Here is the conclusion to our informative and entertaining interview with comic legend Chris Claremont.
Your GeNext miniseries debuts in May. In this series, you created a whole new generation of mutants. How’d you like this process?
The process was simple. I came up with a dozen different conceptual ideas, we put them on the website and said “Vote for your favorite!,” and [fans] did. They voted for GeNext and we found a great artist in Patrick Scherberger who is just wrapping it up now. He’s been doing a terrific, terrific job on it, which I hope the readers appreciate. Essentially we have five members of the new generation and it’s set about 15 to 18 years down the line from where we are today. The X-Men have gone on, not all of them have had happy endings, and it’s a whole different world. Hopefully we’re going to present them with the usual catalogue of challenges and exciting events and in turn we hope the readers will appreciate a really great story well told. Hopefully the response to this first arc of GeNext will inspire the powers that be to greenlight a second...and a third and a fourth and a fifth.
You were responsible for creating and shaping the lives of many of the mutants in the Marvel Universe. What is it like to now see all these characters still being used today in the comics as well as in films and cartoons?
It’s tremendously flattering. It’s no less flattering for me in that way than I’m sure it must be for [X-Men co-creator] Stan Lee. This all starts with him and [X-Men co-creator] Jack Kirby. It’s a tribute to their efforts, their brilliance and their work. So we’re sort of following the path that they blazed. In my case I was lucky enough to work on a series that I was able to shape in a large measure by myself. And it’s sort of a challenge to subsequent writers and artists to build on that foundation something equally new and equally, I hope, radical and exciting to take it as inspiration in the same way that I took Stan’s work on Fantastic Four and the original X-Men, and [previous creative team] Roy Thomas and Neal Adams’ work. The trick is we’re a collaborative medium and collaboration isn’t simply between the writer and the artist, it’s between one generation of writers and editors and the next. You build on all that has gone before and you ideally try to find a way to make it your own and relevant to the audience you have, but also to spin new twists and new varieties on the material.
What other projects do you have coming out?
Back four years ago now, I wrote a graphic novel for a very famous European artist. It was going to be his first try at doing superheroes, his first try at doing Marvel, his first try at doing X-Men, it was jumping off into the deep end with both feet. I just got the first four pages this week from [artist] Milo Manara and they are spectacular! You look at this and you think “Wow, the X-Men have never looked this good!” What you have here is the opportunity to do a graphic novel that is unlike, one hopes, anything that I’ve done before or that the readers are used to seeing. We’re combining these characters as individuals with Manara’s equally unique way of presenting them to the audience and I think, based on what we’ve gotten so far, it’s going to be a lively and exciting ride. It’ll be out when it’s finished. The thing about working with someone like Manara is that he produces at his own rate and you accept it as the way it is, which is fine. He’s doing something completely new for him. It’s the top six X-Babes. Someone else can write the X-Guys, this is the X-Women. While it’s clichéd to say that that’s what Manara does best, the interesting thing is in this four-page action scene that he sent in of the characters going off a cliff and falling down a waterfall and grabbing desperately for survival, because they don’t have their superpowers, Manara manages to convey an eloquent sense of who the characters are as individuals. It’s breath-taking.
Are there any characters that you have not been able to write that you would like to write?
Probably. It’s hard to say. I used to be a smart alec and say “Yeah, Superman!” or “Batman!” except I went over to DC and did it. I don’t know. Thor would be fun. I’ve written him a little but not a lot. I’ve written [Thor’s home] Asgard more than I’ve written Thor. It’s actually more a question of the story than the character. You want to find a tale that needs telling and the right character to go with it in that regard. [The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix] limited series, the origin of Mr. Sinister, isn’t my concept. [Writer Peter Milligan] had his own story to tell with the character. The thing is, I can go back and look at things with a fresh eye and then twist them to make them even more fun, I hope. I can take a second look at a character and see if there’s a way to improve them, to play with them, to make them more enticing to the audience.
The fundamental answer that I have to come back to when you say “What characters would you like to do,” well the characters I’d like to do are the ones I haven’t created yet, the ones that are mine that I’ve been working on, that I’ve been kicking around, that have been taking up space in my notebooks and in my desk files waiting for their turn on the computer screen. These are the characters that are very much mine, not Marvel’s or DC’s or anyone else’s. I think that’s the same with any writer. Given a choice, I assume [writer] Frank Miller would enjoy doing Sin City more than he would enjoy doing Batman just because Sin City is his. One of the wonderful moments of New York Comic Con was going over to Mike Mignola and congratulating him. I’d just seen the trailer for the new “Hellboy” film and I was like, “That was great!” You look at [director] Guillermo del Toro and you think “The guy who directed “Pan’s Labyrinth” has so much respect and affection for the material. He did the first [“Hellboy”] and after “Pan’s Labyrinth” he could go anywhere, do anything, and he came back and did a second [“Hellboy” film]. It’s a tremendous compliment to Mike, it’s a tremendous compliment to the character, and says something very wonderful about the director himself. I think that is the ideal of how things should be in the industry. The work is treated with respect, the people are treated with respect, and as a result what comes from it is even more fun. That held true for all three “Spider-Man” films, this love and respect of the source material, and the same came through with “X-Men.” Being the usual self-absorbed writer, you sit back and think “I hope they do the same thing with my [original] stuff too!” But the first thing you have to do is tell the stories. Wanderers is one such story, New Exiles is another.
And that concludes our interview with Chris Claremont! If you want to find out more about this highly influential writer, you can attend the special Chris Claremont: Career Retrospective panel at Wizard World Philadelphia! Buy your tickets today!
