[bright music] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] ♪ [bright music continues] - Hello, and welcome to "Comic Culture".

I'm Terrence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is legendary writer Chris Claremont.

Chris, welcome to "Comic Culture".

- Thank you for inviting me.

It's a pleasure.

- Chris, you had a long and storied career writing comics mostly at Marvel and mostly on "The Uncanny X-Men".

And I was just wondering, you worked with so many great artists during your run on "The X-Men", whether it was Dave Cockrum, whether it was John Byrne, Jim Lee, Mark Sylvestre.

How did you sort of work with their strengths and your strengths to make the best possible comics?

- I suppose the simplest answer would be to find out what they like to draw and tailor the stories to match.

The extraordinary good fortune on my behalf was that especially with the first four artists, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Dave Cochran again, and Paul Smith, they could draw just about anything.

So it was a remarkably wonderful synergy from top to bottom.

But I mean the thing that I find remarkable, to use that word about my good fortune over the last let's say umpty-bump years and actually still moving on today as the new Gambit series demonstrates with the artist Sid Kotian.

I've had an extraordinary amount of an ongoing good luck finding the most gifted storytellers, to me anyway, that are around to tell the stories, which isn't as easy as it might sound, especially in today's marketplace with the evolution of editorial preferences and how they prefer stories to be told.

I started back in the day when Stan's primary iteration was plop to artist, artist back to writer, script.

So because he was working with Jack Kirby and all you really needed with Jack Kirby was to sit down for 10 minutes, bounce ideas back and forth, and a week later, two weeks later, Jack would come in with 20 pages of wonderment and bingo.

That was the FF.

Stan's role with Jack was primarily to hone down the story and focus all the possibilities of the pencils into a single coherent story, which of course drove Jack crazy, which is why eventually he left for DC where he started "New Gods", which in the space of 10 issues, managed to drive DC management absolutely crazy.

In effect, they drove Jack Away and back to Marvel, but everything he had created in "New Gods", because forgive my rambling, each issue was like starting from scratch.

He'd come up with a dozen brilliant ideas for issue one, wow, what happens in issue two?

Oh, he creates a dozen more brilliant ideas, and on and on down the line.

So by the time the management at DC sort of tried to reign him in, he had created so much brilliant material that DC ended up living off of it for the next three decades.

And today as well.

Stan sort of was the roadblock who could look at it and say this is the setup for the next story and the setup for the story beyond that, and created a synergy for both the FF and Marvel that went on beyond that for two decades.

So when I was there with "The X-Men", the wonder was I was working with Dave Cockrum, a brilliant both character designer but also a visual storyteller.

And we would bad ideas back and forth, I'd coalesce them into a plot, I'd give them to Dave and whamo, suddenly we have an issue that starts out with Charles Xavier having the worst dream of his life and a brilliant double spread of two star fleets battling it out around a trinary star system.

And the next thing you see is Lilandra floating by on her ruined escape craft.

It's like, wow, eat your heart out George Lucas.

And we did it in like three days for like 300 bucks.

Things were cheaper then.

And as far as I was concerned, take that Star Wars, and I think we were like three years ahead of him anyway, but that's the thing.

Dave could do that, John Byrne could do that, Smitty could do that, Walt Simonson could do that.

So many artists that I've been fortunate enough to work with did it like that.

Frank Miller, for crying out loud, when he and I did the second comic he'd ever drawn professionally, which was "John Carter, Warlord of Mars".

In the story, he spent a week figuring out a four handed fighting style.

If you have four arms, and they all can act independently, how do you fight?

For me, it was a matter of trying to swipe from what I was doing with Nightcrawler, but for Frank it was a way of trying to make it work both conceptually and visually.

And I looked at it as the writer and went, wow, I can't cover any of this up, I've gotta shut up.

And that in turn had its next iteration when we teamed up on Wolverine.

- I was gonna say, you know you talk about these cosmic epics that you did, whether it was with Dave Cockrum or John Byrne, or on "John Carter, Warlord of Mars", but you also do this street level action in that Wolverine series.

So as a writer, how do you sort of make sure that you are good enough and are able to stretch the right muscles to tell those stories in a way that the action is fantastic, but that underlying story, the one that connects to the readers, is still gonna be as connecting and real to them.

- Smart Alec reply is I'm the best there is at what I do and what I do best is sometimes really, really good.

I dunno, that's the 5% inspiration.

For me, the first iteration, my initial run on X-Men was, you know, people say what's your favorite story?

And I said there is no favorite story because it's all one story.

From 94 to 279, page 11 is all one life, one continuous story.

And it is broken up into a lot of individual parts, but there was never a separation from one to the next.

There was never a different version of Aurora in one story than the other.

They were all an evolution of consistent characters and consistent events.

The Scott that was in love with Jean was the same Scott for me that went out on dates with Colleen Wing or had a momentary fling with the fishing boat captain that he washed ashore with on Magneto Island in 147.

But the point is, he had dates, but then when he met Madeline, it was like, wham.

And the challenge for him over that arc was, am I feeling this way for her because of who she truly is or the fact that she looks like my dead sweetie?

And that became one of the cruxal moments in their relationship where she demands of him, are you in love with me or are you in love with me because I'm the girl you lost?

And for me as the writer, that was a crux moment, because I needed him to say I'm in love with you.

He had reached a crossroads, a personal Rubicon, and stepped over it.

The life he lived was gone.

He was often a new and more valid personal direction, for want of a better phrase, he had grown up or was in the process of growing up.

And so when he asked Madeline to marry him and she said yes, this was a significant decision for them both.

And the next iteration of it was her becoming pregnant.

Scott had started a new life.

My goal for him, my ambition for him was that this is where, again, he was to lead the way for the rest of the team.

Time would pass, they would grow up, they would reach a point in their lives where they had to choose A or B and perhaps leave the X community.

Scott left because as Madeline said, I have a real job.

We are either us or we're not.

You said when we got married, we were us, when we had our son, we are us, now you've gotta prove it.

And even though he was being shoved out the door by Storm beating him in their duel, that was the seminal moment of his life where he was going to go off and live happily ever after, which was my primal intent.

When "X-Factor" came into being, my counter pitch to Jim Shooter was fine, if you wanna bring Scott back to the hold and establish a team involving the originals, I have no problem with that.

But do it like he is being re-upped.

He has gotta face a moment of truth for himself and his wife and family.

Honey, I know this scares the living daylights out of you, but this is important, not just for me, but for the global community, the mutant community and the human community around it.

I have to go back, trust me on this.

And so Madeline, because she's in love with him and he's in love with her, swallows her fear, picks up, moves back to New York with him, voluntarily takes a more subordinate role because she can't fly and take care of the baby and watch his back.

And they would move on from there.

Scott would become the new Charles Xavier of X-Factor, and we would bring in someone else, I suggested to take Jean's place.

That someone else would be her big sister Sarah, who would function in my pitch as a living cerebral.

That was her mutant power, since I'd already established she has mutant powers, we just didn't know what yet.

And for me, that worked brilliantly because it's me, because as someone new to her ability, she screws up.

So her job at X-Factor would be to manifest the ability of the people they contact or they come into contact with, if their powers hadn't manifest, temporarily make them active.

X-factor could then see whether they're positive or negative and then deal with it.

But because she's brand new at it and learning her craft as she goes, she screws up occasionally and maybe creates an evil mutant by mistake.

But from the emotional point of view, holy cow, for the first time since 1961, Hank and Bobby and Warren have something to do.

It's not the Scott Jean show.

And I thought that would be so much more fun and so much more interesting on an ongoing pattern, an ongoing basis than just going around in the same circle.

And my follow on pitch was if you wanna bring back Jean, that's not a problem.

Just don't make it the Jean from our run.

This could be an alternate universe, an alternate dimension Jean who is not the Phoenix, she's just Jean.

And then see where that leads.

For me, my intent was our Jean who was Phoenix should be gone.

Phoenix is now Rachel, but she's a baby Phoenix.

And we're off in that direction.

And my feeling was both books would benefit, both "X-Factor" and "X-men" would benefit, and we could all live happily and work happily ever after, especially once we got our hands on it.

Sadly, that was not the way things happened.

Which just goes to show in one of my three favorite iterations, people plan, God loves, because the seventh day had nothing to do with God resting.

God was laughing too hard because when one creates everything, one needs a little humor on the side, and we're it.

- It's fascinating because we're used to, or at least as readers and especially with current comics, we're used to characters going through these big arcs and then essentially reset when the next creative team comes in.

And even though there's allegedly continuity by the end of 12 issues and the next team starts, Bruce Wayne is still gonna be Batman and Alfred's still gonna be Alfred and if they've died, they're gonna come back.

Whereas during your run, like you're saying, you had this idea about these characters and where they're going to go.

And it's almost like it wasn't what we would consider a comic run.

You were making changes that were designed to be permanent as the characters grew in age.

So when you start to get into this new editorial era, how do you sort of negotiate that?

- I'm a trained professional.

It's the job, this is the reality.

I mean, it used to be Marvel stood for telling stories in one manner.

DC stood for telling stories in another.

Now there's no difference between them.

From an editorial perspective, it's much easier.

As you say, a writer can define a canon for three years and the writer leaves, and somebody new comes along and you just reboot everything.

I have a different opinion, but that's because I grew up in a substantially different creative era.

You have to understand, Stan's rules were very simple.

Get the book in on time, do good work.

Don't be a pain in my ass.

If you could do that, actually, if you could do any two out of that, you kept your job.

Other than that, you were on your own.

As Stan put it, I'm hiring you as a professional writer.

I assume you know your job.

If you don't know your job, I'll fire you and get somebody else.

But beyond that, you're on your own.

Len Wein and Steve Gerber had huge arguments over who defined the Hulk.

Len felt he should because he was writing "Incredible Hulk", Steve felt he did because he was writing Hulk as a cast member of, not Defenders.

- I think it was Defenders.

- Was it Defenders?

See, my memory gets away from me.

But they each had substantially different views of who the Hulk was and how he behaved and what his abilities were, his cognitive abilities.

So every so often, Archie Goodwin, who's editor-in-chief, and then Jim Shooter who followed him, had to negotiate between the two of them or the referee.

At DC, it never seemed to matter.

The Superman in Superman was not necessarily the Superman in "Man of Steel", was not necessarily the Superman in Adventure Comics or Justice League or this or that.

Same one for Batman.

They were generally the same, but the specifics of their lives did not interact the same way until the 90s when half the editors of DC were former Marvel writers.

So you could get away with things like the interactive death of Superman, where as Weezy has said, you had five guys sitting down and plotting the next year's worth of stories.

But from my perspective as a writer, sitting down and defining the next two years worth of run for a title is dangerous from my perspective, because A, there's no guarantee that you're stepping off in the right direction.

What if you hit a speed bump three issues in and realize you're going down the wrong path?

How do you make a correction when everything is not only locked in on this is the way we go, but other books are coordinating off of that.

By the same token, what do you do if you have a better idea?

Put it on hold for two years when it might not be a better idea or go with it and see where it leads?

I prefer the slightly more freewheeling approach.

I like to think that "X-Men" sales were proof positive that it might not be, that at least for me and that book, it was the right direction.

But nowadays people don't stay on titles that long.

Creative teams don't exist for that long.

And it's less stressful for the office to just say, pitch something, once it's approved, you can't change anything substantial.

Go with it.

I guess my response would be, look at X-Men 3, the movie where by the they were finally settling on a director, the third replacement, it was now March of... No, sorry, it was May of 2005.

And the writers were saying we're still on the first draft of the screenplay, we need more time and can you not hold it for a year, six months at least, or until the summer of 07.

And Fox said no.

You can do what you like with the screenplay.

But all the sets are bought, everything is put together.

It's coming out the end of May 2006.

You've got 10 months.

Have fun.

The end result of course being "X3", which was less than perfect.

The same applies to a bunch of comics as it does to movies.

- I see we have just under five minutes left in our conversation-- - Sorry about that.

- No, it's okay.

It's great stuff.

And hearing you talk about the adaptation of your work when Hollywood gets their hands on some of the stuff that you've done and reinterprets it, obviously you know these characters, you know the story, you know how to make it work, because the numbers, as you say, bear the fact that people like what you did.

So is there anything you can do in that circumstance and maybe say, hey, try this or try that.

Or is once it's in their hands, they have carte blanche?

- Once it's in their hands, they have carte blanche.

I mean, my ambition... Back in 88, Stan and I had a meeting with Jim Cameron.

We were gonna pitch him the X-Men.

He was gonna pitch us Katherine Bigelow as the director.

I'm sitting here thinking, holy God, imagine 1988 Katherine Bigelow directing my X-Men, or at least the X-Men that I was substantially responsible for creating.

Seven Alpha women in the cast.

God knows what would be on screen.

I was like, holy cow.

Until Stan said, I hear you like Spider-Man.

And he and Cameron were off and running because Cameron was an ultimate Spider-Man fan.

And suddenly he went from being producer of the X-Men to producer, screenwriter, director.

And we all know how a successful that turned out to be.

When the opportunity came again in 98, at which time I was an executive at Marvel, Lauren Schuler Donner was pitching us Brian Singer.

And my hope, my ambition was I could hang out on set and just take notes and then maybe with the second film pitch my own idea.

In retrospect, that's not the way Brian does business.

And there was no way it was gonna happen.

For me it was always trying to get my foot in the door and things never synergized, probably has more to do with me than with the business.

But I live on the wrong coast and the synergy never worked.

I would love to get my hands on a concept and play with it.

When Lauren asked me to write a treatment for Gambit, I figured, okay, this is it.

And I wrote, I hoped was the best treatment ever.

But pitching a comic book hero treatment to Fox is a joke in and of itself because Fox hated comics, hated superhero comics, hated I think the most that X-Men was successful, and that comics turned out to be the defining movie genre of the first 15 years, from at least I think ought to 16 or at least till "Avengers: Endgame".

They were always on the wrong side of the curve and there was no way for X-men to embrace its fullest potential.

That I've always thought was the cruelest irony of this century is that without the first X-Men movie, would there have been a Spider-Man movie?

Would there have been Iron Man?

And without them, would there have been Avengers?

We don't know.

But I've always wanted to try and hit one over the park as a screenplay.

It's just never synergized, and I don't think ever will synergize at this point.

But sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

- Well, Chris, I'm gonna have to stop you there.

We've just about run out of time.

I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

It's been a fast half hour.

- Well, I talk too much.

Sorry about that.

- It was great.

I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture".

We will see you again soon.

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