Once again, a dispatch from my big comic-collection reread, where I've now moved onto my much-diminished Marvel collection. Just as reading my DC books started with the Justice League, which was my favorite of those titles, here I've started with the X-Men, which is what got me into superhero comics in the first place. Though the book that did that was (New) X-Men #1, I've started with Uncanny X-Men, the title that had gone back to the team's creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Like most comics readers of my age and generation, the Chris Claremont version is pretty much definitive, having given us a lot of the ideas and characters that we associate with the team now. Because of my searches for back-issues back in the 90s, my collection of his run goes all the way from the late 70s to his departure in the early 90s, so that you can get a sense of how he reused characters and settings over time.
Something that struck me recently, as I read the Muir Island Saga that ended his run on Uncanny, was how well he developed sub-plots over a long time, so that they paid off years later. The Muir Island Saga took place in 1991, but we started to see hints of the Shadow King's takeover there in issues from 1987 or 88, taking advantage of other storylines and subplots that had taken place even earlier. Rereading these issues, I remembered feeling the same awe at seeing a bunch of storylines come together as I did back in the 90s when his run on Excalibur came to an end (though sadly I only have one issue of that run remaining).
Part of what let him put all those subplots in place was the enormous breadth of characters that he created for the book. The main X-Men team, at that time, was believed to be dead but was actually operating from an abandoned outback Australian town. Events conspired to separate them and deposit them, with memories erased, all around the world, leaving Wolverine to go and collect them again. At the same time, tipped off by Jean Grey, two marginal X-Men, Banshee and Forge, went looking for them, while also investigating the odd happenings on Muir Island. On this read I enjoyed the way these characters, who either weren't very well-established or hadn't been seen for a long time, alternated as leads with the main X-Men characters, giving a sense of a self-contained universe.
This period is also notable for being when Marc Silvestri and then Jim Lee were drawing the book. I was a little surprised at how rough Silvestri's style was at this time, somewhat inconsistent and not very recognizable to the linework of his later Cyberforce or Witchblade comics - probably the effect of his inker Dan Green, though I could be wrong. Lee's style, meanwhile, undergoes an interesting transition from his early, Art Adams and manga-influenced work, to the linework that's become more associated with him.
Lee's style, in particular, gave rise to legions of inferior imitators, especially once he and Silvestri and others decamped to Image to create their own books. Interestingly, you can see Claremont's influence there too, as a lot of early WildCATs or Gen13 stories feel like what the writers think Claremont would do. This is both in the breadth and type of villains, and in the ponderous language used in the narrative captions.
One thing that I don't love about Claremont's work now is how wordy it is. Compared with a Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis, who either don't use narrative captions or use them less, these X-Men books take a long time to read, because there's so much speech and narration going on. His language isn't as stilted as, say, Roy Thomas's (my earliest X-Men issue is the one where Thomas introduces Sauron, with typically florid language), but I do remember a friend in college laughing about the vocal tics that Claremont was known for.
The other thing is his accents, which are uniformly terrible. Rogue's is pretty bad, but Banshee's is worse - if you've ever heard an Irish accent in real life you won't recognize it in how Claremont wrote him. Moira MacTaggart's Scottish accent is also not great, in part because Claremont didn't seem able to distinguish it from Banshee's Irish one. These are kind of minor quibbles, but they get magnified by the legions of inferior imitators who propagate these terrible accents because that's how Chris did them.
Because I haven't gotten to New X-Men yet, or read what was happening around the books, I don't recall exactly why Claremont left the books when he did. What I can say is that he left just as they got big in the wider culture, with the 90s animated show using a lot of the characters, designs and plots of that New X-Men reboot period. As I've suggested before, this wider attention is a mixed blessing, because even though it means more people are familiar with the work, it also puts pressure on the creators not to veer too wildly from what viewers of the TV show or movies are familiar with.
Another way of saying that is that Claremont's more long-form, sub-plot driven stories, with less-recognizable characters in less typically superheroic situations, wouldn't have worked in the X-Men's imperial phase of the 90s. Unfortunately, in the hands of lesser writers, the whole universe became bloated and unwieldy, which at least led to the creative rebirth of the late 90s and early 2000s, where Grant Morrison took on New X-Men.
I'll probably write more about that later, but it's interesting that it took a talent like Morrison to shake the X-Men free of Claremont's influence. Though it has to be said, rereading his run emphasizes how much better he was than the writers who immediately followed him.
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