| |
|
I've just completed a seven month read of the entire 1974-1991 Claremont X-Men run, and I wrote it up here, which also gives you links to all the reviews of it that I wrote along the way.
Here's an excerpt that sums up my feelings on the run as a whole:
There are two highpoints of Claremont's run for me, one is the Paul Smith era. He only drew about ten issues of the book, but they see Claremont at his most nuanced in building character. Storm is reborn, gets a mohawk and cuts loose. Cyclops meets a mysterious lady named Maddy Pryor, Kitty rebels against Xavier, Rogue joins the team and proves herself, and the best final panel of any issue ever, Wolverine shedding a tear as Mariko says she won't marry him. It's Wolverine crying, how bold is that. And Smith's art is the best in the book's entire run.
After Paul Smith, there was a bit of lull until the next highlight, the period from roughly 200 to Fall of the Mutants, featuring the art of John Romita Jr. This is where most of the ideas for the movie came from, the conflict between mutant and human, the world that hates and fears them thing. It's dark, intense stuff and the Mutant Massacre is Marvel's best answer to Dark Knight Returns. Fall of the Mutants brilliantly resolves the thematic question of the series by allowing the world to see the X-Men as heroes.
If the X-Men had stayed dead, it would have been the perfect end to the series. I don't think there was much left to do with the book after that, and after this point, Claremont generally stays away from mutant/human conflict. There's no way that Marvel is going to end X-Men at the height of its popularity, and it's that popularity that ultimately dooms the book.
I mentioned this analogy back in my original reviews, but I think it holds true. If X-Men was a TV show, Fall of the Mutants would be the series finale, and Inferno would be the movie made a few years later. Inferno, for all of its flaws, is the last time that these characters feel like real people, and you have the sense that real change can occur. Inferno was designed to clear the deck, and it did that too well, resolving so many long running plot points, from then on, the books had no direction. Inferno's treatment of Maddy bothers me a lot, but as a story, it's epic and crazy, playing off years of character history to create a really compelling narrative.
It's not like it's all downhill after Inferno, but you increasingly get the sense of these characters as fixed entities. Back in Paul Smith, it felt like anyone was expendable, and that the characters were constantly evolving entities. Storm of issue 165 is dramatically different from Storm of issue 94. However, that basic conundrum emerged, it's the dynmaic character development that made the book so popular, but to mess with the dynamics too radically could mean alienating the audience. I admire Claremont for trying some different stuff post Inferno, but in his attempt to shake things up, he separated the characters and there was no sense of the characters as a family.
After that, everything moved back towards the status quo, culminating in X-Men #1, when all the marketable characters are brought back together, Xavier is back in the wheelchair, Scott's back as leader, and it's easy to sell the concept to other media. And as Claremont found out with the Jean Grey resurection, it became increasingly difficult to make lasting changes to the characters.
On the whole, it was a fantastic reading experience. It's easy to see why the book became so popular, and also why it went creatively bankrupt in the 90s. However, what's happened since doesn't dull the greatness of most of the work in the run. Marvel should get more essentials going, and get this whole run back in print. |
|
|
)