Talking X-Men with X-Pert Chris Claremont

Chris Claremont and Jonathan Palmer at the Uncanny Experience.

Besides creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, few names are as synonymous with the X-Men comics as Chris Claremont. He holds the distinction of the longest writing tenure on Uncanny X-Men, from 1975 to 1991, during which time he is credited with introducing complex literary themes into superhero narratives and developing strong female characters. He turned the once underachieving comic into one most popular series of all time.

Claremont just wrapped up his guest appearance at the second Uncanny Experience in Minneapolis. At the 2023 convention, I had the chance to sit down with him to talk about his experiences and vision around the X-Men and about what makes them special.

Career Beginnings

“I didn’t come to Marvel until I was in high school,” Claremont said. “I read Stan and Jack’s stuff while I was in high school. And I thought this is really cool. At no point did I ever imagine myself being in their shoes and contributing to the medium, much less the canon.”

In 1969, when he was still in college, he started as a gofer/editorial assistant at Marvel, where he worked for four years before he got his first professional scripting assignment. His entry into regular comics writing was Daredevil #102. Soon after this, he was assigned to take on Iron Fist, beginning with issue #23 of Marvel Premiere, where the character was featured.

Despite his high school reading habits, Claremont had never intended to go into comics. He viewed the comic book industry as a dying one with dwindling readership and uninteresting material being published. Instead, he had studied acting, political theory, and creative writing in college, hoping to become a director. Though his film career didn’t pan out, he fit in well at Marvel and obtained a full-time position.

And in 1975, he started on X-Men. The series was flailing, but he was passionate about it, and Marvel editor-in-chief Len Wein figured that no one would balk at Claremont taking it on because of the books’ standing. Claremont began developing the characters thoroughly by examining their motives, desires, and individual personalities, essentially a method-acting approach, and his writing drew an immediate positive reaction. He has previously likened his approach to writing the series as trying to do “70-millimeter comics”—that is, “wide-screen cinematic productions about intimate stories.”

Almost 50 years later, having created numerous characters, he now holds nearly as important a spot in the X-Universe as Stan Lee (writer/editor) and Jack Kirby (artist/co-plotter). But he balks at this comparison—he doesn’t see himself in that same light.

Writing is what I do. Writing stories that are published, and that the readers enjoy is what I love to do. It’s getting to those last two aspects that is the challenge. But that’s the simplicity of it. I have nowhere near Jack’s ability—I couldn’t draw that way if I wanted to. There are times when I do want to. I envy Archie Goodwin, because he could sketch to an extent I can’t even conceive of. All I can do this, write. But I figured that I’ll do that as long as I can do it, hopefully a really long time.

For Claremont, it’s also a matter of perspective. He recalled one of his early experiences as an associate editor, when then editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman called him into his office and asked him to deal with a situation. Jerry Siegel—the man who, with Joe Shuster, created Superman—had sent him a pitch. Wolfman was going to decline it and couldn’t bring himself to take the call. So he passed the buck to Claremont, whose job was to tell Siegel, “Thank you, but we can’t accept it. It’s not up to Marvel standards.” Claremont recognized that for Wolfman, it was like saying, “Hi, father of our industry. None of us would be here without you and Joe, and we can’t use it.” As a twentysomething, he didn’t fully feel the weight of that, but when it’s decades later and you’re on the other side of the desk, your perspective changes. So putting himself in the same category with Lee and Kirby now would be like Wolfman putting himself in the same category as Siegel and Shuster.

Making a Statement

Claremont said he has no idea how his writing influences the world other than the fact that he’s gone all over, and whether it’s in Europe, in Russia, or in South America, if people like his work—if they like the story he’s written for the characters and they’re powerfully impressed by it—he feels he’s doing his job. If they don’t care about the stories or the characters, he’s not doing his job. It’s a simple equation, he feels. But the reason he has put so much focus on incorporating diverse characters who are representative of the world in his books is because the real world is varied and diverse.

Comic books have always reflected the public affairs issues of the time, and arguably none more so than the X-Men, whose big themes have always included diversity and equity, “controversial” issues, and the impact those things have on the readers. You go back to the Golden Age of Comics, and Superman was introduced as a ray of hope following the Great Depression. Batman was introduced when organized crime was at a high point. Captain America and Wonder Woman both served as World War II propaganda and fought Nazis. The X-Men were a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and over time they also became a metaphor for LGBTQ+ rights, among other things.

Time after time, writers have used characters to make a specific unsubtle point, like Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy getting hooked on heroin so the creators could show that drugs were bad. It was a specific story at a specific point in social reality where this was a threat or a problem that they felt needed to be addressed. It wasn’t part of the overall ongoing run. It was “We’re making a statement.”

But this wasn’t the approach that Claremont took. He didn’t see the need to push a particular storyline, to actively reinforce the notion that the early X-Men were an allegory for the Civil Rights Movement, or to highlight the obvious focus on discrimination:

From my perspective, Stan already did it. So there’s no need for me to jump on the bandwagon. … Until we got to the graphic novel, which was a whole different reality. But that was grabbing a moment and a specific attitude and building into the graphic novel because that was a standalone book—as if you’re part of an ongoing reality, at least the way I was looking at it, that you approach it from a different perspective. And that’s just the way I chose to tell the stories.

Claremont believes strongly in telling stories that aren’t about the social issues—instead, they’re about who people are and what they’re doing, and the social issues are naturally part of that.

His goal is to make the impact of a story powerful, so that the reader comes back and reads the next story. He doesn’t start out saying, “I want the audience to do this.” He just wants to write a really good story. In fact, he said, oftentimes he has no intention of a direction or a destination for his story; he just writes, starting with where it begins and following the course until he reaches the end. He doesn’t know what the journey in between will be at the start, or where it’s going to wind up—much less how much time it’s going to take, which is a whole different matter. He views it as an adventure for himself as well as the reader.

Marvel Comics

A Changing Approach

In 2012, Astonishing X-Men #51 featured the first same-sex wedding in mainstream comics when Northstar married his boyfriend, Kyle. The issue had a foldout cover, and there was lots of hype around the story, which was written by Marjorie Liu. Claremont himself co-created Northstar with John Byrne in 1979, though it wasn’t until Alpha Flight #106 in 1992 (after Claremont’s run on the X-Men ended) that it was explicitly acknowledged the character was gay. In the years between, when the Comics Code Authority did not allow the open acknowledgement of homosexuality, everything was subtext.

Even without the code, Claremont doesn’t like grandiose gestures as a writer, what he likens to pointing a big arrow and saying, “Hey look, this character is gay.” Rather, he prefers to place his character in a life where are were already out—as he did in Uncanny X-Men #170, in which he had Destiny in her nightgown having coffee in the kitchen when Mystique walks in in her robe. It was clear they were together, and it was clear that that was their apartment, but it wasn’t stated outright. Claremont placed them in a normal, everyday situation that normal couples have, just living their lives.

But at the same time that some characters’ identities are being made more overt in recent comics and movies, there are other cases where identity seems to get lost. One of the things that struck Claremont about the 2020 New Mutants movie was the portrayal of Roberto Da Costa (Sunspot), another character he co-created. In the comics, Bobby is Afro-Brazilian—his father is Black, and his mother is white. His father is also a billionaire and a power player in the Brazilian economy. But all the other wealthy people around him hate him, because they’re white and he’s Black. This dynamic of prejudice is paralleled in the treatment Bobby receives for being a mutant.

In the movie, Sunspot is Brazilian, played an actor who’s Brazilian, but not Black. For Claremont, this leaves out a fundamental part of his character. To focus on him being from Brazil but eliminating the racial dynamics from his comics origin story misses the point.

“I have nothing against the actor, I have nothing against the performance of the script that he had to work from,” he stressed. “But the essential key is the comic was going for one specific metaphor. And the movie blew it out the window.”

20th Century Studios

Whether it’s sexuality or race, Claremont’s approach is not to highlight the issue out and say, “This is where we should be as a society—let’s get there.” Rather, he places us already there and challenges the reader to think about it, to face their own preconceived notions and try to explain or rationalize why it shouldn’t be.

That’s not to say he doesn’t appreciate other writers doing things differently. He pointed to the classic Neal Adams and Dennis O’Neil story in which Green Lantern is confronted by a Black man, who challenges him on racism: “I been readin’ about you. How you, work for the blue skins … and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins … and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with—the black skins! I want to know … how come?! Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!”

Claremont thought it was a wonderful story, but those weren’t the stories he was trying to tell or the way he was trying to tell them. He wants to push the reader to really contemplate what he wrote and understand the reality around us through the eyes of his characters.

“It’s not about ‘Hi, I’m Black, this is an important story.’ It’s about taking someone who is Black, putting them in a situation,” Claremont said, giving as an example a storyline involving Storm, Ororo Munroe. “It’s about Ororo going back to the apartment where she lived, the first thing she remembers about living in Manhattan, and walking in and it’s a crash pad. And yeah, she’s met by Luke Cage and Misty Knight. But for Ororo, the shock is ‘This used to be my home—who are all these kids taking drugs here?’ and she doesn’t know how to deal with it because this isn’t the reality of her life.”

His stories are never just cut and dry, or overt lessons. They’re complex and challenge you to think about the situations and to understand that not all of them are simple.

Creative Freedom

It’s natural that any creator who has worked on a series as long as Claremont did will have thoughts on its direction after their time. Claremont is respectful of the fact that these are other writers’ books now, and they have the freedom to make the choices they thought best.

One choice he struggled with was the comics outing all mutants and establishing a nation for them on Krakoa. “Once you cross that threshold,” he said, “you can’t bring it back: Everybody’s out, like it or not.” For him, that takes away the one thing that made the X-canon significantly different from superheroes like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. If you expose a hero’s secret identity, by extension, you’re outing their parents, their relatives, their friends; you’re putting them all at a measure of risk. But in the X-Men universe, it’s not just the heroes who have secret identities—it’s all mutants.

That’s why so many are scared in the first place and why being a mutant can be terrifying. It parallels the fear of someone who’s Black, Muslim, or gay and living among people who are prejudiced against those identities. Claremont elaborated:

For me, the point of X-Men is that it gets to deal with racism front and center. What I find disturbing about the current books, the current era of books is the decision that that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. And I think for it not to matter anymore takes away a very strong analogy that is why the X-Canon has been followed … analogous to being Black, to being gay, to being Muslim, to being Hispanic, whatever, for me, as it should be.

For Claremont, that connection between mutant identity and real-life identities and the need to take a stand is baked into the DNA of the X-Men. And the definition of who that stand is for is fluid: “You can’t put it in a single box and say this is what it is. It’s a box that reaches out and embraces a lot of different aspects,” he said. And it allows the reader to connect to the characters and see their own struggle against racism and other forms of discrimination represented, acknowledged and championed. Claremont wrote as he did because he felt that that metaphorical perspective was an important one, a needed one. “Maybe now, that’s 30 years after when I started, things have changed,” he said.

Talking with Chris Claremont was the most amazing half hour I have ever had. As we started to wrap up, I asked him how he was enjoying the Uncanny Experience.

“It’s been a hoot,” he said. He and Beth Fleisher, his wife and partner and an editor in her own right, both commented on how much the event reminded them of the more intimate fantasy conventions that they used to attend in earlier years. These weren’t comic conventions, but rather literature ones, where Claremont would attend as a prose writer and Fleisher as an editor—and because of the size, they were centered around the books instead of the merchandise. But the best part was the conversations they would have day and night getting to know people. The Uncanny Experience felt like that to both of them, and they both agreed that the vibe was better than the larger commercial conventions.

“I mean, the fun thing about small SF conventions, as Beth said, you just hung out with your friends,” Claremont said. “You talked stories … till four in the morning.”

I asked whether he had any last words for his fans.

“Still here, still writing,” he said. “Keep buying, keep reading. Tell me if it’s good. Tell me, more importantly, if it’s not.”

As an extra-special closing to the 2024 Uncanny Experience, every attendee received their Xavier Institute diploma from Claremont. The excitement was electric, and everyone was honored to be graduated by the “Dean of the Uncanny X-Men.”

Check out ChrisClaremont.com for more about him and some of the great work he’s done.