In this episode Chris Claremont stops by to talk about his historic career!

Topics include tiring of the X-Men(?), the heartbreaking fact that “God Loves, Man Kills” still holds water today, telling a cracking good story, the importance of a good editor, Life Death w/ Barry Windsor Smith, Chris’s run on X-Men as a “life,” prose creation, and also what he’s reading.

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Transcript:

Matt: Kara.

Kara: Matt.

Matt: We’re back here in Artist Alley at New York Comic-Con with the biggest interview we’ve ever done in history. Mr. Chris Claremont, welcome to the show.

Chris: My pleasure. Thank you for being here and thank you for the very kind words.

Matt: I try my best. Now I grew up reading X-Men. Your X-Men books were a big part of my youth. Do you ever get tired talking about the X-Men?

Chris: No.

Matt: Never?

Chris: As long as nobody’s tired of reading them.

Kara: Definitely not.

Chris: I feel like it’s a fair exchange.

Matt: It is. It really is. I started going back, I grew up in the ‘90’s so I was reading right before you came back in the 2000’s, around the movie era and it’s funny because going back to the early days of “God Loves, Man Kills” which is a rare book I think because it holds up almost perfectly.

Chris: Well I think one of the heartbreaking things about it is that it is still relevant. It still has meaning today. The I guess fanciful hope was that maybe we could grow out of it, but yeah, that was the intent when Louise Simonson and I sat down and tried to figure out, okay, if we’re going to do a graphic novel what could we do?

My decision fairly early on which she wholeheartedly supported was that this would, the idea here was to do a book that was, well in effect, transcended continuity that would be as valid in 10 years or 15 years as it was then and that would be about something told in a way that we could not do or would not feel comfortable doing in a regular run of the title.

That was my reading, my research, my talking to people led me to feel that that level of prejudice was the subject and I just went for it full bore. The intent obviously was to tell a cracking good story but to do so in a way that transcended continuity, that would make it characters a conflict hopefully a resolution that would apply anywhere and at any time.

Matt: Yeah. You mentioned it earlier, but how important was the editor relationship with you during that time period writing you know 200 issues of X-Men with an editor? How important was that?

Chris: I think if you look through the history of modern prose you’ll find every top writer, every writer with a name, will talk about an editor who is special, who has been that person who can help the writer realize the impulse that led him or her into the story and catalyze it into something lasting.

There are more than a few instances where writers have shifted publishers simply to be with that editor. In a real sense it was no different at Marvel, in my case the inestimable good fortune of working with first Louise Simonson and then Ann Nocenti, just sort of brought my instincts and abilities on X-Men together with the right artists, the right stories, the right antagonists, all the rest of them.

Matt: Yeah. There was another portion going back as an adult reading the entire run, I discovered “Life Death” which became my favorite single X-Men issue of all time. Barry Windsor Smith is a next level storyteller and coupled with you, it made me realize a different kind of X-Men book in a different way which I don’t think is done very much today which is a single issue between two people, having thoughts, having conversations and learning more about each other and themselves. You don’t see that really ever and it stinks but that issue is another one that seems to have transcended. For me it’s just a beautiful story about two people learning about each other and themselves.

Chris: Fucking up wholeheartedly.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris: Again that was the idea and the minute I saw the first three pages I knew we had it. Barry is the most infuriatingly brilliant of talents. Brilliant it speaks for itself. Infuriating because damn it, he has a mind of his own. And is as driven by his own frighteningly acute artistic vision as the rest of us are. One of the great things about working with him is his ability to bring to life the imagery that I have and yet also to take it in his own unique direction.

The first pages, as I said the first-

Matt: It was just Storm on the bed. It was beautiful.

Chris: -two pages, the shot of her lying on that bed, there was no need for words because everything you needed to know you could see in the four panels of her expression and in Forge’s reaction and then where you go from there. To me that was the heart and soul of the story.

The fact that it’s taking both of them in an unexpected direction which you hope and realize will lead to them having a lasting relationship and then they fuck it up and it’s the sort of thing you see it happening and you want to yell no and you can’t. That’s very much like life. Again the whole “Life Death II” was Aurora going back to Africa to find her center.

Then ideally there would be a “Life Death III” in my imagination where we resolve the whole thing, where Storm came back to herself and then she and Forge had to cross the next Rubicon which was do we have a relationship or do we not? Where will it lead us and in Storm’s case or even in his case, is this something that we can afford as people, as heroes, as whatever. Can we live with that vulnerability? Can we do the things that are required of a relationship like living happily ever after? In a way all the questions that should have been asked when Storm and T'Challa got together, but weren’t to my way of thinking anyway.

Kara: Matt mentioned earlier that you have written hundreds of X-Men issues and from what you were just describing to us right now, from just this one story, clearly you put a lot of thought into what it is that you’re writing. To do that for so many issues just boggles my mind. What was that like for you just going so deeply into each story?

Chris: In a way it was a very natural thing simply because my global way of looking at it was that they were individual pieces perhaps, but whenever anyone asks, my answer is 94 to 279 is essentially one story. It’s a life. Life is an ongoing sequence of individual events. It was the same here.

If you look at them from that progression they’re evolving, they’re moving forward, sometimes backwards, sometimes side to side, but things are all happening within the context of we are proceeding on with our lives. It all felt very natural.

Matt: Your run on Storm, when I went back to read it, I started to get angry because I felt like Storm should be the woman in the Marvel Universe because you wrote her so well and she was such a full-fledged character.

Chris: I won’t argue with that.

Matt: Good, it’s funny because recently, I’m not sure, I don’t think you caught up in X-Men, but there was one run. The first time I really read an X-Men book that did justice to a character was with Rogue and I believe the writer was Christos Gage. I don’t know if you’ve ever read his work, but I highly recommend it to you because he wrote the X-Men title kind of became Rogue’s title over time.

It was probably one of the best runs of an X-Men book that was devoted to a female character. That’s a long way of going around to say I loved your work on Storm obviously.

Moving on into your prose work just for a moment, how do you approach a prose novel as opposed to the monthly grind so to speak? Is it easier for you? Is it more difficult?

Chris: I don’t have to deal with an artist.

Matt: That’s true.

Chris: That’s not a facetious remark. It’s just that the advantage and disadvantages that you have a second creative intellect to bounce ideas off of and to also catalyze the moment and bring it to life. When I’m thinking of a plot, when I’m looking at Todd Nauck and saying okay, in this issue Nightcrawler does A, then B happens and then he hooks up with Ziggy and Rico, and this happens. Then he meets up with Black Betsy.

What I’m doing is sketching out a sequence of events so that Tom can draw it, sorry Todd can draw it and bring it to life. In a novel, I’m doing it all myself. Not only is it a case of having to describe the moment so that the audience can look at it and see that image, but then I have to deal with how do the characters react to it? How do I convey that to the reader quickly? How do I explain what’s going on?

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: It’s more focused and personalized in the sense that it’s all mine, but it’s harder because I have to keep everybody interested as I write, and write, and write, and write.

Matt: Yeah, I can see that being a negative in some respects too because at a certain point maybe you do have that editor giving opinions back and forth, but you lose a little bit.

Chris: I’ll always have an editor. At one time I’ve got to sell the damn thing.

Matt: Right.

Chris: Everyone becomes an editor. Agents become an editor. The person you give, you know I used to give stuff to my wife and she would read it and tell me what was right with it and what was wrong with it. That’s not the problem. The problem is just finding the moments and then conveying the moments to the audience in a way that makes them want to turn the page and see what happens next.

In that sense the challenge is the same. The difference is that in prose, as I said, all resting on the shoulders of the writers whereas in comics the first focus of the writer is to tell the story to the penciler so the penciler can bring it to life visually so the writer can then look at the pictures and derive whatever dialogue or captioning or mix of that will crystallize, focus that imagery so the reader will want to turn the page and see what happens next and come back next issue.

Kara: Yeah, it’s a totally different medium.

Chris: The other difference also is that comic books generally tend to be short stories whereas novels are novels.

Matt: Yeah.

Kara: Or the X-Men, which is one giant novel.

Chris: Made up of pieces of short stories. It’s chapters. Most comic careers don’t last like that. Even in the old days, it was very rare to find a writer to stick around on a book for 10, much less 16, 17 years.

Matt: If you were to recommend one book that you loved over the last few years or decade, what is the best thing that you picked up that you would recommend to someone?

Chris: Even if it wasn’t written by me?

Matt: Yes.

Chris: In comics?

Matt: Or even in novels too.

Chris: Well I think Walter’s work on Thor, Walter Simonson’s work on “Thor” is exceptional. I think Louise Simonson’s work is exceptional, Frank Miller’s work on “Dark Knight”. It is very much a matter of taste but Frank is one of the most brilliant storytellers in the modern era and at the very least, you take a look to see what he’s doing that is cool and how best to learn from it, if necessary steal from it.

I’m not reading that much fiction these days. I’m doing much more in terms of tangible history, geopolitics, newspapers. It’s evolution.

Matt: Yeah, I bet.

Chris: I don’t want to read other people’s fiction. I want to write my own and hopefully sell my own then ideally deal with positive consequences and mad acclaim and all that sort of foolishness as opposed to oh golly, why is he selling and I’m not?

Matt: Yeah, right. Well I appreciate your taking the time out. We’re huge fans. You’ve influenced both of our comic reading careers in positive ways. I hope that we do get to talk next about one of your novels.

Chris: The interesting thing is I was doing a series in France called “The Black Dragon”. This iteration of it was called “Wanderers” about a group of young people literally setting out to wander the world in 680 AD and what I find amusing is it didn’t quite sell enough in France to justify continuing with the books. I wonder if that was because the lead character was a guy.

Matt: Maybe.

Chris: You’ll never know.

Matt: Maybe. Next time.

Chris: It’s sad because the art was and is and hopefully the story as well, superb.

Matt: We’ll check it out and again, Chris, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Chris: You’re welcome.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)