Uncanny X-Men was, of course, my favored title, but X-Factor, New Mutants, and a slew of others came along with it. Not to mention the umpteen-thousand mini-series, maxi-series, crossovers, special appearances, and whatever else the X-Men appeared in - I had to have it all, or at least all I could afford. And to my credit, I managed to acquire quite a bit of it.A few years back, after a lifetime away, I decided to pull out my old X-Men comics and give them a go. Foremost in my mind was whether or not they were really as good as I remembered them, or if I had simply outgrown them. I had reread Dark Knight Returns, Elektra: Assassin, certain runs of Daredevil (yes, Miller's), select Epic Magazine issues, and more over the years, and they all withstood the test of time, but for whatever reason, once I hit about 20-21, I lost a taste for Uncanny X-Men and never looked back and that suddenly intrigued me a few years ago.
It was Christmas, and I pulled about 30 Uncanny X-Men, starting from slightly before the run which made me a collector (The Mutant Massacre) to just after. I started reading them in order from around issue #199 and an interesting thing happened: I was midway into the third or fourth before I realized how bad they were!
That is to say that the first issue I read had been so good, I read 3-4 more (of pure suck) without even thinking, "Man, this blows woodhchuck!"
Therein lies the power of Chris Claremont.
Now, wait a second - that is not meant as an insult! It is not exactly meant as high praise, but I'm saying that he is so good, you hardly recognize when he is bad. And as I read more old X-Men comics on that Christmas trip, I kept reminding myself of that very fact, as I read one great issue which gave-way to 4-5 shitty ones, leading up to one really great one, followed by 2-3 pretty good issues, and so on. I don't know if it is because that one great issue makes you more forgiving of the others, or if you just get so caught-up in the overarching storylines that you kind of gloss-over, turning pages to find the pay-off you're really waiting on, or what, but Claremont is one of those writers who can coast on sheer mundanity because when he's good, he's great!
But I noticed other things too: such as how unnecessarily wordy Claremont is, and how very often that is. I mean, I never considered him a genius, even in my childhood (in fact, we often joked about his hack abilities, as in, "He's the best at what he does - and what he does isn't very good"), but as an adult, I was stricken by just how many - very obvious - faults I could find with the writer who had, for all practical purposes, raised me! Chris Claremont and Stephen King were my adopted parents throughout [a misspent?] adolescence, which goes to explain way too much, doesn't it?
So when I sat down to read New Exiles #1 tonight, I was excited - I had forgotten that Christmas when I'd pulled the 2-3 year run of Uncanny X-Men and molested my inner-child, forever tarnishing my youth.
I was maybe five pages in when memories of that Christmas thrust their way into my frontal lobe. I screamed, then my eyes glazed-over - not because I had suffered personality-altering brain damage, but because I was sitting here, reading lines such as: "Is that any reason to give up? Or the incentive perhaps to try harder?"
Ah yes, Chris Claremont: where all the characters talk the same and they all sound like Frasier Crane's most contemplative diary entries.
But I don't want to trash the guy - he is a legend, after all, and he probably did write the bulk of everything I read in my adolescence (and I read approximately a novel a day back then - I had the time) so I looked a bit deeper, and I actually came up with a few things:
One of my frustrations with Claremont is how every character thinks - far too much, far too clearly, and far too verbosely - and they speak much the same way. Here's a gem from New Exiles #1 - (Sabretooth, internal [thought bubble]): "There's a new scent in the room. I'm not alone."
Ye-ah. Because a blurb would have been so much more impersonal. But Claremont's style is decidedly blurb-less; he eschews the narrative for thought balloons 99% of the time. The problem, of course, is that that doesn't always work out well and he should know better by now! What blurbs Claremont does use are invariably chockful of the purplest prose this side of a television soap opera novel adaptation (Days of Our Lives - The Novel!), but the rest of the field is rife with that pleasant medium Claremont has been unable to achieve, literally since I was born!
And the fun don't stop there - oh no! Sabretooth's far too obvious observation leads to Rogue's monologue: "The room's a total paradox. Everything here exists, it all functions, but it isn't altogether real. All this equipment is some kind of phantom reproduction. So many systems, how does she keep track of them all? These images - - they're of the team. What's Cat's game, has the girl been spying on us? Baka - - don't assume, think! Cat's off playing with Morph and Sage, that's why I thought the way was clear to go exploring."
Because the opening 10+ pages of embarrassing (and embarrassingly similar) internal dialogue from Cat, Morph, and Sage as they played football weren't enough for us to know that they are, indeed, playing football, thus giving a decidedly un-Southern and dramatically more intelligent Rogue this chance to meander about, wondering aloud. That's right: this is all an actual monologue; she's not thinking all of this, she's literally narrating it to herself as she "explores."
Also true to Claremont form, right before the close of the book, one of the members (Sabretooth) attacks another (Psylocke) for no apparent reason. They then collectively shrug-off the encounter, only for him to verbally threaten her out of the blue a moment later. This wildly out-of-character behavior is soooo Chris Claremont - it's what passes for "tension" amongst the group.
Welcome to the New Exiles, readers - hope you survive it!
I'm sorry, I said I wasn't going to trash the guy, but sitting here, writing this, I'm just so terribly disappointed that I can't help but be a little snide. Contrived, predictable - just utter shit for an opening issue; this is Claremont at his hackiest, and the only hopeful thing I can say is that maybe he did this on purpose so things can only get better.
If I'm being insider-snipey, he rehashed the Fantastic Four's origin toward the start for some unknown reason and he was writing that title a few years back (I don't know if he still is, but this was one of the better artistic sequences in the entire book), so maybe he is upset because he got pulled from Fantastic Four to write this? I don't know, but this is plain awful.
Speaking of art, Grummet and company's work is nice, but not exceptional. As I mentioned, the FF sequence stands-out as the most even and confident of sequences in the entire book, and it comes early-on. Actually, most of the better work is at the front, and Grummet is not a newbie, which does not bode well in my mind. No other frame or sequence is particularly memorable.
Sum: total hack. Very disappointing. Seen it all before - from the same creators - a few times over, actually, and that's depressing. Everyone who worked on this book could do better - in fact, I have a feeling that every, last one of them did do better work... on the backs of their paychecks.
© C Harris Lynn, 2008
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