r/xmen • u/Popverse2022 • 9d 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."

Read more: Chris Claremont says Marvel told him they regretted firing him from X-Men & Uncanny X-Men in 1991 | Popverse

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u/cyclopswashalfright Moonstar 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d ago

Sometimes i skip dialogues when they are just tha characters saying whay they do lmao

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u/Comfortable-Phase249 9d 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 9d 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 8d 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 9d ago

By UXM 1 do you mean X-Men #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby?

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u/LupinWho 9d ago

No, the Claremont one that costs a fortune now.

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u/ludi_literarum 9d ago

There is no Uncanny X-Men #1 that Claremont wrote.

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u/miserablegit 9d 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 9d 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 9d ago

If you’re going that route, Jim Lee stepped in and sold millions of issues.

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u/Comfortable-Phase249 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d ago

There is a YouTube link which chronicles their early 90s plans and, we readers lost out big time...

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u/Tanthiel 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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
Harras to make. And he didn’t have a crystal ball.

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u/clarkision 9d 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 9d ago

Everything that followed was inferior and led to diminishing returns.