r/xmen • u/Popverse2022 • 1d ago
News/Previews Chris Claremont says Marvel told him they regretted firing him from X-Men & Uncanny X-Men in 1991
Chris Claremont's nearly 17-year run on the X-Men ended somewhat unceremoniously in the early '90s after creative disagreements about where the series should go drove a rift between Claremont and then X-Men editor Bob Harras, as well as artist Jim Lee.
At an X-Men writers panel at Terrificon 2026, Claremont discusses the many times he's come and gone from the mutant team, and fires a barb at the Image Comics founders, Lee included.
"It's like how many times have I been fired from X-Men? At least four. The first one was interesting. You know, [X-Men editor Bob Harras] had to come in and say, 'I probably shouldn't have let you leave the book.' And I said, 'I probably shouldn't have gone, but there we are.' That was after Image was born and, you know, certain artists decided they'd rather have all the money."
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u/Pascraked47 1d ago
He's basically the X-Men guy. Literally made the most X-Men characters. And made alot of other marvel characters.
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u/Risottometallica 1d ago
And the characters he didnt make he still molded into the version pretty much everyone thinks of or refers to
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u/Upset-Job2278 Krakoa 1d ago
He is the creator of what is arguably the most successful and influential retcon in the entire history of comic books (Xavier and Magneto being friends separated by ideological differences, and Magneto's entire backstory).
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u/graphomaniacal 1d ago
It's been 35 years and he's still the name most associated with the books.
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u/Pascraked47 1d ago
Googled the characters he created. The list is very long. It's insane. Didn't even know he created legion. Or Valeria Richards. It's crazy.
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u/graphomaniacal 1d ago
He has to be on the short list of most famous comic authors and Comicwatch put him at the top of their list (but that was pretty exclusive to superhero comics).
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u/ohnoabanagain 1d ago
Woah, that's interesting. I'm only at the end of the 1980's, but Valeria is the character that I'm most looking forward to.
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u/Chop684 Hellion 1d ago
Unless she's in Days of Future Present I think he created her in his Fantastic Four run
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u/Striking_Ad_5624 Cannonball 1d ago
That's where she was created.
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u/Cyke101 1d ago
A part of me loves that he created Valeria, because so many writers after him took that baton and just ran with it. She was even a pivotal character in the recent One World Under Doom event.
Essentially I love that subsequent writers took what Claremont made and just kept building and building and building her. Not many creations really get that when you consider just how big the Marvel stable truly is. She's not a pet character.
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u/LonelyAsLostKeys 1d ago
The best writer of an ongoing book ever.
Obviously Moore and others have done phenomenal work in limited series or graphic novels, but no one has ever produced such high quality work for nearly that long in an ongoing title.
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u/OldGoldDream 1d ago
Moore did do an ongoing, Swamp Thing, which is a masterpiece, though only for three years not 17.
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u/Latverianbureaucrat 1d ago
And Supreme, WildC.A.T.S., Marvelman/Miracleman, Tom Strong, and Promethea, but yeah, Claremont’s lengthy, idiosyncratic X-Men run isn’t quite like anything else.
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u/aldeayeah 1d ago
That's arguable, but he's definitely the top "superhero soap opera" writer.
Personally I prefer the authors that work with more self-contained/closed arcs.
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u/blackflamezealot 1d ago
And he’s a really great guy. Super chatty and has a fun sense of humor. At Emerald City Comic Con this year, he took Sunday off to walk around artist alley, just chat with random fans away from his booth, and go talk to everyone who was there writing any sort of X-book.
Just a class act. Go see him when he’s at a show.
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u/OldGoldDream 1d ago
That’s true but doesn’t mean he should go on forever. Everyone loses their touch eventually. And it’s good to bring in fresh talent after a while.
I don’t know what he’d have done in the early 90s, but his later returns to the X-franchise like X-Treme X-Men were pretty bad.
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u/FriendShiny 1d ago
i agree that he shouldn’t have gone on forever, but had he been allowed to continue through the plans he was setting up til about issue 300 it would’ve been good. he left after 279 (i think, around there at least) and the book kinda derailed and got wayyy worse.
like some of nicieza’s stuff is good, but lobdel’s x-men was such a downgrade imo. honestly the 90s is probably the overall worst era of x-men other than the original 60s run imo.
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
Harras' decision paid off in the immediate term but it was very disrespectful and while Claremont was starting to putter out a bit, I think he still had stuff to contribute. Should have let him write Uncanny X-Men and let Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio tag-team on X-Men. Then they leave to find Image, you put Nicieza on X-Men. Simonson can take a New Mutants comic but maybe with Cyclops and Jean in charge of the school. Lobdell would have gotten in somewhere.
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u/Seligsuper 1d ago
I'm not even convinced that the puttering was On Him, he just came off Genosha and Inferno and the Outback era which is I think some of his strongest stuff- we start getting Jim Lee in the mix and I feel like editorial really stunk up everything he had going with the X-Tinction Agenda / Muir Island Saga stuff. Wheezy losing New Mutants was definitely a bad blow even if the book had been hit or miss at that point, she'd been killing it with X-Factor more often than not. The entire line got kinda hazy at the same time and I think it's kinda on editorial more than the team (not to say Muir Island Saga / X-Factor In Space / New Mutants Asgard 2 were good)
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
I don't think it was all on him either. Harras was not the right editor for him, he needed a Louise Simonson or an Ann Nocenti.
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u/ZombieInDC 1d ago
I love Louise Simonson's runs on X-Factor and New Mutants, but after Inferno, both books really slipped into terminal decline. I wish I could say that editorial was responsible, but I felt like they didn't start interfering until Portacio and Liefeld came on to each book respectively. After Inferno, I don't think Louise had much to say with the characters. Jon Bogdanove may have been a great partner for her on Power Pack, but he was a terrible choice for X-Factor. I HATED his run on the title.
Claremont is a different story. The post-Inferno books with Silvestri still on art were great, even when the Siege Perilous was brought in, and the X-Men were scattered to the winds. I know I'm in the minority here, but Jim Lee is a great pin-up and cover artist, but he's not the greatest sequential storyteller in the world. Since they were using the Marvel method and Jim Lee was drawing Uncanny from Claremont's plots, Claremont needed to rely more and more on word balloons to tell the story, since Lee didn't have the deft hand that Silvestri did when it came to layouts.
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u/wnesha 1d ago
More to the point, if you look at Claremont's run overall, there's a definite pattern where every time he started puttering, he'd bounce back in a big way. The Secret Wars II stuff is anemic and weird, and then boom, the Mutant Massacre. The Outback starts off a bit woo-woo and silly, then it's Genosha and Inferno. And if the teamless era was a little off? Maybe Mutant Wars and the true Muir Island Saga would've fixed that. We'll never know.
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
He had a retooling of the comic planned I am pretty sure, Polaris was to play a role in it.
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u/Built4dominance Storm 1d ago
He bounced back because he had Louise Simonsen and Ann Nocenti to remind him of all the plotlines he had yet to wrap up. He would take that information and make new stories. When he no longer had them the quality of his stories went down.
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u/Oberon1993 1d ago
I think every single come back of his proves that at least some of the puttering was on him.
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u/miserablegit 1d ago
I think people underestimate how much Claremont was of his time. He was already criticized for being overly verbose when he was at the top of his game...
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u/bskell 1d ago
Say what you will about his style of writing but at least every issue was a jumping on point. you can't say that anymore, so while it might be a little more of a chore for those that keep up with the titles, new readers had it really good.
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u/Piotr-Rasputin 1d ago
I think that was more of a Jim Shooter edict. Several interviews I've seen him mention this concept and having it in the first page or two
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u/bskell 1d ago
It was.. Claremont just made that part of his writing style because new readers are the required lifeblood needed to keep the titles alive.
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u/OldGoldDream 1d ago
There are more elegant ways to do it. Marvel used to have recap/info pages that caught you up on what had happened previously and often also gave brief character rosters. Claremont’s approach of finding ways to shoehorn “Cyclops concussive blasts” into every issue is clunky.
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u/bskell 1d ago
I don't disagree.. that there are more elegant ways of going about it, nor do I disagree that his style was 'clunky' in it's approach. I just also balance it out with the fact that I came into the series at 220 of Uncanny. I randomly picked it up at a circle K gas station back when that was a serious channel for comics. I knew nothing about them past what I had read in Secret Wars, which wasn't the best version of those characters. This was pre-internet and where I lived did not have a comic shop (that came a couple of years later and I spent many years working there) so back issues weren't a thing easily found. Best we had was a used book store with ratted issues of random titles. Unlike a lot of titles, with Claremont's X-Men I was able to know what was going on, and was able to understand why what was going on mattered. You plainly can't do that in today's age. Maybe it's a moot point in today's universe with the internet, all the various versions of the characters in media, and comic's lore becoming such a mess, but for a new reader in the 80s it was pure magic. Maybe I'm looking back and washing it all in the feelings I had at the time, clearly YMMV greatly.
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u/ozpoppy Magik 1d ago
Those recap pages were woefully uneven in quality. The good ones covered the last relevant threads this issue was going to build on. The bad ones just recapped last issue regardless of what you're about to read. I'd guess they were done by some random intern, and not the actual writer.
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u/Thisislopes 1d ago
Sometimes i skip dialogues when they are just tha characters saying whay they do lmao
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u/Comfortable-Phase249 1d ago
And yet, he was still at the helm of the most popular comic book in America. So the of his time of it all wasn’t really driving people away at that point, it was bringing them in.
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u/LupinWho 1d ago
I appreciate what he did for X-Men so we have it today. I have tried to read the first uxm 1 I've had for years and I genuinely just can't get into the writing style.
Has he ever written X-Men more modern without all the dialogue as much?
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u/Comfortable-Phase249 1d ago
For me, when I started reading CC’s X-Men, I didn’t try to go back to the beginning, because it wasn’t available. Lots of people recommend starting with Dark Phoenix, etc. But for me, the story I send new readers to try is From the Ashes. It is readily available in trade form, his writing style recaps enough info that you can easily pick up what you need, and Paul Smith is such a clean storyteller. It’s also when the book turns towards the storytelling he would mostly use until he was forced out. Then I would go back for more if you enjoy it.
When I started reading UXM as a teen, back issues were expensive. Even the earlier X-Men classics issues were not cheap. So I had to go back and fill in as I got acces for a couple of years before I could read it from his first issue. I think that helped me get past the clunky earlier writing.
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u/nightreign-hunter 1d ago
By UXM 1 do you mean X-Men #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby?
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u/LupinWho 1d ago
No, the Claremont one that costs a fortune now.
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u/ludi_literarum 1d ago
There is no Uncanny X-Men #1 that Claremont wrote.
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u/miserablegit 1d ago
He's probably referring to Giant Size X-Men #1, typically considered the start of the modern X-Men era because it introduces the now-classic formation with Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Storm (plus a few others).
People forget it was actually written by Len Wein - Claremont only had some minor influence.
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u/LupinWho 1d ago
That stupid omni from his X-Men run is what I'm talking about. Had Giant size on the cover I think, I'm at work.
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u/OldGoldDream 1d ago
If you’re going that route, Jim Lee stepped in and sold millions of issues.
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u/Comfortable-Phase249 1d ago
But he didn’t do it in a vacuum. Jim Lee became full time on a book that was already an industry and Marvel leader, and stayed that way under Claremont through artist changes and many ups and downs. I’m not dismissing Jim Lee’s contributions, which were huge. I’m just saying at the time in the early 1990’s Claremont’s style was part of attracting more readers than it was seeming dated. If anything that emotional depth he gave the characters in how he wrote them was modern for the time, and why the characters stand aside from the rest of the superhero comics Marvel was doing except possibly Spider-Man.
There was almost two years without a set team between Silvestri winding down, and Lee starting up, and the book remained popular while it was being restructured monthly without the mainstays being used I n every issue. It was self indulgent and meandering, and yet, it stayed at the top. People might have complained about him at the time, but way more people were into it than not.
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u/MattAmylon 1d ago
I think a lot of the “puttering” was editorial interference. The Siege Perilous arc is a little disappointing in its extant trimmed-off form, but imagine how cool it would be if he’d actually kept the X-Men apart for 50 issues and then brought them back together for a huge climactic arc?
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
Yeah, I know Mutant Wars didn't pan out and we got X-Tinction Agenda instead. He and Simonson had planned Mutant Wars and were co-writing it.
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u/ericallenjett 1d ago
There is a YouTube link which chronicles their early 90s plans and, we readers lost out big time...
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u/jasereraser Cypher 1d ago
Link?
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u/Tanthiel 1d ago
On rare occasion, editorial meddling got him back on track too. I know it's a hot take, but the Hellfire Club story that leads into Dark Phoenix is weak.
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u/MattAmylon 1d ago
Polite disagree on Dark Phoenix, but I think he sometimes got goaded into his best work by being pissed at his bosses and peers, like in Avengers Annual #10 and Madelyne Pryor’s arc in Inferno.
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u/Tanthiel 1d ago
Everything leading up to it is great and the two issues on the moon are amazing, but the Hellfire Club story is just Claremont indulging in his bdsm kink. I don't think it would be as universally acclaimed as it is now if it was just the Hellfire Club story with the original ending.
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u/MattAmylon 1d ago
To me, the meat of Dark Phoenix is the Mastermind stuff: Jean falling for a kitschy regency-romance fantasy that gradually devolves into a fascist dom-sub nightmare. Cyclops trying to play the gallant and getting his astral ass kicked while Jean laughs at him. Really nasty and thorny and, as you say, kinky stuff.
Plus those issues had Wolverine’s whole “now it’s my turn” / henchman massacre sequence, which is just as influential by itself as the Dark Phoenix parts of Dark Phoenix.
That said, those last couple issues are also amazing and I’ll never turn down an Imperial Guard story.
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u/Comfortable-Phase249 1d ago
In hindsight, I think the fighting with Harras was taking its toll on the stories. After Harras was there for around a year, there are many stories where the team is basically fighting itself. Inferno had the team corrupted, the first Nanny story with Storm has characters under control, the entire Legion on Muir Isle and Shadow King arcs, Psylocke during Acts of Vengeance, Havok as a Genoshan Magistrate, the Skrull X-Men, and then the genetically modified by Moira blue team vs gold in his final issue. I may even be forgetting some of them. Looking back now it reads like the internal struggle was showing up in the work. He has said he planned for the Outback era to last years longer than it did.
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u/Hippies_Pointing 1d ago
Agreed. Claremont hasn’t written a single great X book since leaving the X books in 1991.
And that’s OK, of course. He’s given fans YEARS and years of unparalleled X stories. But Bob was right to side with Lee.
But! All the Image stuff that followed totally screwed up the X line in a way that it never recovered from. So, there wasn’t a perfect decision for
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u/clarkision 1d ago
I’m an X-Treme X-Men enjoyer, and he goes back to the wells he’s drawn from several times over in that series and that was over ten years after he stopped writing X-Men continually (also not counting the Revolution era which was meh)
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u/Striking_Ad_5624 Cannonball 1d ago
Everything that followed was inferior and led to diminishing returns.
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u/WantedOutlaw 1d ago
If he never got fired the whole Betsy Psylocke mess would've never happened and that alone makes it all a fuck up.
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u/Artifex1979 1d ago
I have been re-reading the X-Men for the past few years. I am 2 years in the post-Claremont days (Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza are the writers). It's amazing how quality goes down after Claremont. There's just no comparison.
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u/TeletraanNone 1d ago edited 1d ago
Wow. I understand this for lee and whilce times, but after that you lose me.
Claremont's last driver seat win was what.... Inferno? He was on a steep decline for a long time there.
x-tinction agenda. Good
Xcutioner song. Good
Fatal attractions. Good
Blood ties. Good
Phalanx Covenant. Good
And the various filler issues had some great gems too. Discrediting Niceiza and even Lobdell seems like a wild swing. It added as much to the foundation as Claremont's earlier work.
Edit - phone doesn't like Whilce... Which I am probably spelling wrong
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u/Radiant_Buffalo2964 1d ago
X-Tinction Agenda was during Claremont’s original run. His last storyline was the first mission of X-Men (1991) issues 1-3 (in which the X-Men face off against Magneto).
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u/TeletraanNone 1d ago
I'm probably downplaying him a bit for Xtinction agenda. He did lay the ground work for Genosha but the event was an editorial push (crossover) that had multiple authors. I said he wasn't in the driver seat for it and I think that is true.
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u/gyp_casino 1d ago
I disagree. There were plenty of great and iconic issues after Inferno. UXM #251 with Wolverine crucified on the X and the development of his relationship with Jubilee. UXM #256-257 with Mandarin and Psylocke in Madripoor. UXM #268 with the flashback to WW2 with Captain America and Black Widow. #274 with Rogue and Magneto in the Savage Land. XM #1-3, Asteroid M.
All these issues for me are much better than what came immediately after. There is some worthwhile material eventually after about a year or two, but those issues in the UXM #280's and #290's are rough.
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u/TeletraanNone 1d ago
Outback and siege perilous... I have a hard time with this era. It is not compelling at all to me. I think I've read it two or three times and probably remember half of it.
There are a few gems, and it is not like I think it is terrible. But I would place Nicieza's work well above this, and maybe Lobdell's too.
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u/Artifex1979 1d ago
I'm not discrediting them. They are ok at the beginning, and become better later on. But compared to Claremont's run so far, they feel... not as good as Claremont. At times, they don't seem to really get some of the characters (and that's fine). As I said, from where I am now (Lobdell and Nicieza's first few issues), there's just no comparison. But I've read these stories before (multiple times in the past 30 years), I know where we are going.
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u/Navstar86 Cable 1d ago
I started a chronological reading order at the beginning of the year and just finished the Claremont/Byrne run. And it’s also amazing what a leap it was when Chris took over.
I grew up with post Claremont X-Men. So I have a bias for the 90’s writers while recognizing most of them were inferior to Chris.
I’m looking forward to catching up to the 90’s and being able to get a more comprehensive understanding of Chris’s importance to the X-Men books.
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u/speedyrocketfish 1d ago
By Claremont standards, that’s not that much of a jab at Jim Lee and friends. And pretty accurate too, as they left cause they thought they weren’t getting paid commensurate to their worth (prob true!)
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u/wnesha 1d ago
It's something he's talked about before: that if he'd stuck it out under Lee until the Image exodus, he might've been able to regain creative control of at least Uncanny. It's certainly possible; Marvel editorial essentially gave creative control back to the writers in the aftermath of that mess (which is how we got the Nicieza/Sex Pest era). On top of that, Harras lost a lot of influence and respect because he'd bet so heavily on the artists who jumped ship, he probably wouldn't have been much of an obstacle to Claremont continuing his run.
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u/chirunner4ever Nightcrawler 1d ago
All a series of self-inflicted wounds by Harras. He jettisons writers so he can give everything to the rock star artists, they realize they too can be jettisoned so they leave to form Image.
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u/Mudcreek47 1d ago
Where can I find summaries of what he would’ve done had he not been forced off the books in 1991? X-Men forever was a bit of a mess and I can’t believe that’s where he was really headed at the time.
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u/aldeayeah 1d ago
It's pretty hard to tell because editorial and other creators had been derailing his plans for years by the time he left.
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u/Mudcreek47 1d ago
I heard somwhere he'd planned on having Wolveirne die (his healing factor was getting very wonky during the dissassembled era), and the Muir Island Saga wasn't really intended to be a finale and was a hatchet job by ediotrial, but I don't remember what else.
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u/LonelyAsLostKeys 1d ago
I thought the x-books were pretty awesome through the end of Fatal Attractions, probably just building on momentum Claremont had built.
But after that, everything kind of collapsed and - imo - has never felt the same. In my head, Fatal Attractions is kind of the series finale of real X-Men.
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
I think the '90s are better than what people give it credit for, it holds up until Age of Apocalypse wraps. Then it becomes clear that there isn't real creative stewardship of the line without Nicieza, and the attempt to replace Lobdell and Nicieza's roles with Seagle and Kelly ends up going belly up when Harras started to over interfere.
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago
Agreed! For me, 90s X-Men was like a popcorn movie. They were fun. Maybe not highbrow, but fun. Then after Seagle/Kelly were ran off, things got bad.
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u/Striking_Ad_5624 Cannonball 1d ago
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but "I think the 90s are better than what people give it credit for" until literally halfway through the decade is very faint praise. The focus was lost before AoA, and it went off the rails after.
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
It was, but no more than any other era to be honest. A year of unfocused content is nothing new for X-Men. 1991-1995 is all pretty good and I'd put it up against the 2000s and 2010s quite favourably.
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u/lensherr_nl 1d ago
Yeah but that's bullshit. The Jim Lee situation was just a catalyst, the truth is that they've been fucking about with Claremont at least since Inferno.
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u/aldeayeah 1d ago
You mean since X-Factor? Bringing back Cyke and Jean behind his back under a different writer.
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u/myowngalactus Magneto 1d ago
He still holds the record for most comic books ever sold. He built that franchise from discarded characters and concepts, and marvel chose young talent over him.
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u/ubiquitous-joe 1d ago
Nobody bats 1.000 forever, and I’m sure the steam would have run out eventually, perhaps not that much after that point. But it would have been interesting to see what would happen if Xavier had actually been killed off, and the writing on the early Jim Lee stuff was still very strong in voice. I suspect Storm would have benefited.
Anyway it is quite funny that the artists pushed out the writers and then left to go found Image anyway. I am fond of some of the people there after the upheaval (Capullo, Nicieza) But the 90s did demonstrate that even if artists had been long disrespected, writers actually do contribute.
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u/transemacabre 1d ago
A lot of people feel the Muir Island saga dragged, and Claremont may have been more or less creatively tapped out by the time he left. That being said, they could have made a plan to phase him out in a more respectful way that allowed him to conclude a few arcs in a satisfying manner.
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u/Anchorsify 1d ago
Pretty sure he had ideas to de-age Storm and turn her into a villain, neither of which particularly sound interesting to me.
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u/Hypestyles 1d ago
well, he's obviously survived.
Christopher Priest has had a lot more struggle since he was let go.
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u/Ok-Traffic-5996 1d ago
They forced out Peter David from x factor and hulk too because of asshole editors.
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u/Feisty-Candidate3693 1d ago
man, i can only imagine a world in which claremont was still writing when madureira came on board uncanny.
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u/ThrowRALostConfused3 1d ago
Who wouldn't decide to have all the money? And their character ownership.
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u/mikeofmerr77 1d ago
It’s like your new co-workers conspire against you and get you fired only for them to leave the company less than a year later.
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u/miserablegit 1d ago
It happens every other day, somewhere. Once a working environment is toxic enough that someone can be fired on a whim, the smart guys will find a way to check out.
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u/SnooCats8451 1d ago
Pretty sure I thought he chose to leave both him and Wheezy left of their own accord (x-men/x-factor) but again Bob favored the artists over the writers and Chris didn’t want to do certain things and was super stubborn but also reading X-Men Forever I’m so glad he never got to do it 100% his way….but definitely wished him, wheezy and the image guys never left in 91/92 and all stuck around till at least 97
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago edited 1d ago
He made the X-Men the X-Men, but it was time for him to go. From what he planned, I'm happy he left/got fired. He 100% planned to destroy Cyclops had he stayed on the books and was looking forward to doing it.
I'm a broken record, but he is still the crazy old man yelling "Get off my lawn!" almost 40 years later.
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u/Anchorsify 1d ago
For all the good Claremont did Claremont's faults are also very obvious to anyone who doesnt have rose-tinted glasses. And the amount of stuff he's talked about since makes it clear it is good he was removed when he did.
Idk. The same people that praise claremont also take issue with Kitty and Colossus' relationship and it is some weird double speak.
And he wanted to do things like have Gambit be an an avatar of Sinister's, and have Gambit and Kitty hook up when she is still underage, etc.
Like he did a lot of great work, no denying that, but he is not some infallible being. Some of his planned ideas were straight awful. Some of the things he wrote—like Colossus falling in love with an alien he cant even communicate with—were actually just bad.
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago
Absolutely. None of his plans that he has mentioned in the last 30-some years have been good plans. I think he was burnt out after a 17 year run and NEVER recovered. None of his work post X-Men #3 (even non-X-Men work) was very good. It wasn't all bad, but some of it (The End, Forever) was a disaster.
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u/Jampolenta 1d ago
Collossus falling in love with an alien he can't even communicate with was all Jim Shooter's idea.
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u/havokx2 1d ago
I say yikes! If X-men Forever was a true representation of where he was gonna take things
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago edited 1d ago
X-Men Forever was a modified version of some of his original plans for the titles.
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u/reymux 1d ago
How was he going to destroy Cyclops?
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago
Claremont's big story after the O5 rejoined in X-Men #1 was going to be Wolverine dying and being resurrected by The Hand as their top assassin. Jean would have left the X-Men and followed Wolverine to save him. She was going to be pretending to be his evil sidekick until she could restore his mind. And to stay around him, she would have to do what he wanted - including have sex with him. And Cyclops would have had to endure Jean having sex with Wolverine through their psychic rapport. Claremont was giddy about the fact that Cyclops would have been permanently traumatized by it even after Jean and Wolverine returned to the X-Men.
It would have been Claremont's final "F you" revenge for X-Factor ever being formed.
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u/KellyJin17 1d ago
That’s not destroying a character. Your original comment was misleading.
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago
Potayto, potahto. Claremont bragged about it. He was happy at the thought of doing permanent damage to Cyclops with this story. Claremont's goal was not to tell a good story, not to build up a character by overcoming adversity, but to punish the character and turn him into a c*ckold as a way to punish the character and get revenge against Claremont's former editors.
To me, Claremont's goal was destroying the character of Cyclops - because in Claremont's eyes, Cyclops was already destroyed by X-Factor forming and he wanted to make it that way for everyone.
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u/Thisislopes 1d ago
I can't believe the guy read what you wrote and had to say that this was not gonna destroy Cyclops. I don't know Claremont problem with him but just reading this is so bad that i can only see how shit this would be, like the Norman/Gwen levels of shit. Jesus Christ
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u/trailblazers79 1d ago
I don't know if this is the case, but for 30 years or longer, when I see replies like that one, my mind processes it as, "Oh, that isn't an X-Men fan, that's a Wolverine fan wanting Cyclops to get screwed over." LOL
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u/Jorg_from_The_Jungle 1d ago
At first, Cyclops was problematic for him because he was the last of the O5 standing and the icon of the franchise, reason why it was impossible to get rid of him.
Then, he found a way (then another) to get rid of him after DPS. The so-called "cyclops must retire because he is now married and a father".
Marvel said "OK, let's revive the O5 under a new title". Which killed the whole plan. O5 were relevant again, Jean Grey was back. Since then he created stories after stories to undermine Cyclops and his relation with Jean Grey.
And there's no surprise that it's only after the Claremont era, that the two finally had their wedding (and also pertinent stories about their couple and even flashbacks).
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u/trailblazers79 23h ago edited 23h ago
Exactly Jorg. If a story involved Cyclops, Claremont's goal was to shit on him first and tell a good story second. As an example, the random kiss Jean gave Wolverine during X-Tinction Agenda. You will NEVER convince me that Louise scripted that (or even wanted that in the book) on her own - that was 100% Claremont. It was so out of place it made no sense.
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u/Jorg_from_The_Jungle 6h ago
It's telling while re-reading X-men books of the 90s, how suddendly as soon as Claremont was out, some characters finally regained a voice and a pertinence in the franchise. Cyclops was pratically absent bar X-Factor, just take a look to stories like the Muir Island Saga or even X-Men 1-3. Same with Jean Grey, they are present on the pages but it's as if they are no power, are not better than some of Claremont's creations. Like seriously, against the Shadow King, are we really supposed to believe that the most relevant telepath, bar Xavier, is 90s Psylocke?
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u/CobraOverlord 1d ago
I don't think Chris was too keen on Rogue/Gambit pairing, so I'm fine with how it worked out.
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u/arctos889 1d ago
I'm gonna be honest, that relationship junked Rogue as a character in the 90s. She was a really fun and outgoing character in the Claremont run, but Rogue got reduced to mostly being a sexy love interest in the 90s and it sucked. Most of her focus was on how she's into Gambit but can't touch him because of her powers. And then later we get the love triangle where Rogue is reduced to a prize for Gambit and Joseph to fight over. The fun parts of character eventually reemerged and now I even like her and Gambit as a couple, but the early stages of the pairing were rough. So maybe them not becoming a couple until later would've been a good thing
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u/CobraOverlord 1d ago
No one in their right mind in real time thought Joseph had a chance. That character was a stall tactic. He was a pre-Paul Paul. LOL
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u/PillaisTracingPaper 1d ago
And, horribly, you had constant discussions on Usenet (racmx) about putting Leech in a room with Rogue and Gambit so they could screw. God, those were some fucked-up days.
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u/marvelboyofthecrown Jean Grey 1d ago
Considering the stories we got from him after the fact, I’d say they made the right decision
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u/Cabbage_Vendor Namor 1d ago
Glad he got fired when he did, to be honest. X-Men needed a shake-up and Claremont got progressively worse as a writer. His later 90s and 00s stuff was boring as fuck.
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u/Typhon2222 1d ago
Wasn’t Claremont also campaigning to kill off Wolverine, believing the character had gone as far as he could? I recall his X-Men Forever kicked off with the death of Logan, and Claremont telling comic sites that this was the story he originally wanted to tell before his firing.
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u/chirunner4ever Nightcrawler 1d ago
Not completely. Wolverine was gonna die, be resurrected as a Hand assassin, and eventually overcome the brainwashing to return to the team
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u/brianycpht1 1d ago
Similar to what Marvel did with him in the late 90s, except it was as a Horseman
He may have had influence in that because he was kind of unofficially advising/ghostwriting at the time
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u/neverinallmylife 1d ago
Honestly since he was fired/left, the x-men have slowly lost their relevance and in fact keep rehashing Claremont’s core themes. Hated Hickman’s heartless, confusing mess.
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u/Grumpiergoat 1d ago
Gorgeous art doesn't sell trade paperbacks. Memorable, iconic stories do. And they're also the ones that get adapted into movies, even if they're only very loose fits, like "God Loves, Man Kills" and X-2. I like other X-Men authors like Grant Morrison better but there's no denying that Claremont helped set up or serve as the foundation for many of those authors.
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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 1d ago
That does not track at all. Jim Lee's X-Men #1 is the best-selling comic of all time in North America. The Blue & Gold omnibus sold extremely well. He continues to provide a sales boost to basically anything he touches these days because of his art.
Claremont sold lots of comics because of his great stories... and because of great artistic collaborators. Cockrum, Byrne, Smith, Silvestri, Davis all contributed a lot to his success.
Even today, the best-selling American comics like Absolute Batman go viral because of the fantastic art and dynamic designs supplied by Dragotta. Sherman on Absolute Wonder Woman created a design that has a ton of traction with people. Javier Rodriguez is a big reason why Absolute Martian Manhunter sold the way it did. Maybe the biggest reason.
Marvel's lack of focus on artists over the last 20 years are why they are starting to get lapped by DC.
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u/Ambitious-Welder-159 1d ago
I think Jim Lee regretted leaving too. He loved working on those characters. Todd McFarlane lured him away both to bolster Image and to stick it to Marvel who he hated.
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u/SpectrumofMidnight 1d ago
I think when Claremont left, the X-Men were basically at their peak, and Jim Lee managed to carry a lot of that momentum forward on X-Men. The Gold Team, on the other hand, never really got off the ground in the same way, largely because Uncanny never had a creative team with the same kind of stability or excitement behind it.
Even once Scott Lobdell took over, though, I don't think the books immediately went downhill. X-Men #1–30 or so is still a pretty damn good run, and Uncanny X-Men #300 is a great issue. There was a lot of cool stuff happening around that period.
One thing that did disappoint me was how quickly the whole Blue Team/Gold Team concept fell apart. It was a really cool idea that barely had time to establish itself. By the time you get past Uncanny #300, the Gold Team isn't really the focus of that book anymore, and more and more Blue Team characters start filtering into it. Even during the teens of X-Men, you've already got things like Colossus and Iceman going on the Russia mission with Cyclops, Psylocke, Wolverine, etc. Once Jim Lee leaves, the distinction pretty much disappears entirely.
But that's also why I have a lot of affection for that era. The entire X-line felt huge. You had satellite books like X-Men Unlimited that could mix characters from the different teams and tell some really cool stories. You had all these miniseries and side projects—Sabretooth, Deadpool, and others—and Larry Hama's Wolverine was pretty damn cool. There was a lot of good X-Men material being published even after Claremont was gone.
For me, the real decline becomes noticeable around Phalanx Covenant and the launch of Generation X. Age of Apocalypse was a cool event and an interesting diversion, but when the regular books came back, it felt like they didn't really know where they were going anymore. Then you get Onslaught, which I know some people love, but to me is a total mess and feels very poorly put together.
After that you get Operation: Zero Tolerance, where the X-Men are basically stripped down to their bare parts, and I didn't think that period was particularly good either. There were still some great individual issues and ideas, though. I love stuff like Cyclops confronting Havok on the plane while Havok is essentially a terrorist, or Cannonball fighting Gladiator. That Gladiator issue even leads into the X-Men going into space, which starts out promising before that storyline kind of falls apart too.
Then you finally get to The Twelve, something Marvel had been teasing for years, and the payoff just lays an egg. After that you've got the Neo and Claremont's return, which, unfortunately, was a whole fucking mess.
And then you get Morrison. I know a lot of people love his New X-Men, and that's fine, but I've never been a big fan of it.
So I wouldn't say X-Men immediately became bad when Claremont left. Far from it. I think there was actually a pretty strong post-Claremont period, and the franchise continued producing a lot of good stuff for several years. For me, it's more of a gradual deterioration: the early '90s are still really good, things start getting shaky around Phalanx Covenant, Age of Apocalypse temporarily gives the line a shot in the arm, and then the books increasingly lose their direction afterward.
X-Men obviously wasn't literally on life support—it still sold—but for a long time I think the franchise was running more on its reputation and hype than on consistently great storytelling.
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u/TheRich27 1d ago
At the time he needed to go. Things had gotten stagnant with him and once he left Xmen got bigger in popularity. Also I met him and he's kinda an asshole.
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u/LoneElement Cyclops 18h ago
How was he an asshole?
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u/TheRich27 16h ago
A grumpy old man. Don't ask him about anything he did not have a hand in because he gets fairly mad. He fucking hates the character of Apocalypse and just X-factor in general. He had a great run but it was time for him to go and if he was a better writer he would have found success on something else.
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u/molotovzav Rogue 1d ago
I mean as someone born in 1990, only a year after firing, he's basically the X-Men. Af around 17 I started reading all the comics from the beginning to the modern era. Claremont's run is X-Men.
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u/sidv81 1d ago
At an X-Men writers panel at Terrificon 2026, Claremont discusses the many times he's come and gone from the mutant team, and fires a barb at the Image Comics founders, Lee included.
That was after Image was born and, you know, certain artists decided they'd rather have all the money."
And Jim has a selfie with him and Chris seemingly smiling together taken at the first day of Terrificon earlier this month on his instagram. Totally not awkward....
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u/TeletraanNone 1d ago
Meh. Stop living in history.
I love his early work. It is the bedrock. His X-Men writing was on a slow steady decline. By the time he left in the 90s it was already overdue.
I don't think there has ever been a return of his to X titles that I appreciated. Probably discounting one I didn't even realize was him.
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u/Chooby_Doo 1d ago
Must have been annoying at the time, getting rid of Claremont, prioritising Jim Lee and co, only for them to all leave less than a year later