Spider-Man is just hated because he’s Spider-Man but no one thinks about his origins as the source of his powers the origin isn’t the cause of Spider-Man’s lack of respect. It’s the “we fear what we don’t understand” mentality that’s defined who the X-Men are.
Going back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the idea that the X-Men were feared and hated for being mutants is central to the myth of the X-Men. And perhaps with the popularity of the book he was writing came an amount of freedom for Claremont to turn the X-Men into outlaws even as they fought for the good of mutantkind and mankind.
And then with the launch of the ongoing New Mutants series, the X-Men became a franchise. While Uncanny X-Men had been allowed to just exist really by itself from 1975 through to 1981, 1982 is when things start expanding just a bit, first with two graphic novels (one of which introduces a whole new team of mutants,) and the first Wolverine miniseries, with art by Marvel superstar Frank Miller. So this is where things get interesting as Marvel clearly realizes the hit they have with Chris Claremont’s X-Men. So this is where things really start to get interesting. This month, we're covering 1983 to 1984, the heyday of Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men. Maybe by the end of 2023, I’ll have some kind of grand unified theory of Chris Claremont’s time on the book or maybe I’ll just have read a lot of comics that range from “not bad” to “what were they thinking?”. So armed with several omnibuses, Marvel Unlimited, and whatever back issue diving I need to do, I’ve set the goal to read his 16-year run on X-Men, New Mutants, and other related books, probably also eventually including some Louise Simonson New Mutants and X-Factor here as well since the series are so tied together.Īs much as this is to check out these stories again, I want to see if there’s a completeness to the story that Claremont was telling, starting with his first issue, X-Men #94 (1975), and extending all the way through X-Men #3 (1991). I probably read it when it was coming out but more out of the inertia of collecting than any love of it. 7 min read One Punch!! (From Uncanny X-Men #186 (1984,) art by Barry Windsor-Smith and Terry Austin)Īround the end of 2022 a thought struck me have I ever read all of Chris Claremont’s X-Men? I think I’ve collected it all in one form or another (or even multiple forms) but there’s a point in the mid-1980s where a lot of it becomes fuzzy in my memory.
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