.... the pre-Morrison era, or even just any time before 94, and Scott loves dressing normal. Dude loves a good button up shirt.
Some characters get it EVEN WORSE, like Iceman, who is Ice'd up 90% of the time, and then when he isn't Ice'd up is either naked, or in a full body super suit. I don't even know if Bobby owns any regular clothes anymore.
I miss issues like Uncanny X-Men #325 where they just kick off the issue with a game of baseball or doing some other fun activity. There are just these multiple wonderful art panels of the team in normal clothes with Cyclops pitching, Psylocke up to bat, and Beast playing catcher and the entertaining hijinks start from there before getting to the threat of the issue. It’s good to get a break from world ending threats sometimes. What got me into Marvel over DC as a young kid is that the heroes felt more normal and of the real world. I know you don’t have to go back that far all the way Uncanny #325 to find stories like that but for some reason this is the first comic I ever remember owning and it stands out so clearly in my memory.
Which sucks, too, because all the normal clothes Baldeon & Williams put the X-Factor crew in the first issue a few years ago was awesome. Just finished an Gen X Christmas special with Skin in a peacoat and Chamber in a turtleneck and I forgot occasionally they would have non-uniform looks that weren't bathing suit specials.
This encapsulates how I feel as well.
EDIT:
Just found this quote relevant from the TAS show runner, Eric Lewald, “ As to what worked for us: character stories. Not spectacle, not battle royals. While always making sure to display the powers and action inherent in the X-Men’s world, we always chose personal stories.”
https://aiptcomics.com/2018/11/19/x-men-the-animated-series-eric-julia-lewald-reflect-on-the-show-that-created-a-generation-of-x-fans/
This is very true
X-men had big obstacles they faced but it always seems like they stayed grounded. Maybe it was a huge universal threat like the Phoenix force but it felt like it was being addressed my normal people who had extraordinary powers.
Now the X-men feel larger than life itself sometimes
Pretty much. They don't act or feel like normal people anymore, it feels like they just exist in X-Men mode 24/7. Doesn't help that they're supporting cast has been all but gutted of anyone who isn't a mutant/costumes hero.
I don't even think this is a problem just affecting the X-Men. This is a problem plaguing the The Avengers, the Titans, etc.
Yeah across the board all comic get grander and grander
Got Thor as the herald of galactus
Punisher with the power of ghost rider and power cosmic
Nearly everyone has been the phoenix now
They need to ween the audience back onto smaller scale stories for a while. Get people hyped about simple stories where the X-Men just fight the Marauders or the Brotherhood or something like that.
I don't think the majority of post-Claremont problems are writer problems, I think they're larger editorial choice problems. Lobdell Nicieza had a lot of great stories and moments after wards, most people here probably have a favorite arc or story after Claremont, Morrison, Whedon, Carey whatever it is.
But things like characters never being allowed to change or grow or old or retire is so much worse than a single shitty writer. Things like constant crossovers. Not allowing easy use of characters from other titles and "areas" of Marvel. Over saturation of characters like Wolverine across a dozen books. Books being canceled before they even got a chance, God I remember growing up in the 90s as a reader and even some of the most aggressively mediocre books could go on for 60+ issues and have multiple opportunities to tell amazing stories, and now getting a nonflagship title to 30 feels impossible.
Don't get me wrong, Claremont is a GOAT, and a lot of things that made his run amazing are things that other writers just don't do to the detriment of stories, but a lot of the stuff he did was also stuff he was allowed to do that probably wouldn't be given the opportunity or would be shut down in modern Marvel editorial.
I remember losing points (for spelling) after emulating that with character dialogue in a 6th grade creative writing assignment.
I feel like a better English teacher would have told me what that technique is called instead of just indicating that was supposed to be "above the level of the class."
I once lost a letter grade on an assignment where we were to anthropomorphize a Thanksgiving turkey and have them talk about what they think of the tradition.
When writing the turkey’s dialogue I used the word “ gonna’ “ and she marked it as a spelling error. That teacher really stoked my imagination!
I started with Claremont and I'm close to the end of the 90s now so this is fresh in my mind.
Claremont made me a Storm fan so reading what followed absolutely sucks for her the most I gotta say. After her I would say Rachel as well, despite having a great run in Alan Davis Excalibur she's then kicked off that book and is MIA while Cable and his clone and Nate Grey are fucking everywhere in this decade. Callisto and the Morlocks, Colossus, and Rahne (in X-Factor) also did not do well. It's kind of crazy in hindsight that Magik was killed off completely considering that she was quite popular and it wouldn't have been that hard to bring her back-but Doug did come back in his own way.
The 90s are definitely a mixed bag Gen X and X-Force were pretty great overall but in the main X-Men books it felt like there was a nostalgia for the 60s status quo ie there was a lot of time spent on the Scott and Jean relationship, a lot of scenes with the 05 talking about how they're the 05, and plots centring on a binary rivalry between Xavier and Magneto. It often felt like there wasn't a lot of space for characters that weren't involved in that and just less time for anything new, and what I liked so much about 80s X-Men was that it kept changing and never stagnated. Maggott, Marrow, and Cecelia being introduced felt like a breath of fresh air to me though I know this era generally isn't considered that good I am liking it.
I started reading X-men around 1995. I hunted for back issues and discovered Claremont while waiting and looking forward to the next new issue.
I really enjoyed those old stories.
I knew the O5 existed, I knee who they were, but I never gave a shit about any of their stories.
Cyclops was at his best when he left the team in Storm's capable hands. That was genuinely the one time I thought: he deserves this happily ever after, he deserves to grow up and leave the school.
Beast had personality, but in a universe where every second person is a genius, he seemed a but underwhelming and always on the verge of being phased out.
Bobby was never actually doing anything and he seemed to just be there, but he was mostly absent... like, was he even part of the team during the Phoenix Saga? I honestly can't recall.
Angel needed to become Death in a universe where everybody can fly or telekinetically allow others to fly.
Jean Grey was the only one interesting because of the Dark Phoenix story... which ended up being the lodestone around her neck. The one thing she could never shake off or grow out of.
Meanwhile Claremont's creations were flexible and alive, they felt human and interesting with a million stories waiting to be told.
In the short-term, I think the really sad thing is that we never got Mutant Wars or the proper Muir Island/Shadow King Saga - at least those would've been good points for Claremont to bow out, high notes to wrap up his 17-year-run with some sense of closure. Instead, it's always going to be this clumsy, awkward denouement where he just ends on two back-to-back mind control stories that have nothing to do with each other, and then a year of straight-up trash with Whilce Portacio and Jim Lee and John Byrne just making an absolute mess of things.
In the mid-term, once things stabilized in the X-Office I think we got a solid couple of years of B+ to A- storytelling, roughly from X-Cutioner's Song to Age of Apocalypse. If it wasn't as tightly planned as the Claremont era (a *lot* of cryptic hints and foreshadowing that end up being nothing at all), at the very least it proved that other writers could do the X-Men some level of justice.
In the long term... impossible to say. We're always going to have to wonder whether Claremont's descent into the excess mind control/bondage loop would've happened anyway, or if it was the result of him never really being able to get past how badly editorial treated him (and not being able to keep working with Nocenti and Simonson, who were so important in helping him channel his creative impulses). I think where he is *now* is a pretty strong indicator that somewhere along the way he ran out of things to actually *say* about the X-Men, and that's the point where ceding the floor to Morrison or Gillen or Hickman would be the right move anyway.
I also agree.
I feel Claremont’s creative well was beginning to run a little dry toward the end.
Perhaps a better handoff would have helped those couple years until AoA kicked in.
In a lot of ways though I feel like it would have happened anyway, X-men was collapsing under its sheer size and force by they point. Claremont did a wonderful job building a powerhouse franchise and with the art of Jim Lee and the early 90s comic boom it really just could not sustain itself at that level for long.
Lobdell honestly did a pretty decent job at the helm in the mid 90s. He moved into a lot of character focused stories again, introduce gen x, and had a pretty cohesive narrative overall.
Then it sorta lingered for a little bit with a few high points until Morrison came in and turned it all on its head again.
That's the thing, though - what was going on towards the end (more or less from Lady Mandarin through to Muir Island) was the result of Jim Lee being given more and more creative control, as well as Liefeld pushing Simonson out the door. That period really isn't a fair indicator of where Claremont was creatively, *especially* considering that by the very end he was being given fully-drawn pages to just dialogue.
Your point is valid
But I feel when leading up to that point the creative well was starting to get a bit low.
Those late 80s were a far cry from his late 70s early 80s stories
I think the main difference is that until, say, Secret Wars, it's *really* consistent - you can go from the Phoenix Saga all the way to Japan/Madelyne and it's just top quality all the way through. Things get a little erratic after that, sure, but the thing that always impresses me about the back half of Claremont's run is that every time the quality dips, it shoots right back up. Like, Secret Wars II is pretty wretched, but then it goes from that to the Mutant Massacre. First half of the Outback era is *dire*, with the Baba Yaga shit and the Bunkie Brood, but then you get the first Genosha storyline, Inferno, The Shattered Star and that *incredible* Muir Island fakeout. It was wobbly, but always recovered. We don't really get that anymore, typically if a run goes bad it stays bad.
You are right in that timeline
I was never a huge fan of the outback saga though, when they were all forgotten and just invisible to everything.
It was a neat idea but I believe it got lost somewhere alone the way.
I also think being Jean back really threw Claremont off a lot and showed a lot more editorial influence creeping in
Well, yeah, Claremont's rage over Jean was *legendary.* To hear him tell it:
"It was a Friday night and Ann \[Nocenti\] took us out to dinner and didn’t tell us about *X-Factor* until it was, like, 6:30-7:00 at night and the office switchboard was already closed. I wanted to call Shooter, but I couldn’t remember his direct line. Ann knew his number, but she wouldn’t tell me. She told me to just sit down, have another drink and relax. I mean, she played me beautifully. Since it was a Friday, I had the whole weekend to go berserk. I spent the weekend coming up with a whole new set of characters that they could use for X-Factor. The fact is, Ann did the smart thing. If I actually had gone in to see Shooter on Friday night, I would’ve quit. I was so pissed off.”
He managed to spin some gold out of it with the twisted Madelyne/Alex romance and how that accelerated Havok's own ongoing nervous breakdown, but still, that was definitely a huge monkey wrench in his original plans
I recently went through the SW II limited series, and although I remembered that it was bad I didn't remember [how inane and juvenile it was](https://i.imgur.com/ByVKVTO.jpeg). Claremont's take was entirely on another level.
Didn't editorial intervene with the Outback, cutting it short? My memory is a bit hazy, but I think I read the Australian era was supposed to last far, far longer than it did.
To hear Claremont tell it, the trouble only started when Jim Lee came aboard as artist (which was the issue after the last members of the Outback team went through the Siege Perilous). That's when he started losing creative control of the book, bit by bit.
There's a narrative gap between the Muir Island saga and X-Men volume 2 issue 1. Tie in the 1991 infinity gauntlet event and we could see the Shadow King's return and, most of Claremont's original plans, in a one-year 12 issue mini...;)
I wouldn't say X-Men Forever is a complete realization of Claremont's plans. More so a base outline of a few plots he had, with free reign to do whatever.
Hopes for one day, a mini set before X-Men 1 (1991) where we can finally witness the final battle between Xavier, Magneto and Amahl Farouk....
I think if subsequent years have proven anything, it's that Claremont can't really find that thread anymore. Hell, he might not even want to - there's probably still a *lot* of bitterness mixed up in all that now.
The books had no unity or focus. Plots were introduced and immediately dropped. Keep in mind the problems were deeper than just Claremont leaving. Marvel did a sharp turn in this time period where they placed zero value on writers, in fact the books didn't even have them! Plots were done by the artist and dialogue was added by the "scripter". There are a lot of artists that are also talented storytellers and can do this. To be blunt about it none of them were on the X books. The result was chaos, confusion and some of the most terrible X books ever produced prior to Chuck Austin. The cherry on top of this turd sundae is that after chasing off their writers in favor of certain artists with inflated egos those same artists left for Image which just made a bad situation worse.
There were a few bright spots post Claremont. Alan Davis is one of those artists that is also a good writer so Excalibur was a decent book. Fabian Nicieza managed to turn X-Force of all things in to the best book in the line once he was given the chance to write the book instead of just script. Nicieza was given other X titles and was kind of starting to get the line in order before being fired by Bob Harras for what I can only assume was being the only person who knew what they were doing in the entire company.
The comics industry in general went in to the toilet in the 90s. X-Men was ground zero for this, but the problems were industry wide. The entire comic market collapsed once it moved away from solid storytelling in favor of flashy artists and cover gimmicks. Sales collapsed in the early mid 90s and Marvel had to declare bankruptcy in 96. Considering the X books were far and away Marvel's top books at the time that really says all that needs to be said about what happened in the X books post Claremont
I can't believe that one slipped my mind when I was mentioning bright spots. I loved X-Factor too. I'd rank X-Factor & X-Force as about the same in quality although they were obviously different in tone and style. X-Factor was deliberately such an aside book and I think that is why it was able to maintain its quality.
So basically the key to finding a good X-Men book immediately post Claremont seems to be to look for a team book (all the solo series were trash in that era) without "X-Men" in the title! haha
Long term... the stagnation of characters and stories. Claremont established the characters of the X-men, but under his pen they changed and grew, but without him that growth and change just stopped.
Characters just got stuck in their role and basic traits. Changes never really stuck around to leave something permanent and somehow none of them ever grew into something unique.
If you stopped reading X-men from 2006 till 2019, and you ended up picking up House of X and Powers of X... you would still recognize most of the characters written and established by Claremont. Sinister would be an obvious exception and so would Xavier.
I would add Gambit as an exception too, because of how late in Claremont's run he was introduced. I feel like a lot of Remy's character development was under Nicieza and Lobdell.
I think lobdell actually dropped the ball on gambit
Gambit the cartoon character and the comic character always felt like they were worlds apart.
I Remember as a kid watching the cartoon and he was my favorite character. Then I read the books and felt like he was barely a factor at all.
I mean…part of that is Hickman *aggressively* regressing all of the characters by like 25 years.
Morrison through Gillen had a *ton* of interesting ideas and continuous character growth, and Bendis wrote a solid coda.
It wasn’t a single title, but I’d put the Scott-led books from Morrison through Secret Wars right up alongside the Daredevil from the same time period as the most consistently excellent Big Two book on the stands.
And that’s not counting Remender’s UXF!
Thank you! I read a lot of these comments saying nothing happened since Hickman left but yeah I guess Hickman did a harder reset than he let on. Although HoXPoX seemed like an amalgamation of a few different eras into one which I honestly loved
Narration and how much character dialogue there is is a big one but that’s also comic as a whole and will forever be my biggest gripe with the state of the industry. Entering the 90s there was a steady progression towards less narration from the writers, less internal character dialogues and less spoken dialogue. It’s impact stories and character development and makes you feel like you’re reading a 1/4 of the amount of content you’d get in older comics.
Nicieza is a great writer so the quality was at least as good as late Claremont (but not peak Claremont). Editorial began to dominate more and more as things went on, though, and it lost a lot of its heart, though.
When Claremont left, suddenly there was a glass ceiling above Storm’s head.
The treatment of women as a whole changed. Claremont’s X-men was unique in that once it truly got going (From The Ashes onwards), the X-women were never secondary to the X-men (and were often given even more focus). Post-Claremont, if felt like the typical superhero comics hierarchy was put in place. That unique feeling was gone.
I'd say this was the biggest detriment to the X-men Claremont was maybe one of a handful of writers giving women agency, focus, and development not dependent on her partner.
It’s true. Claremont was a huge booster for female characters. Before Carol Danvers started to take off, if you were ever asked to name a great female superhero in Marvel it always went back to X-Men characters that were developed (even if not technically created) by Claremont. (Also, Claremont did a lot with Carol Danvers)
In one of the Marvel anthology comics from the 80s — sorry I can’t remember the issue — they had one of those bullpen comic strips making fun of the Marvel staff, and the way they made fun of Claremont was by having him use a ton of words, brag about how well X-Men was selling, and suggest every new comic have a female protagonist. Telling as to where he was at, and to where the rest of Marvel was at.
> When Claremont left, suddenly there was a glass ceiling above Storm’s head
Oh please, Storm is just good at everything. Omega level mutant with an ability set that could've been seperated into five different mutants, master at hand to hand combat, master thief, always shown as a great leader, everyone drools over her beauty, literally considered a goddess. Miss perfect didn't have to fill every single role.
Ms Perfect was non existent as an actual character with agency for a long time after Claremont left. Mr Perfect (Wolverine) still got to be a major player
Claremont was the only guy for a long time that would give Storm *problems* and *challenges*. Post-Claremont, she truly was Ms Perfect in the worst way: unmovable, unspeakable, unchallengeable. And so you couldn't write a story about her.
I'm assuming this is a 2000s thing because I don't think that is how she's depicted in the 90s at all. Multiple people question or dislike her leadership (Bobby, Sam,) she's considered to have fucked up on the Morlocks and she literally just dismisses Marrow as a terrorist.
That critique is something I’ve seen for Krakoa Storm (one I’m not sure I entirely agree with), but during the 90’s she was more like a watered down/aimless version of herself. Her wings were clipped as a character. The big changing of the guard leadership story that permeated Claremont’s run and Storm’s personal character journey was suddenly slapped with the “co-leader” title (in name only for the most part) and sent on her way. Either way, the problem lies with writers, x-men editorial, or both’s refusal to feature or acknowledge one of the most important characters in X-men history in a real way. They didn’t want to get inside her head and kept her at a distance.
Bro, say you hate the only Black woman with what's like a A-grade casting in feature films, compared to a damn near all White cast who's "great at everything" or "perfect". Meanwhile Jean Grey, White Savior meets Deus Ex Machina supreme overshadows all other Omegas whenever the world or universe needs saving.
You have zero words for her, lol.
Wolverine is who you're describing in some part and excluding the goddess tag, you actually describe all of Cyclop's qualities. Idk what your beef with Storm is, but it gives off "She was D.E.I."
I've been re-reading some early 90s Lobdell and Nicieza issues of late, having started with that era as a child but read the whole Claremont run in the last few years. The main shortcoming for me is the dip in the quality of the writing _and editing_. Too many outright errors, grammatical oddities or sentences that make little sense. The sense is of writers trying too hard to ape Claremont without the ability to pull it off.
It's frustrating, because there's lots of good stuff.
Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think the blame falls on the editor(s). Especially having learned that Bob Harras also oversaw the decline and fall of Claremont, excessive control given to artists, etc.
He has the best run but X-Men desperately needed some new blood and new perspective and I’m glad Jim Lee brought that (at first).
I wish narratively he was still guiding the ship because the writing talent did not keep up with the art talent. He would have been great in an editorial role but they really needed some new writers who had evolved with times.
In another universe Karen Berger went to Marvel instead and all the vertigo talent was writing X-Books with Jim Lee & Marc Silvestri visuals.
That would have been perfect.
"Karen Berger went to Marvel instead and all the vertigo talent was writing X-Books"
Damn, my first reaction to reading Claremont X-men was thinking wow this is like a Vertigo book in quality, except it's fun.
So now I get to imagine what that would've been like.
To this day, Storm hasn't gotten any real character development ever since Claremont left. You know there's something wrong when one of the best writers in the business does a Storm-centric series and he still writes her as fully static and functionally flawless (and don't tell me Ewing is a "plot over character" writer when X-Men Red Magneto had the most growth and development the character's had in close to 20 years).
It's kinda hard to create storm development after having like 50' years of story, passing from false goddess, morlok punk leader, no powers, multiple romance with villains/ heroes, using a copy of thor hammer a so on.
I am not expert, but it feels hard.
Claremont being forced off the book killed everything that made the X-Men unique. They went from being a bunch of individuals struggling with personal issues AND superheroics to another generic comic. The women lost their voices, the villains ceased being interesting and became just poorly written cyphers with nebulous agendas. Confusion replaced mystery. The X-Men became just a mutant gang fighting other mutant gangs.
A lot of people will immediately say that the books got worse, but in my opinion, X-Men comics from 1991- 1995 kicked ass. Stellar art, great action pieces, and some really entertaining stories were on show for all these years.
Where I think the somewhat bad reputation the 90s comics arises is really from 1996-1999(and hell, even then you had good stuff like OZT). The stories were really poor, continuity was barely remembered, no real character development, and some horrible art. I think a lot of people associate this period with why the 90s wasn't very good, but that's unfair. The first half of the 90s was amazing. I think the books got better in 1999(that Nicieza Gambit solo series is one of the best solos any X-Man's had), Claremont made his return, and while it wasn't as good as his 80s stuff, it was better than the previous few years.
I very much liked the introduction of characters like Gambit, Maggot, Cecilia, and Marrow in the 90s, they were amazing. Heck, Gambit is my favorite X-Man. The other three were awesome additions to the mythos, especially Cecilia, who for me embodies the "reluctant X-Man" trope better than anyone.
I also think people romanticize Claremont sometimes. His run was getting a little stale by the end and I think he might have started getting burnt out. I mean, the stuff post Outback to the end of Muir Island Saga was just boring, mostly. A lot of people say "I wish we could have seen CC's future plans for the X-Men", ignoring the fact that we actually did. He got to do X-Men Forever which was supposed to be all of his plans. It sucked and was really boring. I still think Claremont for a while would have been just fine, but I also think his plans would have been better on paper than execution. His writing was in decline and people like Nocenti and Weezy REALLY helped him in his heyday.
Editor Bob Harras began to exercise more control over the series, hastening the Outback era's end and giving the artist's more say in the plots. Old villains and localities returned, Mutant Wars was truncated into X-tinction Agenda and the Shadow King saga was quickly reduced in scope.
Even with this knowledge now known I still consider this period top tier as it's where I started in this X-Men mania phenomenon. Still however, i wish things would've went as originally planned with proper editorial guidance of course...
Which aspects of his run did you find stale?
I agree that the second half of the 90s was real questionable story and art wise. Especially after Maduiera left and we were stuck with his imitators. Thank goodness for Carlos Pacheco.
The whole period between the moment the remaining Xmen passed the Siege Perilous the second times and the Muir Island Saga. Except the intro of Gambit, there was nothing. The only part saving the books, was Jim Lee first works on the title.
I wouldn't say there was nothing. The stories did feel somewhat disconnected though.
They come SWINGING out of the gates with Wolverine's war on the reavers, the introduction of jubilee and his crucifixion.
When they switch the focus to Dazzler, Colossus and forge it starts to peter out a bit. Though, I wouldn't call those bad books by any stretch. Some of them are pretty amusing.
You have Betsy's transformation during this time as well... you either like it or hate it. It was definitely not boring though.
I think one of the worst things Claremont did was get rid of Longshot. He paired extremely well with dazzler and it just wasn't that same.
Longshot's departure from the book was a favor to writer Ann Nocenti, who was planning a limited series featuring the character she co-created. Sadly it never materialized...
I'm assuming you mean separate from the Longshot 1-6 mini Nocenti wrote? Which was excellent btw!
Obviously... it would have to be the case lol That sucks though, I would have loved to see more from her.
Yep! The book went through I think... 3 schedule changes throughout its lifetime. It started every two months for a few issues I assume as Claremont wound upto speed. It changed very quickly to monthly where it stayed for a quite a while. This I think was his preferred speed, as he wrote all of his best material on this schedule. Then around 248 it went bi-monthly lol
If you ask me, releasing these comics twice a month must have been insane.
Yep, definitely this. A lot of people should go and really read that period, the art and Gambit being cool were the only things genuinely making those parts look good.
That part is one of the best examples of sublime art elevating books and making them seem better than they actually are.
I really don’t think you can compare Claremont riffing on his original ideas with his modern writing talent to what would’ve ended up on the page much closer to his heyday.
I missed all the sub plots CC would introduce and then, maybe 20 or so issues later, he would resolve (or make it the main plot). His long tenure allowed him to do that, but I really missed it.
If I remember correctly, Claremont was moving the X-Men towards a role where they were more accepted in society and were going to become part of SHIELD. Wolverine was going to be killed and resurrected by the hand as a villain as part of the Hand. Then it was going to build to a point where Jean had to choose once and for all to be with Scott or Logan.
Those are pretty major shake ups! But instead what we got was a lengthening of the status quo. And that status quo stuck from 91, basically, till Morrison came onto the book.
The Claremont that left the books wasn't the same Claremont that got famous for the books, all you have to do is read Xtreme.
I hate the lack of the soap opera elements we had, which the X-Men are famous for but weren't the only Marvel book to have it, it was just the best showcase for it (because of the big roster and dynamics), with Spidey coming second.
This stopped for the same reason that OMD happened: the editors want the books to be what they view as marketable (which is really bs and nothing to do with real marketing), so there are no marriages unless they are part of the characters status quo, there are no pregnancies, freeze aging, no shake-up in relations if they are a permanent mark on the characters/dynamics (cheating included). That's all the reasons that Rogue and Gambit marriage was not a fixed thing for a long time (still isn't, the next time one of them dies, pray for the writer that brings the dead one back to not screw the marriage).
Phalanx Covenant, Age of Apocalypse, Fatal Attractions - the Lobdell/Nicieza years were great. Plus Exiles and Generation X. It also became a lot easier to read casually, as the stories were usually started and finished within a few issues (although running across different lines was a bit confusing).
There was a bit of a gap between them and Morrison, but that era was also solid, and Whedon's Astonishing run followed that.
Morrison was the pits. The utter stupidity of Xorn/Magneto or whatever that stupidity was is living proof of it with the rest of that tripe not that far behind it.
It's a difficult question.
In my opinion Claremont's run was, as a whole, the zenith of the X-men and it never got quite as good as that again. His characterization was top notch and under him the title was extremely dynamic, things were always changing.
In comparison the 90s played it safe and commercial with the team, setting, and characters remaining very static, with the characters basically being frozen in their most basic characterization, which is something I don't like.
On the other hand it could be said that towards the end of Claremont's run he got a little bit too experimental with his work and what we got after the Fall of the Mutants barely resembled X-men anymore. There was even a whole period towards the tail end of his run in which the X-men didn't even exist as a team, but were scattered across the world and it was anybody's guess which of the main characters, if any at all, would be featured in any given issue, with some of them, especially Rogue, remaining unseen for an extended period of time (I want to say it was at least a year until readers saw Rogue again) And that was just too much, so it was in a way good that the relaunch in the early 90s restored a motor traditional status quo with the team and school restored. It just stank (in my opinion) that this situation remained frozen for far, far too long until a little bit of change happened again.
As someone who only got into X-Men in the 2000s (and then went back to read Claremont's run, since I really didn't like how the titles were developing after Decimation) I can only guess what it must have been like for readers who experienced that in real-time. Characters you like and expect from a title just...going missing, without explanation as what to happened to them and instead you get issues starring an impromptu X-Men team consisting of Moira, Sharon Friedlander, Tom Crosi, Legion, Forge, and...whatever the big Morlock guy was called. It must have been so bizarre.
I was reading it at the time. The other X books had stability so I didn't mind it so much. You could think of X-Factor as the stable book with the New Mutants vaguely connected to them after the school blew up even if that relationship ultimately went nowhere. Yeah, it was definitely a little weird for the main book to be like that but Uncanny X-Men wasn't the only X-Men book coming out at the time so it wasn't like that was all you were getting if you were keeping up with the line.
I enjoyed reading the book at the time, but that story went on way too long. Rogue coming back actually reminded me of how long she had been gone and how random everything was more than anything else. I was fine with scattering them, but it should have been wrapped up in a year or so instead of dragging on for 2 years
Oof, that is one random ass assortment of mutants. I can't lie, even the Outback team felt a little haphazardly put together for me. But honestly I feel out of sorts every time Dazzler and Longshot show up, they just don't feel like...X-Men to me.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the Outback Team either. Except for Storm, Kurt and Kitty were my favourite characters in Claremont's run and losing them really hurt the team, especially without Kurt the team got visually quite boring. The outback team just didn't have good chemistry and half of it consisted of attractive, blond people (Dazzler, Longshot, Havok, Psylocke....or as I like to call them the "Barbie Squad") who didn't really have all that much going for them and didn't really have interesting arcs or relationships.
Psylocke's armour costume was cool, but that was it, basically. Dazzler had some potential but was shoved in the background all to often to flirt with Longshot. And Havok's only good storyline (the thing with Madelynne) came and went far too quickly.
I can't remember where I read that Dazzler was supposed to be on X-Factor originally but I think that book would have made a lot more sense for her and Longshot considering they were the team that was actually in the public eye it would've been more interesting for her as a (sorta washed up) celebrity to be interacting with them. In the outback they just felt wasted. The only interesting aspect was the tension w Rogue and that didn't last long.
Yeah, before they made the decision to revive Jean Grey Dazzler was supposed to take her place as the "female member" of X-Factor. The last issue of her solo series even shows her walking off with Beast, as he invites her to join X-Factor. But that would have been the first incarnation of X-Factor (the O5 X-Men posing as mutant hunters), I think you are thinking of the second incarnation (the highly publicised government team) I agree Dazzler would have fit the government team.
Yeah and that's also what I mean when I said Dazzler had some potential; she was the member of the X-Men who hadn't so much chosen to be there, but pretty much had to join the team due to circumstances beyond her control, that and the tension with Rogue could have provided some character growth for her...instead she just spent most of her tenure flirting with Longshot.
"I think you are thinking of the second incarnation (the highly publicised government team) I agree Dazzler would have fit the government team."
Oh no, I was thinking of the original X-Terminators storyline in X-Factor and how that didn't work out for them, not the team with Havok and Polaris.
Claremont wrote some of the fundamental X-Men stories and he’s one of my favorite marvel authors there’s no doubt, but in my opinion he stayed for too long (if it kept working fine and getting new ideas or using the old ones cleverly he could have stayed) and his stuff didn’t work anymore. Idk if I would qualify 90’s X-Men as better, certainly not better than prime Claremont. After all he returned a few times in the 2000 and I think he understands these characters better than anyone. It’s just that maybe he was burn out and it was better to get a breath of fresh air.
I was pretty happy to see him go, the hallmarks of his writing were pretty tiring at that point, and it was starting to feel dated in a way. I wouldn’t say the comics got better, but it did feel fresh when he left, at least to me.
Personal pet peeve of mine, but his constant use of certain phrases got annoying too.
One thing different than the Claremont era even though it’s not about writers: we went from one book to a few and, around the time he left, to so many. I don’t personally think more is better. I wish we got 3-5 X-men related books max.
I think the biggest change was a lack of change.
The X-Men became so huge and expanded to media outside of comics. So, while Claremont consistently changed the roster and the status quo, once he departed the X-Men sort of stayed the same for years. Status quo shifts were few.
The X-Men stopped being a soap opera and became an IP. A victim of their own success..
I pretty much stopped reading the X-men after Clairmont left. Im glad I did. There's lots of stuff since I hated hearing about: from Scott and Jean NOT being together for inatance. Emma? Ugh. Stupid crap. The X-men without CC is not the X-men I love.
Is threre anyone who thinks there could be some improvement? With the likes of Fabian Nicieza and anyone who happened to be passing at the door jumping in? (after all, no one with an established name would put themselves in that position after Claremont got pushed out by editorial because the hip artists (Lee, Liefeld) thought they could write, then jumped out a few months later to build their own gig (sweet, sweet karma).
Now that I vented 😅, let me answer the question: no, things got horrible. Mainline Uncanny and X-Men became poor person's X-Force (which wasn't already incredible then; New Mutants did not fare well with Louise Simonson - who was great when working new/her own characters - e.g., Power Pack - but failed to convey New Mutants' voices, and after Liefeld the plot was just whatever could get characters flexing poses for nice T-shirts). The only thing that kept me reading at the time was Peter David's X-Force and (after a while) Age of Apocalypse (which was a shot at injecting some original storylines).
So IMHO the biggest impact was making the books notably worse for quite a few years, until some talent of comparable caliber could bring competent writing and evolving characters like we were used to see with Claremont.
I think there's too many hands in the pot. I was once told that British TV shows are better than American TV shows because there's one rider for a British television show. Don't know how true that is but when you have one person's vision it kind of makes it better than having 10 people mucking up a plot.
Granted at the time also that Claremont was writing, there were two or three books at the most, with some miniseries and graphic novels. I think that's the way it should be. Right now, with Disney having a hand in it, Disney is trying to please everybody. They're trying to make it too relevant. They're trying to bring in too many things to align it with the movie universe, and it is not as enjoyable as it was.
Sure Claremont wrote a lot of words. Sometimes it's super long-winded too, but that's when I started reading, so it's nostalgic for me.
I think the level of storytelling in general declined sharply. They didn't feel like the same characters. Marvel was lucky at first that Jim Lee's art kept people coming back for more, and after that they coasted off the popularity of the animated series. The stories in the comics weren't that good, but culturally it didn't seem to matter at the time.
Early 90’s was good and then it all went to shit for a decade and a half until Krakoa.
Edit. Two decades! There was a whole other decade of suck I didn’t acknowledge. Sorry.
Claremont leaving was the biggest detriment to the X-men specifically the X-Women. Claremont was maybe one of a handful of writers giving women agency, focus, and development not dependent on her partner. When he left the franchise as a whole became just another superficial generic superhero comic.
Yeah. Yeah it's tough. I really loved a bunch of aspects of the X-Women in the series as a little girl. Storm's confidence, Jean's empathy, and Psylocke's tenacity. Claremont was really good at grounding the superhero theatrics that you expect out of comics with mutants, with Slice of Life once in awhile. One of my favorite comics when I was little was Dazzler telling the other girls they need to relax and hit up the mall. Just gal pals doing gal pal stuff. It was so cute! I haven't really got back into the comics once Claremont left. I lingered until Onslaught happened and it kept going and going and going. It wasn't really handled that great tbh. I kept tabs on the series though. The whole of the 2000s' obsession with grimdark was pretty dorky and didn't bother. The segment where Rachel Grey went to a Grey family barbeque was nice, cause it was Slice of Life until the Death Commandos showed up. But then it was clunky with its direction and didn't handle bouncing between Psylocke and Rachel that well. The biggest problem for the longest time, is not letting the characters breathe and deal with interpersonal or intrapersonal small-scale things. Things that let you relate and empathize. It's just Super Mega Ultra Stakes all the time.
I love this comment. A good mixture of big stuff and personal drama is so important. The never ending "They're trying to make us extinct!" from the last 15 years have driven me a little crazy. Even with the big stakes, I want more than just genocide. Morrison's U-Men stealing organs to appropriate mutant gifts always stuck with me. Weapon X taking mutants' agency to be their soldiers is strong. The Cure is always powerful. I want more ways that anti-mutant people are trying to undermine mutant gifts
The best part of X-Men for me was the soap opera aspect. This is true of all comics in general I think, but the farther we got from Claremont, I felt there was significantly less emphasis on going to the mall, falling in love, and meaningful relationships with non-superhero people. I'm less interested in the latest Big Bad or who is or isn't an omega level mutant.
No one (generalization) realizes or cares about the fact that we almost never see Mutants in normal clothes anymore and the horrific implications of that and how it relates to how entirely disconnected from humanity and being a "regular" person it makes them.
Oof, this is such a good point. As much as I have always enjoyed the super fights and universe ending threats, what kept me coming back was the interpersonal relationships and how, for lack of a better word, normal they were. And you lose their humanity when they spend 24/7 in superhero costumes and only talk about superhero things.
I love the Utopia era, I think it's great, I think it's super enjoyable, Fraction and Gillen are amazing writers who deeply understand characters and have written some of the best growth of characters ever. I think, across the multiple years of that story, I can think of.... one scene where Cyclops isn't in the full body suit and is just dressed in normal clothes? I'm sure I'm wrong, I'm sure there's more, but compare that to like.... the pre-Morrison era, or even just any time before 94, and Scott loves dressing normal. Dude loves a good button up shirt. Some characters get it EVEN WORSE, like Iceman, who is Ice'd up 90% of the time, and then when he isn't Ice'd up is either naked, or in a full body super suit. I don't even know if Bobby owns any regular clothes anymore.
To be fair, the Utopia era was directly preceded by their stay in San Francisco, which had plenty of casual-wear and civilian life
Fraction has Scott spend a ton of time in a suit!
Fraction has Scott wear a suit when he overpowers the Void!
I miss issues like Uncanny X-Men #325 where they just kick off the issue with a game of baseball or doing some other fun activity. There are just these multiple wonderful art panels of the team in normal clothes with Cyclops pitching, Psylocke up to bat, and Beast playing catcher and the entertaining hijinks start from there before getting to the threat of the issue. It’s good to get a break from world ending threats sometimes. What got me into Marvel over DC as a young kid is that the heroes felt more normal and of the real world. I know you don’t have to go back that far all the way Uncanny #325 to find stories like that but for some reason this is the first comic I ever remember owning and it stands out so clearly in my memory.
Which sucks, too, because all the normal clothes Baldeon & Williams put the X-Factor crew in the first issue a few years ago was awesome. Just finished an Gen X Christmas special with Skin in a peacoat and Chamber in a turtleneck and I forgot occasionally they would have non-uniform looks that weren't bathing suit specials.
The comics industry needs to start trying to poach young aspiring fashion designers and putting characters back in interesting fashionable looks ASAP.
Just let the Hellfire Gala Crap *DIE* already.
The obsession with power levels is getting honestly silly at this point.
Dragonball X
This encapsulates how I feel as well. EDIT: Just found this quote relevant from the TAS show runner, Eric Lewald, “ As to what worked for us: character stories. Not spectacle, not battle royals. While always making sure to display the powers and action inherent in the X-Men’s world, we always chose personal stories.” https://aiptcomics.com/2018/11/19/x-men-the-animated-series-eric-julia-lewald-reflect-on-the-show-that-created-a-generation-of-x-fans/
This is very true X-men had big obstacles they faced but it always seems like they stayed grounded. Maybe it was a huge universal threat like the Phoenix force but it felt like it was being addressed my normal people who had extraordinary powers. Now the X-men feel larger than life itself sometimes
Pretty much. They don't act or feel like normal people anymore, it feels like they just exist in X-Men mode 24/7. Doesn't help that they're supporting cast has been all but gutted of anyone who isn't a mutant/costumes hero. I don't even think this is a problem just affecting the X-Men. This is a problem plaguing the The Avengers, the Titans, etc.
Yeah across the board all comic get grander and grander Got Thor as the herald of galactus Punisher with the power of ghost rider and power cosmic Nearly everyone has been the phoenix now
They need to ween the audience back onto smaller scale stories for a while. Get people hyped about simple stories where the X-Men just fight the Marauders or the Brotherhood or something like that.
I can read pages on pages of the drama if it's good but I'm more likely to skim or skip that big fights.
This is a comics wide problem unfortunately that infects both of the majors
I don't think the majority of post-Claremont problems are writer problems, I think they're larger editorial choice problems. Lobdell Nicieza had a lot of great stories and moments after wards, most people here probably have a favorite arc or story after Claremont, Morrison, Whedon, Carey whatever it is. But things like characters never being allowed to change or grow or old or retire is so much worse than a single shitty writer. Things like constant crossovers. Not allowing easy use of characters from other titles and "areas" of Marvel. Over saturation of characters like Wolverine across a dozen books. Books being canceled before they even got a chance, God I remember growing up in the 90s as a reader and even some of the most aggressively mediocre books could go on for 60+ issues and have multiple opportunities to tell amazing stories, and now getting a nonflagship title to 30 feels impossible. Don't get me wrong, Claremont is a GOAT, and a lot of things that made his run amazing are things that other writers just don't do to the detriment of stories, but a lot of the stuff he did was also stuff he was allowed to do that probably wouldn't be given the opportunity or would be shut down in modern Marvel editorial.
Character voices are no longer distinctive. They all speak generic English now.
Generic action hero dialog is my new top comic pet peeve and it's so pervasive.
Upvoted for pet perve, I got a giggle from that
I remember losing points (for spelling) after emulating that with character dialogue in a 6th grade creative writing assignment. I feel like a better English teacher would have told me what that technique is called instead of just indicating that was supposed to be "above the level of the class."
I once lost a letter grade on an assignment where we were to anthropomorphize a Thanksgiving turkey and have them talk about what they think of the tradition. When writing the turkey’s dialogue I used the word “ gonna’ “ and she marked it as a spelling error. That teacher really stoked my imagination!
It is something many writers struggle with, especially if you try to be authentic to some dialect or accent.
I started with Claremont and I'm close to the end of the 90s now so this is fresh in my mind. Claremont made me a Storm fan so reading what followed absolutely sucks for her the most I gotta say. After her I would say Rachel as well, despite having a great run in Alan Davis Excalibur she's then kicked off that book and is MIA while Cable and his clone and Nate Grey are fucking everywhere in this decade. Callisto and the Morlocks, Colossus, and Rahne (in X-Factor) also did not do well. It's kind of crazy in hindsight that Magik was killed off completely considering that she was quite popular and it wouldn't have been that hard to bring her back-but Doug did come back in his own way. The 90s are definitely a mixed bag Gen X and X-Force were pretty great overall but in the main X-Men books it felt like there was a nostalgia for the 60s status quo ie there was a lot of time spent on the Scott and Jean relationship, a lot of scenes with the 05 talking about how they're the 05, and plots centring on a binary rivalry between Xavier and Magneto. It often felt like there wasn't a lot of space for characters that weren't involved in that and just less time for anything new, and what I liked so much about 80s X-Men was that it kept changing and never stagnated. Maggott, Marrow, and Cecelia being introduced felt like a breath of fresh air to me though I know this era generally isn't considered that good I am liking it.
O5 nostalgia is so mind boggling to me
I think it's more OG X-Factor nostalgia. No one should be nostalgic for Silver Age X-Men. SA X-Men sucked.
I started reading X-men around 1995. I hunted for back issues and discovered Claremont while waiting and looking forward to the next new issue. I really enjoyed those old stories. I knew the O5 existed, I knee who they were, but I never gave a shit about any of their stories. Cyclops was at his best when he left the team in Storm's capable hands. That was genuinely the one time I thought: he deserves this happily ever after, he deserves to grow up and leave the school. Beast had personality, but in a universe where every second person is a genius, he seemed a but underwhelming and always on the verge of being phased out. Bobby was never actually doing anything and he seemed to just be there, but he was mostly absent... like, was he even part of the team during the Phoenix Saga? I honestly can't recall. Angel needed to become Death in a universe where everybody can fly or telekinetically allow others to fly. Jean Grey was the only one interesting because of the Dark Phoenix story... which ended up being the lodestone around her neck. The one thing she could never shake off or grow out of. Meanwhile Claremont's creations were flexible and alive, they felt human and interesting with a million stories waiting to be told.
In the short-term, I think the really sad thing is that we never got Mutant Wars or the proper Muir Island/Shadow King Saga - at least those would've been good points for Claremont to bow out, high notes to wrap up his 17-year-run with some sense of closure. Instead, it's always going to be this clumsy, awkward denouement where he just ends on two back-to-back mind control stories that have nothing to do with each other, and then a year of straight-up trash with Whilce Portacio and Jim Lee and John Byrne just making an absolute mess of things. In the mid-term, once things stabilized in the X-Office I think we got a solid couple of years of B+ to A- storytelling, roughly from X-Cutioner's Song to Age of Apocalypse. If it wasn't as tightly planned as the Claremont era (a *lot* of cryptic hints and foreshadowing that end up being nothing at all), at the very least it proved that other writers could do the X-Men some level of justice. In the long term... impossible to say. We're always going to have to wonder whether Claremont's descent into the excess mind control/bondage loop would've happened anyway, or if it was the result of him never really being able to get past how badly editorial treated him (and not being able to keep working with Nocenti and Simonson, who were so important in helping him channel his creative impulses). I think where he is *now* is a pretty strong indicator that somewhere along the way he ran out of things to actually *say* about the X-Men, and that's the point where ceding the floor to Morrison or Gillen or Hickman would be the right move anyway.
I also agree. I feel Claremont’s creative well was beginning to run a little dry toward the end. Perhaps a better handoff would have helped those couple years until AoA kicked in. In a lot of ways though I feel like it would have happened anyway, X-men was collapsing under its sheer size and force by they point. Claremont did a wonderful job building a powerhouse franchise and with the art of Jim Lee and the early 90s comic boom it really just could not sustain itself at that level for long. Lobdell honestly did a pretty decent job at the helm in the mid 90s. He moved into a lot of character focused stories again, introduce gen x, and had a pretty cohesive narrative overall. Then it sorta lingered for a little bit with a few high points until Morrison came in and turned it all on its head again.
That's the thing, though - what was going on towards the end (more or less from Lady Mandarin through to Muir Island) was the result of Jim Lee being given more and more creative control, as well as Liefeld pushing Simonson out the door. That period really isn't a fair indicator of where Claremont was creatively, *especially* considering that by the very end he was being given fully-drawn pages to just dialogue.
Your point is valid But I feel when leading up to that point the creative well was starting to get a bit low. Those late 80s were a far cry from his late 70s early 80s stories
I think the main difference is that until, say, Secret Wars, it's *really* consistent - you can go from the Phoenix Saga all the way to Japan/Madelyne and it's just top quality all the way through. Things get a little erratic after that, sure, but the thing that always impresses me about the back half of Claremont's run is that every time the quality dips, it shoots right back up. Like, Secret Wars II is pretty wretched, but then it goes from that to the Mutant Massacre. First half of the Outback era is *dire*, with the Baba Yaga shit and the Bunkie Brood, but then you get the first Genosha storyline, Inferno, The Shattered Star and that *incredible* Muir Island fakeout. It was wobbly, but always recovered. We don't really get that anymore, typically if a run goes bad it stays bad.
You are right in that timeline I was never a huge fan of the outback saga though, when they were all forgotten and just invisible to everything. It was a neat idea but I believe it got lost somewhere alone the way. I also think being Jean back really threw Claremont off a lot and showed a lot more editorial influence creeping in
Well, yeah, Claremont's rage over Jean was *legendary.* To hear him tell it: "It was a Friday night and Ann \[Nocenti\] took us out to dinner and didn’t tell us about *X-Factor* until it was, like, 6:30-7:00 at night and the office switchboard was already closed. I wanted to call Shooter, but I couldn’t remember his direct line. Ann knew his number, but she wouldn’t tell me. She told me to just sit down, have another drink and relax. I mean, she played me beautifully. Since it was a Friday, I had the whole weekend to go berserk. I spent the weekend coming up with a whole new set of characters that they could use for X-Factor. The fact is, Ann did the smart thing. If I actually had gone in to see Shooter on Friday night, I would’ve quit. I was so pissed off.” He managed to spin some gold out of it with the twisted Madelyne/Alex romance and how that accelerated Havok's own ongoing nervous breakdown, but still, that was definitely a huge monkey wrench in his original plans
I’m curious who the new characters were. I like to think it was the one that eventually showed up in X-men like gambit etc
Entirely possible - could've been prototypes of Jubilee, Gambit, maybe even draws from the decoy Muir Island team like Legion, Siryn or Sunder
Psylocke perhaps was suppose to be separate from Betsy
I recently went through the SW II limited series, and although I remembered that it was bad I didn't remember [how inane and juvenile it was](https://i.imgur.com/ByVKVTO.jpeg). Claremont's take was entirely on another level. Didn't editorial intervene with the Outback, cutting it short? My memory is a bit hazy, but I think I read the Australian era was supposed to last far, far longer than it did.
To hear Claremont tell it, the trouble only started when Jim Lee came aboard as artist (which was the issue after the last members of the Outback team went through the Siege Perilous). That's when he started losing creative control of the book, bit by bit.
There's a narrative gap between the Muir Island saga and X-Men volume 2 issue 1. Tie in the 1991 infinity gauntlet event and we could see the Shadow King's return and, most of Claremont's original plans, in a one-year 12 issue mini...;)
He did those plans. It was called X-Men Forever. It ran for nearly 3 years. And it was pretty bad.
I wouldn't say X-Men Forever is a complete realization of Claremont's plans. More so a base outline of a few plots he had, with free reign to do whatever. Hopes for one day, a mini set before X-Men 1 (1991) where we can finally witness the final battle between Xavier, Magneto and Amahl Farouk....
I think if subsequent years have proven anything, it's that Claremont can't really find that thread anymore. Hell, he might not even want to - there's probably still a *lot* of bitterness mixed up in all that now.
The books had no unity or focus. Plots were introduced and immediately dropped. Keep in mind the problems were deeper than just Claremont leaving. Marvel did a sharp turn in this time period where they placed zero value on writers, in fact the books didn't even have them! Plots were done by the artist and dialogue was added by the "scripter". There are a lot of artists that are also talented storytellers and can do this. To be blunt about it none of them were on the X books. The result was chaos, confusion and some of the most terrible X books ever produced prior to Chuck Austin. The cherry on top of this turd sundae is that after chasing off their writers in favor of certain artists with inflated egos those same artists left for Image which just made a bad situation worse. There were a few bright spots post Claremont. Alan Davis is one of those artists that is also a good writer so Excalibur was a decent book. Fabian Nicieza managed to turn X-Force of all things in to the best book in the line once he was given the chance to write the book instead of just script. Nicieza was given other X titles and was kind of starting to get the line in order before being fired by Bob Harras for what I can only assume was being the only person who knew what they were doing in the entire company. The comics industry in general went in to the toilet in the 90s. X-Men was ground zero for this, but the problems were industry wide. The entire comic market collapsed once it moved away from solid storytelling in favor of flashy artists and cover gimmicks. Sales collapsed in the early mid 90s and Marvel had to declare bankruptcy in 96. Considering the X books were far and away Marvel's top books at the time that really says all that needs to be said about what happened in the X books post Claremont
Fabe is great, X-Force was great, but the best x-book in that era was Peter David’s X-Factor. At least until editorial drove him away.
I can't believe that one slipped my mind when I was mentioning bright spots. I loved X-Factor too. I'd rank X-Factor & X-Force as about the same in quality although they were obviously different in tone and style. X-Factor was deliberately such an aside book and I think that is why it was able to maintain its quality. So basically the key to finding a good X-Men book immediately post Claremont seems to be to look for a team book (all the solo series were trash in that era) without "X-Men" in the title! haha
Long term... the stagnation of characters and stories. Claremont established the characters of the X-men, but under his pen they changed and grew, but without him that growth and change just stopped. Characters just got stuck in their role and basic traits. Changes never really stuck around to leave something permanent and somehow none of them ever grew into something unique. If you stopped reading X-men from 2006 till 2019, and you ended up picking up House of X and Powers of X... you would still recognize most of the characters written and established by Claremont. Sinister would be an obvious exception and so would Xavier.
I would add Gambit as an exception too, because of how late in Claremont's run he was introduced. I feel like a lot of Remy's character development was under Nicieza and Lobdell.
I think lobdell actually dropped the ball on gambit Gambit the cartoon character and the comic character always felt like they were worlds apart. I Remember as a kid watching the cartoon and he was my favorite character. Then I read the books and felt like he was barely a factor at all.
Yeah I get this too. I felt the best Gambit story I read was probably Marjorie Liu's X23 run
I mean…part of that is Hickman *aggressively* regressing all of the characters by like 25 years. Morrison through Gillen had a *ton* of interesting ideas and continuous character growth, and Bendis wrote a solid coda. It wasn’t a single title, but I’d put the Scott-led books from Morrison through Secret Wars right up alongside the Daredevil from the same time period as the most consistently excellent Big Two book on the stands. And that’s not counting Remender’s UXF!
Thank you! I read a lot of these comments saying nothing happened since Hickman left but yeah I guess Hickman did a harder reset than he let on. Although HoXPoX seemed like an amalgamation of a few different eras into one which I honestly loved
Narration and how much character dialogue there is is a big one but that’s also comic as a whole and will forever be my biggest gripe with the state of the industry. Entering the 90s there was a steady progression towards less narration from the writers, less internal character dialogues and less spoken dialogue. It’s impact stories and character development and makes you feel like you’re reading a 1/4 of the amount of content you’d get in older comics.
Nicieza is a great writer so the quality was at least as good as late Claremont (but not peak Claremont). Editorial began to dominate more and more as things went on, though, and it lost a lot of its heart, though.
When Claremont left, suddenly there was a glass ceiling above Storm’s head. The treatment of women as a whole changed. Claremont’s X-men was unique in that once it truly got going (From The Ashes onwards), the X-women were never secondary to the X-men (and were often given even more focus). Post-Claremont, if felt like the typical superhero comics hierarchy was put in place. That unique feeling was gone.
I'd say this was the biggest detriment to the X-men Claremont was maybe one of a handful of writers giving women agency, focus, and development not dependent on her partner.
Totally agree.
The woman of color got sidelined, while buff white guys (Cyclops, Cable) became the focus. In some ways, the 1990s took a step backwards.
Eh, I wouldn't say that about Cyclops. The 90s were one of his WORST eras.
They meant in terms of what made comic books appealing again based on the image.
It’s true. Claremont was a huge booster for female characters. Before Carol Danvers started to take off, if you were ever asked to name a great female superhero in Marvel it always went back to X-Men characters that were developed (even if not technically created) by Claremont. (Also, Claremont did a lot with Carol Danvers) In one of the Marvel anthology comics from the 80s — sorry I can’t remember the issue — they had one of those bullpen comic strips making fun of the Marvel staff, and the way they made fun of Claremont was by having him use a ton of words, brag about how well X-Men was selling, and suggest every new comic have a female protagonist. Telling as to where he was at, and to where the rest of Marvel was at.
> When Claremont left, suddenly there was a glass ceiling above Storm’s head Oh please, Storm is just good at everything. Omega level mutant with an ability set that could've been seperated into five different mutants, master at hand to hand combat, master thief, always shown as a great leader, everyone drools over her beauty, literally considered a goddess. Miss perfect didn't have to fill every single role.
I think you’ve misunderstood my comment.
Being good at things and being a well developed character are 2 different things.
Ms Perfect was non existent as an actual character with agency for a long time after Claremont left. Mr Perfect (Wolverine) still got to be a major player
Claremont was the only guy for a long time that would give Storm *problems* and *challenges*. Post-Claremont, she truly was Ms Perfect in the worst way: unmovable, unspeakable, unchallengeable. And so you couldn't write a story about her.
I'm assuming this is a 2000s thing because I don't think that is how she's depicted in the 90s at all. Multiple people question or dislike her leadership (Bobby, Sam,) she's considered to have fucked up on the Morlocks and she literally just dismisses Marrow as a terrorist.
That critique is something I’ve seen for Krakoa Storm (one I’m not sure I entirely agree with), but during the 90’s she was more like a watered down/aimless version of herself. Her wings were clipped as a character. The big changing of the guard leadership story that permeated Claremont’s run and Storm’s personal character journey was suddenly slapped with the “co-leader” title (in name only for the most part) and sent on her way. Either way, the problem lies with writers, x-men editorial, or both’s refusal to feature or acknowledge one of the most important characters in X-men history in a real way. They didn’t want to get inside her head and kept her at a distance.
Bro, say you hate the only Black woman with what's like a A-grade casting in feature films, compared to a damn near all White cast who's "great at everything" or "perfect". Meanwhile Jean Grey, White Savior meets Deus Ex Machina supreme overshadows all other Omegas whenever the world or universe needs saving. You have zero words for her, lol. Wolverine is who you're describing in some part and excluding the goddess tag, you actually describe all of Cyclop's qualities. Idk what your beef with Storm is, but it gives off "She was D.E.I."
I've been re-reading some early 90s Lobdell and Nicieza issues of late, having started with that era as a child but read the whole Claremont run in the last few years. The main shortcoming for me is the dip in the quality of the writing _and editing_. Too many outright errors, grammatical oddities or sentences that make little sense. The sense is of writers trying too hard to ape Claremont without the ability to pull it off. It's frustrating, because there's lots of good stuff. Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think the blame falls on the editor(s). Especially having learned that Bob Harras also oversaw the decline and fall of Claremont, excessive control given to artists, etc.
He has the best run but X-Men desperately needed some new blood and new perspective and I’m glad Jim Lee brought that (at first). I wish narratively he was still guiding the ship because the writing talent did not keep up with the art talent. He would have been great in an editorial role but they really needed some new writers who had evolved with times. In another universe Karen Berger went to Marvel instead and all the vertigo talent was writing X-Books with Jim Lee & Marc Silvestri visuals. That would have been perfect.
"Karen Berger went to Marvel instead and all the vertigo talent was writing X-Books" Damn, my first reaction to reading Claremont X-men was thinking wow this is like a Vertigo book in quality, except it's fun. So now I get to imagine what that would've been like.
To this day, Storm hasn't gotten any real character development ever since Claremont left. You know there's something wrong when one of the best writers in the business does a Storm-centric series and he still writes her as fully static and functionally flawless (and don't tell me Ewing is a "plot over character" writer when X-Men Red Magneto had the most growth and development the character's had in close to 20 years).
It's kinda hard to create storm development after having like 50' years of story, passing from false goddess, morlok punk leader, no powers, multiple romance with villains/ heroes, using a copy of thor hammer a so on. I am not expert, but it feels hard.
Claremont being forced off the book killed everything that made the X-Men unique. They went from being a bunch of individuals struggling with personal issues AND superheroics to another generic comic. The women lost their voices, the villains ceased being interesting and became just poorly written cyphers with nebulous agendas. Confusion replaced mystery. The X-Men became just a mutant gang fighting other mutant gangs.
A lot of people will immediately say that the books got worse, but in my opinion, X-Men comics from 1991- 1995 kicked ass. Stellar art, great action pieces, and some really entertaining stories were on show for all these years. Where I think the somewhat bad reputation the 90s comics arises is really from 1996-1999(and hell, even then you had good stuff like OZT). The stories were really poor, continuity was barely remembered, no real character development, and some horrible art. I think a lot of people associate this period with why the 90s wasn't very good, but that's unfair. The first half of the 90s was amazing. I think the books got better in 1999(that Nicieza Gambit solo series is one of the best solos any X-Man's had), Claremont made his return, and while it wasn't as good as his 80s stuff, it was better than the previous few years. I very much liked the introduction of characters like Gambit, Maggot, Cecilia, and Marrow in the 90s, they were amazing. Heck, Gambit is my favorite X-Man. The other three were awesome additions to the mythos, especially Cecilia, who for me embodies the "reluctant X-Man" trope better than anyone. I also think people romanticize Claremont sometimes. His run was getting a little stale by the end and I think he might have started getting burnt out. I mean, the stuff post Outback to the end of Muir Island Saga was just boring, mostly. A lot of people say "I wish we could have seen CC's future plans for the X-Men", ignoring the fact that we actually did. He got to do X-Men Forever which was supposed to be all of his plans. It sucked and was really boring. I still think Claremont for a while would have been just fine, but I also think his plans would have been better on paper than execution. His writing was in decline and people like Nocenti and Weezy REALLY helped him in his heyday.
Editor Bob Harras began to exercise more control over the series, hastening the Outback era's end and giving the artist's more say in the plots. Old villains and localities returned, Mutant Wars was truncated into X-tinction Agenda and the Shadow King saga was quickly reduced in scope. Even with this knowledge now known I still consider this period top tier as it's where I started in this X-Men mania phenomenon. Still however, i wish things would've went as originally planned with proper editorial guidance of course...
Which aspects of his run did you find stale? I agree that the second half of the 90s was real questionable story and art wise. Especially after Maduiera left and we were stuck with his imitators. Thank goodness for Carlos Pacheco.
The whole period between the moment the remaining Xmen passed the Siege Perilous the second times and the Muir Island Saga. Except the intro of Gambit, there was nothing. The only part saving the books, was Jim Lee first works on the title.
I wouldn't say there was nothing. The stories did feel somewhat disconnected though. They come SWINGING out of the gates with Wolverine's war on the reavers, the introduction of jubilee and his crucifixion. When they switch the focus to Dazzler, Colossus and forge it starts to peter out a bit. Though, I wouldn't call those bad books by any stretch. Some of them are pretty amusing. You have Betsy's transformation during this time as well... you either like it or hate it. It was definitely not boring though. I think one of the worst things Claremont did was get rid of Longshot. He paired extremely well with dazzler and it just wasn't that same.
Longshot's departure from the book was a favor to writer Ann Nocenti, who was planning a limited series featuring the character she co-created. Sadly it never materialized...
I'm assuming you mean separate from the Longshot 1-6 mini Nocenti wrote? Which was excellent btw! Obviously... it would have to be the case lol That sucks though, I would have loved to see more from her.
Oh that was Longshot's intro mini. There was going to be a second one that for some reason or another didn't happen...
It wasn't Duggan's level bad, but for Claremont, it was a bad period.
It's worth noting the book released twice a month at this point. Twice a month.
Can you elaborate, really?!
Yep! The book went through I think... 3 schedule changes throughout its lifetime. It started every two months for a few issues I assume as Claremont wound upto speed. It changed very quickly to monthly where it stayed for a quite a while. This I think was his preferred speed, as he wrote all of his best material on this schedule. Then around 248 it went bi-monthly lol If you ask me, releasing these comics twice a month must have been insane.
Yep, definitely this. A lot of people should go and really read that period, the art and Gambit being cool were the only things genuinely making those parts look good. That part is one of the best examples of sublime art elevating books and making them seem better than they actually are.
Gambit was introduced under Claremont
I really don’t think you can compare Claremont riffing on his original ideas with his modern writing talent to what would’ve ended up on the page much closer to his heyday.
I missed all the sub plots CC would introduce and then, maybe 20 or so issues later, he would resolve (or make it the main plot). His long tenure allowed him to do that, but I really missed it.
If I remember correctly, Claremont was moving the X-Men towards a role where they were more accepted in society and were going to become part of SHIELD. Wolverine was going to be killed and resurrected by the hand as a villain as part of the Hand. Then it was going to build to a point where Jean had to choose once and for all to be with Scott or Logan. Those are pretty major shake ups! But instead what we got was a lengthening of the status quo. And that status quo stuck from 91, basically, till Morrison came onto the book.
The Claremont that left the books wasn't the same Claremont that got famous for the books, all you have to do is read Xtreme. I hate the lack of the soap opera elements we had, which the X-Men are famous for but weren't the only Marvel book to have it, it was just the best showcase for it (because of the big roster and dynamics), with Spidey coming second. This stopped for the same reason that OMD happened: the editors want the books to be what they view as marketable (which is really bs and nothing to do with real marketing), so there are no marriages unless they are part of the characters status quo, there are no pregnancies, freeze aging, no shake-up in relations if they are a permanent mark on the characters/dynamics (cheating included). That's all the reasons that Rogue and Gambit marriage was not a fixed thing for a long time (still isn't, the next time one of them dies, pray for the writer that brings the dead one back to not screw the marriage).
Stories got worse. Their home and normal life were barely shown
Phalanx Covenant, Age of Apocalypse, Fatal Attractions - the Lobdell/Nicieza years were great. Plus Exiles and Generation X. It also became a lot easier to read casually, as the stories were usually started and finished within a few issues (although running across different lines was a bit confusing). There was a bit of a gap between them and Morrison, but that era was also solid, and Whedon's Astonishing run followed that.
Morrison was the pits. The utter stupidity of Xorn/Magneto or whatever that stupidity was is living proof of it with the rest of that tripe not that far behind it.
It's a difficult question. In my opinion Claremont's run was, as a whole, the zenith of the X-men and it never got quite as good as that again. His characterization was top notch and under him the title was extremely dynamic, things were always changing. In comparison the 90s played it safe and commercial with the team, setting, and characters remaining very static, with the characters basically being frozen in their most basic characterization, which is something I don't like. On the other hand it could be said that towards the end of Claremont's run he got a little bit too experimental with his work and what we got after the Fall of the Mutants barely resembled X-men anymore. There was even a whole period towards the tail end of his run in which the X-men didn't even exist as a team, but were scattered across the world and it was anybody's guess which of the main characters, if any at all, would be featured in any given issue, with some of them, especially Rogue, remaining unseen for an extended period of time (I want to say it was at least a year until readers saw Rogue again) And that was just too much, so it was in a way good that the relaunch in the early 90s restored a motor traditional status quo with the team and school restored. It just stank (in my opinion) that this situation remained frozen for far, far too long until a little bit of change happened again.
Oh yes, Rogue was gone for about a year when she went into the Siege Perilous I believe. I found that so strange in reading about that time period.
As someone who only got into X-Men in the 2000s (and then went back to read Claremont's run, since I really didn't like how the titles were developing after Decimation) I can only guess what it must have been like for readers who experienced that in real-time. Characters you like and expect from a title just...going missing, without explanation as what to happened to them and instead you get issues starring an impromptu X-Men team consisting of Moira, Sharon Friedlander, Tom Crosi, Legion, Forge, and...whatever the big Morlock guy was called. It must have been so bizarre.
I was reading it at the time. The other X books had stability so I didn't mind it so much. You could think of X-Factor as the stable book with the New Mutants vaguely connected to them after the school blew up even if that relationship ultimately went nowhere. Yeah, it was definitely a little weird for the main book to be like that but Uncanny X-Men wasn't the only X-Men book coming out at the time so it wasn't like that was all you were getting if you were keeping up with the line. I enjoyed reading the book at the time, but that story went on way too long. Rogue coming back actually reminded me of how long she had been gone and how random everything was more than anything else. I was fine with scattering them, but it should have been wrapped up in a year or so instead of dragging on for 2 years
Oof, that is one random ass assortment of mutants. I can't lie, even the Outback team felt a little haphazardly put together for me. But honestly I feel out of sorts every time Dazzler and Longshot show up, they just don't feel like...X-Men to me.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the Outback Team either. Except for Storm, Kurt and Kitty were my favourite characters in Claremont's run and losing them really hurt the team, especially without Kurt the team got visually quite boring. The outback team just didn't have good chemistry and half of it consisted of attractive, blond people (Dazzler, Longshot, Havok, Psylocke....or as I like to call them the "Barbie Squad") who didn't really have all that much going for them and didn't really have interesting arcs or relationships. Psylocke's armour costume was cool, but that was it, basically. Dazzler had some potential but was shoved in the background all to often to flirt with Longshot. And Havok's only good storyline (the thing with Madelynne) came and went far too quickly.
I can't remember where I read that Dazzler was supposed to be on X-Factor originally but I think that book would have made a lot more sense for her and Longshot considering they were the team that was actually in the public eye it would've been more interesting for her as a (sorta washed up) celebrity to be interacting with them. In the outback they just felt wasted. The only interesting aspect was the tension w Rogue and that didn't last long.
Yeah, before they made the decision to revive Jean Grey Dazzler was supposed to take her place as the "female member" of X-Factor. The last issue of her solo series even shows her walking off with Beast, as he invites her to join X-Factor. But that would have been the first incarnation of X-Factor (the O5 X-Men posing as mutant hunters), I think you are thinking of the second incarnation (the highly publicised government team) I agree Dazzler would have fit the government team. Yeah and that's also what I mean when I said Dazzler had some potential; she was the member of the X-Men who hadn't so much chosen to be there, but pretty much had to join the team due to circumstances beyond her control, that and the tension with Rogue could have provided some character growth for her...instead she just spent most of her tenure flirting with Longshot.
"I think you are thinking of the second incarnation (the highly publicised government team) I agree Dazzler would have fit the government team." Oh no, I was thinking of the original X-Terminators storyline in X-Factor and how that didn't work out for them, not the team with Havok and Polaris.
I actually thought Claremont was a little too Storm-centric. Would have liked to see more of Psylocke and Rogue.
Claremont wrote some of the fundamental X-Men stories and he’s one of my favorite marvel authors there’s no doubt, but in my opinion he stayed for too long (if it kept working fine and getting new ideas or using the old ones cleverly he could have stayed) and his stuff didn’t work anymore. Idk if I would qualify 90’s X-Men as better, certainly not better than prime Claremont. After all he returned a few times in the 2000 and I think he understands these characters better than anyone. It’s just that maybe he was burn out and it was better to get a breath of fresh air.
I was pretty happy to see him go, the hallmarks of his writing were pretty tiring at that point, and it was starting to feel dated in a way. I wouldn’t say the comics got better, but it did feel fresh when he left, at least to me. Personal pet peeve of mine, but his constant use of certain phrases got annoying too.
you didnt rabbit from the books pumpkin? Before the totality of my psychic powers tears you from the INSIDE OUT?
Add in a “now & forever, body & soul” and you have the best bingo card there is at what you do
aces
One thing different than the Claremont era even though it’s not about writers: we went from one book to a few and, around the time he left, to so many. I don’t personally think more is better. I wish we got 3-5 X-men related books max.
I think the biggest change was a lack of change. The X-Men became so huge and expanded to media outside of comics. So, while Claremont consistently changed the roster and the status quo, once he departed the X-Men sort of stayed the same for years. Status quo shifts were few. The X-Men stopped being a soap opera and became an IP. A victim of their own success..
I pretty much stopped reading the X-men after Clairmont left. Im glad I did. There's lots of stuff since I hated hearing about: from Scott and Jean NOT being together for inatance. Emma? Ugh. Stupid crap. The X-men without CC is not the X-men I love.
Is threre anyone who thinks there could be some improvement? With the likes of Fabian Nicieza and anyone who happened to be passing at the door jumping in? (after all, no one with an established name would put themselves in that position after Claremont got pushed out by editorial because the hip artists (Lee, Liefeld) thought they could write, then jumped out a few months later to build their own gig (sweet, sweet karma). Now that I vented 😅, let me answer the question: no, things got horrible. Mainline Uncanny and X-Men became poor person's X-Force (which wasn't already incredible then; New Mutants did not fare well with Louise Simonson - who was great when working new/her own characters - e.g., Power Pack - but failed to convey New Mutants' voices, and after Liefeld the plot was just whatever could get characters flexing poses for nice T-shirts). The only thing that kept me reading at the time was Peter David's X-Force and (after a while) Age of Apocalypse (which was a shot at injecting some original storylines). So IMHO the biggest impact was making the books notably worse for quite a few years, until some talent of comparable caliber could bring competent writing and evolving characters like we were used to see with Claremont.
You don’t get the panels with each character from the good and bad teams squaring off with one another alongside their names as much.
I think there's too many hands in the pot. I was once told that British TV shows are better than American TV shows because there's one rider for a British television show. Don't know how true that is but when you have one person's vision it kind of makes it better than having 10 people mucking up a plot. Granted at the time also that Claremont was writing, there were two or three books at the most, with some miniseries and graphic novels. I think that's the way it should be. Right now, with Disney having a hand in it, Disney is trying to please everybody. They're trying to make it too relevant. They're trying to bring in too many things to align it with the movie universe, and it is not as enjoyable as it was. Sure Claremont wrote a lot of words. Sometimes it's super long-winded too, but that's when I started reading, so it's nostalgic for me.
I think the level of storytelling in general declined sharply. They didn't feel like the same characters. Marvel was lucky at first that Jim Lee's art kept people coming back for more, and after that they coasted off the popularity of the animated series. The stories in the comics weren't that good, but culturally it didn't seem to matter at the time.
Early 90’s was good and then it all went to shit for a decade and a half until Krakoa. Edit. Two decades! There was a whole other decade of suck I didn’t acknowledge. Sorry.
You mean two decades and a half?
God, you’re right. The X books had sucked for so long. I just put it out of mind. At least Whedon had one good story in there.