(industrial music)
(light electronic music)
- [Narrator] X-Men is unique in comics history.
Unlike Superman, Batman, Spider-Man,
and most other popular superheroes,
which were defined by many creators over decades,
the X-Men's wild success
is due almost entirely to one writer, Chris Claremont.
(light electronic music)
- I was born in London, abducted by pirates at a young age,
transported across the pond to this strange new world.
My father wanted to explore medicine over here.
My mother wanted better food.
It was five years after the war.
She was tired of rationing.
Went to school for the first time,
dressed as I would be going to school back home,
shorts and a proper shirt and a proper sleeveless sweater
and knee socks and shoes and a blazer, and, uh,
didn't last the day,
(children laughing)
and never did it again.
- Chris grew up in a military family
and they moved around quite a bit.
- When you're moving every couple of years,
by the time you settle in and establish relationships,
especially when you're a kid,
boom, you're up and out, moving across the country.
and you gotta do it all over again.
That's a hard thing to get used to,
and after a while, you just stop trusting,
because, well, I'm not gonna make friends,
because if I make friends, we'll just move again.
- Chris's experiences feeling like a little bit
of an outsider had influence on his work on the X-Men.
He probably would not have found
a whole lot to identify with in the comics of, say,
the 50s or maybe even the early 60s.
- Comics was something I did when I went to get a haircut.
You know, sitting around waiting for a barber,
didn't want to read Ladies' Home Journal.
So if there were comics there, you read, I read comics.
- Chris Claremont, when he went to college,
he went to college for theater, he wanted to be an actor.
And what do actors do?
They sit and they think about character.
How do you make a character well-rounded?
What is a character's back story?
How do you present it so that
it's not a flat, two-dimensional thing on the stage,
but is something living and real
that the audience can relate to.
And I believe that it's that training,
in how to create a character,
that led him to create these amazing characters.
(pensive guitar music)
- [Narrator] As a university student,
Chris was tasked with finding an internship,
a task which took him into the world of comics.
- My parents had a friend, Al Jaffee,
the artist from Mad magazine,
and I thought it'd be cool to work as a volunteer for Mad,
because from all accounts, Mad was cool.
Al evidently called up my parents and said,
"There is no way in hell I'm gonna take your son
into the office."
"Do you have any idea what we do in there?"
"You'll never speak to me again."
But Al said, "I know Stan Lee."
"If he's interested,
I can see about getting him a job at Marvel."
And I said, "Cool," and the minute I said,
"Since it's school, I'll work for free,"
I was in.
(light electric guitar music)
- [Narrator] While Marvel comics of the 60s
may seem dated now, at the time, they were hailed
for a realism and relatability previously unseen in comics.
- The challenges that the Marvel heroes would come across
were more down-to-earth,
and because they were more down-to-earth,
they made the super-heroics part of things
a little more accessible.
It wasn't that Spidey would defeat Doc Ock,
it was, will he get the test in on time?
Will he work things out with Gwen Stacy?
Everybody was flawed, which made the Marvel characters
that much more accessible and interesting
from a dramatic side of things, and more fun to play with,
and, as far as the X-Men were concerned,
no one really knew from one issue to the next,
were they respectable, were they hated, were they loved,
were they what?
They'd save the world and nobody would say thank you.
(pensive guitar music)
- [Narrator] X-Men was created
by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963.
They introduced the basic premise of mutants
fighting for a world that hates and fears them,
and some of the series' notable characters,
but the book was not considered a major achievement
next to more successful Marvel titles,
like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, or The Avengers.
- It was one of the very few books Jack and Stan created
that wasn't at least doing solidly in the marketplace.
They left the book early.
- The X-Men, back in the 60s,
was a commercially failure, ultimately.
It got canceled.
But it was always a book that had loyal readers.
It was always an intelligent book,
even though it was sort of a second,
even third-string book.
- And there was talk for a number of years
about possibly reviving the book
as a group of international heroes,
based on the fact that a lot of Marvel books
sold very well in various other, foreign countries,
and they thought if they could heroes from those countries
in this book, it would increase the sales even more.
- [Narrator] Editor Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum
were tasked with creating an all-new, all-different team
of international X-Men.
- Dave Cockrum was already a fan favorite
from his work on Legion of Superheroes.
- And he showed me his sketchbooks from the Navy.
- Dave had a note, well, a notebook,
he had a dozen notebooks
filled with sketches of characters he did.
- You'd ask him for a costume design,
he'd come in with 40 pages of artwork.
- [Len] So it's where we found Nightcrawler,
and Colossus, Thunderbird, all came from that.
- [Narrator] Giant-size X-Men number one
was released in May 1975,
the first new X-Men story in five years.
It was successful enough to justify continuing the series.
- It was supposed to be a quarterly,
because Marvel wasn't sure it would sell.
After Dave had started working on the second issue,
the editorial decision came down
to make the book a bi-monthly.
- And X-Men, I really didn't intend to give up, initially.
- But he didn't have time to do a bi-monthly X-Men.
- And when I said, "Gee, I don't know,
should I give up the X-Men, should I keep it?"
Chris just sort of sat there and went,
"I'll take it, I'll take it, me, over here."
- So he asked if I was interested.
And I said, "Hell yes!"
- [Narrator] In his early issues,
Claremont began to develop this new cast of characters
and started laying the groundwork for decades of storylines.
- What I had was what almost no one has had since then,
a mainstream series that was fundamentally a tabula rasa.
We had a half-dozen characters, all of whom are brand new.
It was a chance to get in on the sub-level
and define the characters from the get-go.
- His dialogue had more sophistication to it
than a lot of other writers.
It had more of an edge.
He also was delving more deeply into character
in ways that a lot of other comics writers of the time
were not doing.
(light rock music)
- You take these seven people, five of whom were immigrants,
and you throw 'em into a world that, ideally,
is unlike anything they know.
You had a wall down the middle of Europe.
So for Peter Rasputin to come
from the Ust-Ordynsky Collective to New York
to work with the X-Men, was making a valid and,
in its own small way, revolutionary, statement.
- Chris and Dave Cockrum and, later, John Byrne
were the ones who really sort of helped
define these characters.
- How do we define Nightcrawler?
Nightcrawler should be scary, but no.
We're tired of demons who look like demons
acting like demons.
Why can't they be cool?
Why can't they be normal people?
Why don't we make the most outrageous-looking of the team
the most cheerfully rational and generous of them all?
- Wolverine came along when I was doing the Hulk.
The idea of making him a mutant
was simply because I knew there was talk
of somebody doing this international book.
I said, "Well, okay, so I'll give 'em a Canadian hero."
- Len had envisioned him as a kid, he was 19, 20 years old,
and that the claws were part of the costume, not the body.
And the problem is, he didn't look like a kid.
And especially in the first issue,
he's presented as an officer, so we figured,
let's go the other direction.
Why not try him as being older?
But then, if he's older and he's got a healing factor,
how old are we talking about?
And then, the third thing was, well,
wouldn't it be cool
if the claws actually came out of his body,
if they were a part of him?
And the first reaction was, "Oh, that's disgusting."
"Oh, man, that's creepy."
Oh, they are gonna love this.
The reality for me, from the very beginning, was,
every time he pops his claws, he is slashing open his hand,
so there's blood and there's pain.
To me, that made him accessible and human.
He wasn't just a magic monster.
He is a guy who has a serious problem,
and he can't escape from it.
And so how do we deal with it?
(somber, monotone music)
- At the time, Chris's boss at Marvel
was Jim Shooter, who had broken into the comics industry
as a writer, as a young teenager.
- I'm Jim Shooter,
and when I was 12 years old,
I decided I wanted to write comic books,
'cause my family needed money, and when you're 12,
they won't hire you in a steel mill.
So I thought, I can do that.
The reason I thought I could do it
is I read a bunch of DC comics,
I read a bunch of Marvel comics,
and the Marvel comics were better.
And I thought, if I can figure out why these are better,
then I can write for those guys.
So I literally studied comic books for a year.
And when I thought I had it figured out,
I wrote a script for DC Comics' Adventure Comics,
featuring Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes,
and sent it to them, I thought,
"Well, maybe a shot at selling this."
Well, I got a letter back from the editor saying,
"Hey, this is pretty good, send us another one."
So I sent 'em two more.
He called me up and he said,
"I want to buy all three of these,
and I want you to write a Supergirl story,
and we'll keep you busy as much as you want."
So I became a regular writer.
I was in ninth grade.
- This was not a common thing.
A 13 and 14-year-old kid writing comics
just didn't happen in 1966.
- After this went on for a little while,
the editor said, "I want you to fly up to New York."
I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Said, "I want you to fly up to New York
and spend a couple of days in the office,
'cause we want to teach you some few things."
And I kinda hesitated, and he finally said, "How old are you?"
'Cause he thought I must be a college student, I think.
And I said, "Well, I just turned 14,
and I wrote the first story when I was 13."
And he said, "Put your mother on the phone."
- He always wanted to work for Marvel.
Marvel was where the quality stuff was,
so he moved over to Marvel and began as an editor,
and this was a time,
after Stan Lee had stopped being the editor of the comics,
where Marvel went through about
four or five editors-in-chief in about four or five years.
- Basically, it was anarchy.
I mean, basically, every writer
just kind of did his own thing.
The books were never even seen by the office
until they were completed.
I was kind of brought in as an innovation,
an editor, someone to actually look at the plots,
make sure that they made sense,
look at the pencils when they came in,
make sure they followed the plot,
and then look at the script when it came in
and made sure that makes sense,
so that there would be fewer catastrophes at the end
that had to be entirely remade.
(light rock music)
- [Narrator] The pressure of a monthly schedule
forced original artist Dave Cockrum to leave the book.
He was replaced by John Byrne, an up-and-coming young artist
whose collaborations with Chris
drew more critical acclaim and attention to X-Men.
- Now that we're so used to X-Men being the hit,
the number one, it may be hard to realize
that at one point, it was the sort of book
that the aficionados knew and loved.
- When I met Chris, I discovered he was pretty intense.
I mean, he cared desperately about this third-string book,
and he poured his heart into it.
And I read it, and I thought it was pretty good.
- Those people who, shall we say, had discerning taste
knew that this was good, this was something different,
this was a book that was going places.
But it wasn't until into the 80s
that the book really became this top seller.
- [Narrator] One of Claremont's most successful
early stories was The Phoenix Saga,
which saw ordinary mutant Jean Grey transformed
into a cosmically powerful entity, the Phoenix.
- He had this idea that maybe being like Phoenix could,
like, her powers could run amok a little bit and stuff.
And I said, "You know what?"
"At Marvel comics, we had any number
of villainous characters become heroic."
"We've never had a heroic character become evil,
I mean really evil, the next Doctor Doom, you know?"
And I said, "Why don't you do that?"
- The Dark Phoenix Saga, of course, really nailed it down
as the comic that everyone was talking about.
- [Narrator] The Dark Phoenix Saga saw Jean seduced
by manipulative villain Mastermind
until her powers ran amok,
leading her to consume a planet
filled with an alien race known as Asparagus People.
- Chris comes in, he shows me this page, and he says,
"Look, this is Phoenix," and he said, "John drew this,
and she's destroying a planet."
So then I wrote this caption,
and it said, "You know, the Asparagus People scream
as zillions of them fry."
And I said, "Chris, she's a hero,
you can't have her kill all these people."
And he said, "Oh, yeah, Shooter said I could."
You had shown it to Sali--
- [Chris] No, Salicrup said I could--
- That's like saying, Mommy said I could,
and then, - That's right.
- And then bringing in Dad. - John, no,
John and I thought Salicrup had shown it to Shooter,
and it turned out, no, he hadn't.
- When I became editor-in-chief,
I would check the books out.
I mean, no book would go to the printer
without my signature.
I remember checking out an issue of X-Men,
and I think, whoa, you know, mass murder, holy cow.
And so I'm reading through these scripts and plots
and, finally, the plot for the last issue.
And in the plot for the last issue,
Dark Phoenix is captured by the Shi'ar
and she gets her brain adjusted, and then she's okay again,
and she goes back and lives on Long Island with the X-Men,
and everything's fine.
I said, "Whoa, what a wimpy ending, nah."
I said, "You gotta do something better."
He said, "Like what?"
So we had another one of our shouting arguments.
And I suggested, I said, "Well, maybe,
you know, for the first time in comic book history,
she gets captured and sent to prison."
- But then you automatically know
that the next 40 issues of X-Men
will be them trying to get to hell, breaking her out,
failing, succeeding, failing, succeeding.
- So he didn't like that.
I said, "Well, then, you figure it out, I don't,
okay, you're the writer, you do it."
So the next morning, he came in,
and he kind of strides into my office.
He said, "We're going to kill her."
(suspenseful music)
- Well, I figured if we're gonna do it,
we might as well do it right.
- I said, "Okay, she's dead, it's done."
It's a deal, it's a pact, she dies.
And he's like, "What do you mean, but, uh,
and now he starts arguing like, you can't kill her."
I said, "What do you mean, me kill her?"
You just said, "You were gonna kill her."
So Chris goes out of my office, finds a phone someplace.
Seconds later, my phone rings.
It's John Byrne, and his first words were, "Are you crazy?"
(laughs) And I said, "No, we're killing her, that's it."
So they're both yelling at me now.
It was a bluff, they didn't really want to kill her.
They did it sort of kicking and screaming,
and yet, that issue sold, umpteen, sold through the roof.
And P.S., it's a great issue.
- The impact was huge, X-Men sales went through the roof.
People reportedly sent flowers and death threats
to the Marvel offices.
(gentle guitar music)
It was the major sensational event of its day
and really put the X-Men on the map,
sales-wise and critical-wise, and it sort of stayed there
for the next 20, 25 years.
- That same year, I flew the whole X-Men team
out to San Diego, and that wasn't done in those days,
they were mobbed everywhere they went, mobbed.
- [Peter] It was an era in which the creators
were becoming more prominent, were becoming stars,
and that this was Chris Claremont's X-Men.
(upbeat guitar music)
- I'm Louise Simonson, otherwise known as Wheezy,
and I started Marvel in 1980 as an editor.
- Toward the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga,
the X-Men got a new editor, Louise Simonson.
- Like all children in the 50s, I read some comics.
- Louise Simonson, who used to be known as Louise Jones,
was around comics for a really long time.
- I wanted to be in publishing of some kind.
I knew that, that was why I was in New York.
I knew comics, I knew a lot of people who worked in comics.
- If you go back to the very first thing Swamp Thing comic
in 1972, she was the model for the cover
that Bernie Wrightson drew.
- I didn't think of it as a career
until I actually started working there,
and I found I loved it.
Loved the people, loved the work.
- Shortly after joining Marvel,
Louise Simonson was assigned to edit
Chris Claremont and John Byrne on X-Men.
- Because I had been asked to edit the X-Men,
I took home all of Chris's work
from the very beginning, when he had started writing the X-Men.
I sat down, I had a raging headache.
The building behind me was throwing a huge party.
There was a loud band, womp, womp, womp,
and my head was going womp, womp, womp,
and I started reading these comics, and it all went away,
and I was in the world of the X-Men and it was wonderful.
And I thought, "Has any other editor ever been so lucky
as to be handed a team like this and a book like this?"
I was just very, very lucky, and I realized it.
With Chris, it was never a problem coming up with a story.
Chris is an enormous font of ideas.
- And I would just sit there at lunch,
watching how she negotiated
which ideas were good and which weren't good.
- I remember, it was one issue.
Chris had gotten really late.
Shooter was threatening to pull him off that issue
and put in a fill-in.
So I dragged him to my house and I sat him down in a chair
and I said, "Okay, Chris, what happens?"
And he'd tell me, "Bum-bum-bum-bah-bah."
I'd go (imitates typewriter keys clacking).
"Okay, what happens next?"
And he'd say, "Blah-blah-blah,"
and I'd go, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah.
"What happens next," put it in and I'd type it up.
- And they used to call Wheezy,
that her superpower was the power to cloud men's minds.
And all I had to do was watch her handle Chris for a while,
where she somehow would get, pull the best ideas out,
and everybody left the office with their tail wagging.
And then I'd sit there and go,
"Did they realize that you just told them
what they were doing was terrible and they had to redo it?"
They always left happy.
- And we would just smile and say,
- I think that's a legend, - Wheezy would,
it's not, I've witnessed it!
- And the thing is, we know she's doing it,
when it's happening, it's like, "Wow, I'm really brilliant,
but she's smarter." - Well, actually,
you were brilliant. - I don't really notice that
I'm being whipped right now, you know, and, oh,
it feels good, actually. (Chris and Louise laugh)
(upbeat pop music)
- [Narrator] Though many today consider Dark Phoenix
the high point of Chris's run, he was just getting started
developing a universe of characters.
- Well, we just killed off Phoenix,
and the idea that I think John and I
were always playing with during our run on the book was,
okay, can you top this?
Just when you thought you could take a breath and relax,
we had this wacky idea.
- [Tom] Days of Future Past was a story
that looked into the future of the X-Men.
- You come in in the last act in the tragedy.
The first cover says it all.
Look at that wanted poster behind Logan and Kitty
and there are all the X-Men and half of them say dead.
And you know, just looking at it,
that everybody there who is a mutant
is living on borrowed time.
And yes, the paradigm for Days of Future Past
comes right out of the second World War
and what happened in Germany,
and that is the automatic primal resonance for Magneto.
(somber tonal music)
This is his worst nightmare come to pass.
This is everything he has warned against
and fought against for his entire life.
How can he find a way to stop it, to neutralize it,
to make it right?
And then the other side of the coin is,
Xavier has to look at it and think,
everything Magneto has told me has come to pass.
Which side should I be on?
The neat tagline for Days of Future Past was that
you don't know what will happen tomorrow,
you just have to do everything you can today
to make the world, and life in the world,
as good as possible.
(somber tonal music)
- Several issues after Days of Future Past,
John Byrne quits, because he wants to go over
and do Fantastic Four, and I think, "Oh my God, I'm doomed."
I have driven this creative,
this brilliant creative team apart (groans).
Oh no, they're going to fire me for sure.
But then, you know, but Chris kept it together,
bless his sweet heart.
And, um, you know, the rest is history.
You know, it just got better and better and better.
- [Narrator] After turning a hero into a villain
with Phoenix, he set out to redeem
the X-Men's arch-nemesis, Magneto.
- Magneto was sort of the typical Marvel villain,
very much in the mode of Doctor Doom.
- In the Scottish play, Mac-you-know-who
comes out, and he's just a bastard from step one.
Who cares?
But if you see that he starts out as a noble hero,
a trusted knight, and suddenly he's walking down a path
which makes perfect sense to him,
but, you're watching the degradation,
the corruption, the destruction
of someone who could have been a noble hero,
it's the essence of great tragedy.
The villain, the guy who turns out to be the monster,
has to have something wonderful to lose.
- You started to get this really intense backstory.
- So with Magneto, what led him to this position?
He's a young man in Auschwitz,
he lost everything there, he survived.
Somehow he survived.
And each step of the way leads him
towards putting on the suit
and forming the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
and coming out and trying to say,
I've tried playing by your rules.
It isn't working, fine.
I'm going to impose my rules and you'll behave yourselves.
I'm gonna be the dad now and not the servitor.
- This was a really bold way to reimagine a villain.
It gave the character a depth
that very few bad guys in superhero comics ever had.
- [Narrator] Issue number 150 revealed
Magneto's Holocaust backstory,
and also put him in contact with Kitty Pryde,
a recently introduced teenage X-Man.
- The beautiful paradigm of Kitty's presence
in the X-Men was suddenly, we had a young Jewish hero
who is everything Magneto is fighting for,
and the seminal moment in 50 is he damn near kills her.
Not because he has anything against her,
it's just, he reacted.
He saw the costume, she was attacking him,
he struck back and then realized,
oh, my God, it's a little girl.
But within the context of the character that I was building,
this is also a man who, 20 years earlier,
had seen his own daughter, the same age,
burned to death because she was different.
And that was bringing home in a primal sense,
a personal sense,
I am becoming that which I fought my entire life.
Am I a good man who can reform himself through will,
or am I inevitably a monster?
(light pop music)
I mean, my plan was, by 300, to have Charlie killed
and Magneto become the permanent head of the school.
You know, I wanted him to be a hero.
I wanted him to be the leader of the X-Men,
because it would then allow us the opportunity
of creating a whole new, utterly irredeemable villain
for the current generation.
(light pop music)
- The X-Men, in particular, really appeals to people
who feel in some way marginalized,
because they've always been this metaphor for outsiders.
- If you don't fit in any place else,
then you know that there are other people like you.
- Now, that's a great metaphor for race and racism,
but I think it's not a bad metaphor
for what women also have to endure.
- And it had more female characters,
it had such a diverse cast.
- [Peter] Much more independent, much more feminist
than we've seen before.
- Every team had a female character who was the girl.
Never the woman, always the girl.
I figure, why can't we have more exciting people?
- He has said that whenever he sat down
to create a character, he would always say, first,
you know, "Is there any reason
this character can't be female?"
- So he added so many female characters to the mutant canon.
Kitty Pryde was a classic, inquisitive young girl, you know?
She was spunky, she was learning about love
for the first time, you know, she was exploring her powers,
and she was just the perfect character
for teenage girls to identify with.
- I felt like Kitty Pryde, there was my role model now.
- There was Storm, who is really probably
my first feminist icon ever.
(jazzy guitar music)
- Because I'm mixed,
it was one of the first comic book characters
where it was a strong female character in Storm.
- I don't think other people asked,
why can't this character be a woman,
I think it was a Chris thing.
And honestly, I think that, because it was a Chris thing,
Chris's books were very popular with a female audience.
And you gotta figure that half the people out there
in the world are female, so you know,
it could have been one of the reasons
that his books sold so well.
I mean, the X-Men was a huge seller.
- Ann No centi came on,
first as an assistant editor under Louise Simonson,
and then she took over as editor of the book.
- I'm Annie No centi, actually, I'm Ann No centi (laughs).
Who am I?
I didn't have a history of reading comics.
I didn't even know what a comic was when I got hired.
I answered an ad in the Village Voice,
and it said that they were looking for writers.
I called up and I said, "Well, what would I be writing?"
And she said, "Oh, I can't say over the phone,"
and I thought, well, porn, okay, I'll try.
(Chris and Louise laugh loudly)
- The advantage, I think, that I've had with X-Men
was Louise Simonson and Ann No centi as editors.
They provided a perspective
that was rarely available elsewhere.
- So he had women around him, women who he respected.
- Ann had no idea where I was coming from,
and I had no idea where she was coming from,
so we shuffled it all together
and came up with some really great stuff.
And Wheezy would just look at us and kind of go,
"Gosh, aren't they interesting?"
- The offices themselves, back then, were a lot of fun.
- When I first came into Marvel,
there were people sleeping under desks.
There was a giant papier-mâché figure of Thor
suspended from the ceiling.
I mean, really, DC was like an insurance office.
Marvel was, as I said, home.
- Or they would decide to set up offices in the bathroom
or people would come in with balloons,
helium balloons with their thoughts over their heads,
and it was really fun.
- There was so much creativity that it just boiled over.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Louise] It wasn't contained,
it boiled over onto the walls,
it spilled out into the bullpen.
- We're sitting around one day,
and we were talking about Saturday Night Live,
'cause they were just in their second season,
and it was really cool, and you know,
what are we gonna do in team-up?
Oh shit, you know what would be fun?
Why don't we just,
Spidey and the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players.
And Shooter looks at me and says, "Well..."
I said, "Well, what?"
"Well, it's your idea, do it."
(stutters) Okay.
And so he called 'em up, and it's like, you know,
Jim talks for five minutes,
and that was all it took.
And we all got invited to the cast party for Animal House.
- Marvel was considered to be a creative think tank
back then, and NASA once said,
"We're sending Slinkys into space,"
- Oh, NASA, yeah.
- "And we want the Slinkys to have superhero characters."
So they'd hire us,
and we would come up with characters for NASA.
And then the Vatican hired us to do the Pope comic,
you remember that?
- Oh, God, yes.
- And the monsignors came through and blessed all the pages,
and we were just dying, you know? (laughs)
- Because half of us were Jewish! (laughs)
And the other half, you don't want to know.
Marvel was the kind of wild, crazy place
where this sort of silliness happened as a matter of course.
(soft rock music)
- [Narrator] With X-Men a bigger and bigger success,
Marvel wanted to expand the brand
and corporate higher-ups pushed for a spin-off title.
- Jim Shooter had been after the X-Men office,
which was me and Chris, essentially,
to create another X book for a while.
Chris didn't want to do that,
because he didn't want to water down
the impact of the X-Men.
I mean, he felt like he was doing it
and he was doing it well,
and that it really didn't need another book.
But commercially, Shooter wanted another success
that was as big as the X-Men, if he could manage it.
- As soon as Chris realized that this was actually, I think,
going to happen, was when he sort of got serious about,
okay, well, if there's going to be a spin-off,
I'm going to do it.
'Cause he was protective of his corner of Marvel.
- [Narrator] Chris developed The New Mutants,
which introduced a new cast of teenage characters
studying at Xavier Academy.
- After a little slightly rocky start,
that became a real interesting book.
I mean, that became our experimental book,
with Bill Sienkiewicz doing fantastic, weird,
crazy, artsy stuff.
- The energy that built
when we decided to put Bill Sienkiewicz on The New Mutants
was extraordinary.
That was just extraordinary,
because Bill is so deeply intelligent, he's so passionate,
he has a billion ideas.
- You had stuff that looked like it was drawn
by little kids, you know, in crayon,
and then you had stuff that just looked like
beautiful Renaissance painting.
- This looked cutting edge,
and I think Chris responded to that
by making the stories more cutting edge.
- I don't think we would have done
the stories we did with Warlock, for instance,
without Bill as the artist,
because we knew that Bill could just run with it.
- The whole tone of The New Mutants comic
took a big shift from more teenage storylines
into things that were a lot deeper
and a lot more complicated and emotional.
And Legion was probably the best example of this,
because it delves into so much psychology.
- I used to say, "Bill, draw whatever you want,
you're a genius, why should I tell you what to draw?"
And he'd do these covers, to me, they were like brilliant,
and Shooter would fight him--
- tooth and nail.
- Chris had to run everything past his editor, of course,
the editor had to say yes or no.
- Well, there are always clashes
between writers and editors,
because you have different perspectives.
The writer is very tunnel-vision,
I want what is best for my book,
everybody else get the hell out of the way.
The editor-in-chief, like it or not,
has to balance those desires
with the fact you're playing in a community.
- We fought like cats and dogs, me and him.
He wanted to do all kinds of things, and I,
X-Men was important, I paid attention to it.
- But for the most part, I think that Chris
had a surprising amount of creative freedom.
- We could do whatever we wanted, really.
- We just had to be a little tactful about it, that's all.
- Chris, Wheezy, and I came up with storylines.
There was nobody guarding the gate
between us and the public.
Sometimes your mistakes saw print, but so what?
Because you were always able to stretch and do fun things--
- Shooter was the only real major obstacle,
and really, he wasn't that bad,
certainly on the X-Men, - Yeah, you could,
- He wasn't that bad. - Oh, no.
- He had his moments, but,
- I tried never to say, "You must do this,"
but I would say, "This is the sort of thing we need,
because, you know, you've created this story
and it needs to go someplace."
And so he'd, you know, we'd have these shouting matches.
But it was always about the story.
- When Shooter would get us all presents?
Oh, my God. - Yes, yes.
- [Louise] Oh, yes.
- [Chris] Yeah, some of those presents were just, like--
- Well, you know what he got me.
- I know.
- He got me a bondage outfit.
- I know.
- With a whip and a knife (laughs).
(whip snaps)
- [Narrator] Claremont's run continued
with artist Paul Smith in a series of stories
that drove deeper into the personal and emotional lives
of the characters.
- It's interesting.
I hear people talking about a character now,
and it's as if they're over there, and they're iconic,
and they're, you know, they were just people.
- You define certain specified moments.
We're going in this direction.
But these are organic characters,
and it's not just a single character.
You're dealing with a group
of seven to 14 characters in an issue.
You don't know who will suddenly jump to the foreground.
- One of the maddening but beautiful things about comics
is that you have to give characters a sense of change
without changing them so much
that they violate the essence of who they are.
- Dave, when we started, emphasized Nightcrawler,
because he loved Nightcrawler,
he bonded with Nightcrawler.
Nightcrawler, to him,
was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
John Byrne loved Logan, and that shifted the evolution
in a slightly different direction.
Smitty, I like to think that the one,
the character who stepped to the foreground was Storm.
- [Narrator] Under Chris and Paul Smith,
Storm had a personal crisis, lost her powers,
and took on a new mohawk-and-leather look.
- You know, I think one of the best things
Chris came up with was Storm,
was deciding that the goddess thing
was getting a little tired
and to put her in the biker outfit.
Characters age, and get stuck,
the whole African worship thing started to feel,
a little, like, clunky and tacky.
You know, and just right at the right time,
you have to recreate a character,
but they have to stay the same.
- With Smitty, the superhero adventures, they're alright.
But the character, the characterization,
the interaction of the X-Men on an emotional level
was unsurpassed.
One image that stays to mind is
the moment where Rogue walks into the room in Japan
to meet Logan and Mariko,
and she's just standing there, shyly.
It's very, very, very hard to draw shy.
And Paul did it.
At that point, you don't need a superhero battle.
You don't need the end of the universe.
You bond with that girl and you want to know,
how do you make her feel better?
- You write from your heart, and you write your passions,
what interests you, and then there's gonna be
a ton of people out there that are gonna react.
- The X-Men expressed real emotion,
sorrow, anger, love, lust.
Their lives were just so turbulent.
When people call the X-Men a soap opera,
it's not really a joke, and I was totally enthralled.
- Once I started reading X-Men, I was obsessed with comics.
- X-Men comics were where it started for me.
Got super into that.
- It's really easy to think that you write these stories
and they're just disposable,
that they don't go into anybody's head.
But you'd get letters, occasionally, from people
that your stories really made a difference to.
It makes me feel better about what I do,
which is entertainment.
You know, you begin to think, well, entertaining people's
maybe not so unimportant after all.
- If I had never opened that X-Men comic,
I don't know if I would be exactly where I am today,
because that just, I went, this is what I wanna do.
- [Narrator] Chris continued to expand and deepen
his universe with new artist John Romita, Jr.,
but was rudely surprised
by the news that a new X-Men book
would be starting without him, X-Factor,
and that the first issue would resurrect Jean Grey.
- X-Factor sprung from an idea
that they had to reunite the original X-Men,
because Chris constantly added characters to the X-Men,
and you ended up with a pool of X-Men characters
that weren't in the X-Men,
and obviously Marvel was gonna think
that's a good idea to maybe do something with them,
since the X-Men sell so well.
- Chris had been told that, if Jean was killed,
she would never, ever, ever come back.
This was the end, she was dead, dead, dead,
forever ever ever.
And that was fine.
- Oddly enough, even though it was Jim Shooter
who decreed that Jean Grey must die
for the Dark Phoenix Saga, of course,
he was one of the principal forces behind X-Factor,
which brings Jean back.
- My idea is that when you kill a character,
that character stays dead.
And then my idea with Phoenix
was that she would remain dead.
Well, it was John Byrne
who came up with this return of Phoenix idea.
- The first thing she tells me is,
"Well, there's something you need to know."
What's that?
"They're bringing back Jean."
And I said, - I barely remember this.
- "What the fu,"
and I jumped up from the table, ran out the door,
and called Shooter,
who had the sense not to be in the office.
It was after hours, I couldn't go back and, like, punch him.
- Before this, you called me and asked,
and I said, "Oh, Shooter would never do that."
- That's what we thought.
- He swore to you.
So I gave you really bad advice,
you wouldn't, - kinda.
- I calmed him down.
'Cause I wasn't an editor at that time,
I was just a freelancer.
- It's coming back.
- Shooter would never, ever do that.
He wouldn't lie to you that way, I said.
He's an honorable man.
Guess what. - Yeah, well.
If you have 400,000 readers who read this issue
and have emotional reactions to the death of a character,
and then we turned around and say, "We lied,"
they're never gonna trust you again.
- [Narrator] X-Factor was a critical dud,
and original writer Bob Layton
was soon replaced by Louise Simonson.
She worked closely with Chris
and brought the book more in line with his vision for X-Men.
At the same time, Chris became known
for an increasingly sprawling narrative style,
with plot threads stretching multiple issues
and even years before resolution.
- Problem I always had with Chris on a book,
and I loved his work, I read the book religiously
while he was writing it, was,
he was always starting new stories.
- And we were getting fast and loose and sloppy
and having stories that went on for six issues
and we didn't know--
- [Chris] Not at all like today.
- It was like the Big Sleep, you know, where not even,
was it Raymond Chandler?
Not even Raymond Chandler knew what was going on
or how it ended, or,
that was kind of what we were up to.
- Once in a while, he would say, "I've run out of ideas."
"I can't think of a story, oh my God."
But with Chris, it was easy, because as we all know,
Chris had loads of dangling plot threads that the readers,
of course, always carried on about.
So you'd say, "Well, Chris, hmm, you have this plot thread
and this plot thread and this plot thread,
any of those one that you want to pick up?"
And he'd say, "Oh, okay!"
And he'd go home and write a story and it would be great.
- You basically root around in a box,
either on the floor or in your head, looking for
something to, that catches your imagination,
and you just start talking about it,
and the next thing you know,
you're stitching it into a story.
- And then, of course, it all comes from character.
Once you learn who these characters are,
it becomes just innate, you know.
You know what Logan would do and wouldn't do.
They're speaking to you, the characters.
The only way you could do this day in and day out
was to convince yourself these characters were real.
So we had a lot of affection for them.
So we would have conversations like,
who's Kitty gonna play with, which sounds retarded,
- But it was a reality of life, I mean, I (groans)
not gonna go there, - Or even who was together.
- it's just, ah!
- [Narrator] This period was notable
for Chris taking time out for low-key personal stories
like Lifedeath, in which Storm and mutant inventor Forge
share an intimate dinner.
- We had done a bunch of epic stories
and made a conscious decision to slow the pace down
and just do a Storm story, you know?
Not even a Storm story, a Ororo story.
It was a beautiful story. - I mean, we had a
five-page scene of Storm just sitting there,
drinking wine and talk, you know,
wearing a pair of jeans and fixing a salad.
- And that was just so much fun, for,
to just allow ourselves to have that little breather,
that one moment, when we were just like,
well, who is she?
(gentle acoustic guitar music)
- [Ann] You know, people have this wonderful cause,
and then, boom, you hit them with something.
- [Louise] And it gives you something
to have your big story about,
- [Both] Mm-hmm.
- Other than about explosions,
which I personally happen to love.
I have no problem - I have no problem with
blowing things up, either. - with blowing things up
and knocking buildings over.
But it's nice to have it have a human context.
And if you've got characters whom you've come to love
involved in this event, then the event has meaning.
And if you threaten these characters,
it means a lot more
than if it's just one explosion after another
with no emotional context.
- I also think that, when you have, like,
a lot of characters in a book,
you have to take turns torturing them.
Chris loved torturing Wolverine, Storm.
It is interesting that we use this word torture a lot.
- It is.
- We're always talking about torturing the characters.
- I know.
- It's not, it's meant with love and affection.
- Oh, total love.
- It's, yeah, it's kind of like,
if you want to find out what somebody is made of,
put them through some kind of trial.
- It's our answer to why God allows evil in the universe.
(Ann laughs)
- Well, 'cause otherwise, he'd be boring.
He'd be bored.
It's like, there's no fun in the world
if I don't have the devil.
- I don't know if you've noticed, from the three of us,
but when you write comics for years,
you stay a little infantile (laughs).
(Chris and Louise laugh)
- [Louise] It keeps you very infantile (laughs).
- Young in all but hair.
(light guitar music)
- As the X-Men started to get more popular,
there were pressures to make more and more titles
that involved those X-Men characters
and Claremont, of course,
who felt very proprietary about these characters.
- The advantage that X-Men built is
that it was fundamentally the product of two people,
two writers, me and Wheezy.
That gave it a tremendous focus in terms of
what we could do with the characters
and how they were presented to the audience.
- What you start to see in the early 1980s
is Chris Claremont spreading himself thinner and thinner,
making sure that he can keep controlling
what's going on with these corporate-owned properties.
They're going to be published with or without him,
and so he's just trying to make it as good as he can.
- The first three or four years
being off the radar,
we had our time to ourselves.
Suddenly, down the line, you had
crossovers.
You know, as long as we could control the crossovers,
it was a family affair.
- The X-Men books were being done
by a group of close collaborators and close friends.
- And they enjoyed working together,
and The Mutant Massacre sort of came from them.
- Chris came into me and he said, "I have this great idea."
Paul Smith has drawn too many mutants in the alley.
I'm just gonna have to kill some.
And I said, "Oh, man, Chris, that's just too big a story."
That's too cool to do it just in one issue.
Can I play too?
- That was exactly what Wheezy just said.
It was, sometimes people just all
wanted to play. - I just thought it was fun.
And then Walter said, - And thought it was fun.
- "Ooh, can I play?"
That's the way things were done back in the olden days.
And that's why the olden days were better.
- [Narrator] 1986's The Mutant Massacre
was the first X-Men crossover,
a single story spanning Claremont's X-Men,
Louise Simonson's X-Factor and Power Pack,
and Walter Simonson's Thor.
The massive success of this dark story
led Marvel to demand yearly crossovers
among the different X-Men titles.
- There was just a need to keep filling the racks
with X-Men comics, because they sold well
and they hadn't reached their saturation point yet.
And Marvel was not going to stop
until they reached their saturation point.
- And then the next fall, Shooter said, "And you will
do another crossover." - Do another one.
- And, uh, this is what you're gonna do, blah blah blah.
And we said, "Oh, no, no, no, Jim."
We pretended that we already had stuff planned for it.
- Yes, we lied.
- We totally pretended, oh, yeah,
we have stuff planned for that.
- And pretty much every year after that,
you'd have some major storyline that crossed over
into the various X-Men titles.
- It became just a really complicated problem
to solve every year, and then more than every year,
and then, seemingly, all the time.
- [Narrator] As the 80s went on, Chris phased out
fan-favorite characters like Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler,
and worked with artist Marc Silvestri to build a new cast
with characters like Dazzler and Longshot.
- Not really growing up with comics,
it took me a little while to really get the impact
of working with Chris Claremont and working on the X-Men.
So, for a few years, it was a pure adrenaline rush.
Once I got the scope of where I was as a professional,
it became sometimes overwhelming.
And Chris, great guy, but, you know, intimidating guy,
especially if you're someone just getting in there.
It was Chris Claremont.
- Towards the end of his run,
Chris had reached a point
that no other comics writer really had,
having been on these characters
and on this same book continuously for 15 years.
And I think Chris got to the point
where he was trying to do the stories
that still appealed to him after 16 years,
which was new things, and he didn't want to do
what pretty much every other superhero comic book does,
which is, basically, recycle villains, recycle storylines.
- How do we keep these long-term readers
excited and intrigued and eager
to find out what happens next?
And that means there has to be
a growth and evolution in the characters.
- At the time, TV shows were not serialized.
They were all standalone episodes.
Movies would have sequels,
but still sort of stood on their own.
But in the X-Men, he was writing a bigger story
with each chapter of the comic book that he did.
- To me, it's all one story.
Because life is a story, is a single story,
and this is, to me it wasn't,
I'm not writing superhero adventures,
I'm telling the story of these characters' lives.
You pick up X-Men 100, you see the seven characters,
you figure, okay, this is who they are.
You pick up 200, the characters have evolved.
- If you took, like, one issue from each year,
every single issue is gonna have different characters in it,
different styles in it.
It constantly changed.
- It would not be, to me, anyway,
unreasonable to have a totally different cast,
that Scott, I mean, Scott retires, Scott's raising his kids.
Maybe Storm has moved on.
Maybe Nightcrawler has become a priest.
That allows the readers who were reading the book
in 1990 to say, "I've got someone who's my own."
And then the readers who are reading it in 2000,
maybe they find someone who's, they can do the same with.
- [Narrator] In the late 80s, Marvel was sold several times
and eventually went public.
Jim Shooter was ousted as editor-in-chief,
and the new Marvel management was focused primarily
on producing higher and higher quarterly earnings.
- Everyone aspired to the X-Men.
It was the leading book, it was the top-selling book.
X-Men was automatic.
No matter who drew it, it always charted probably
just under half a million copies at the time.
- What changed was that, as the X-Men became more popular,
there was a demand for more X-Men material
than Chris alone could write,
or that Chris and his close colleagues like Louise
could write, and Ann could write, and edit themselves.
And there's going to be more and more people
who had their fingers in the pie.
- Sort of reluctantly,
I allowed the X-Men franchise to expand.
- Cha-ching.
Money, money, money, money, money.
- [Tom] They added Excalibur, which Chris did,
and Wolverine, which Chris did,
but Chris didn't stay with Wolverine.
- It suddenly gets more and more challenging
to keep everything balanced.
- But I know, towards the end of the time I was there
and I got, they started getting very corporate,
and they started getting very,
well, this sells, so let's do it in five different versions.
- You wanted to try and keep a balance
between making the readers really excited,
or sustaining that excitement, and come back,
keep them coming back for more,
but never let them get so much that it becomes a joke,
it becomes boring. - Yeah, because
your readers are smart.
- I kind of feel like the X-Men became,
almost like a prison of Claremont's own making.
The very success that the X-Men eventually attained
meant that those characters were going to just keep
being exploited in as many properties as they could.
- There are only so many hours in the day.
I couldn't write everything.
I was a fool to think it was even possible.
And there was no way
I was gonna stop the expansion of the franchise.
- [Narrator] Artist Jim Lee joined the title
and became an instant favorite
with both fans and Marvel's management,
including new X-Men line editor, Bob Harris.
- He was my assistant.
- Thanks a lot.
- I remember, I sicced him on you, I'm so sorry.
- Bob was certainly a more aggressive and, I think,
commercially-minded editor
than Ann No centi or Louise Simonson had been.
- So much of comics seems to boil down
to the new kid on the block.
You want the bright, shiny object, you want the new punk.
- Jim Lee was at the forefront
of this new group of fan-favorite artists
that started to really dominate the industry,
and he was followed by guys like Rob Liefeld.
- Bob Harris, who was editing the X-Men, said,
"Hey Rob, love for you to come work for me in the X office."
Now that was a drop-the-phone moment.
X-Men was my favorite franchise
and that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
- Liefeld, I think, came in as a desire
on behalf of Bob Harris and Marvel
to boost the book up again.
- Comics were boring.
Even Marc Silvestri, he'll admit, he got bored.
And from where I looked, Marc had done the book
for already, like, four or five years.
And, but it's not a job you, you don't leave that job.
It's the best-selling comic.
And the writer had been on it for 15 years.
You don't think he's burned out?
I mean, it was like, hey, the X-Men girls go shopping.
In the next issue, the guys go to the mall.
And you're like, this isn't the X-Men I grew up loving.
Where's Magneto, where's the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?
Where's the stuff that's gonna psych me out?
- The New Mutants had started to slip in popularity
from where it had been.
- It was the ugly stepchild of the X-Men universe.
I mean, it was, everything else sold up here
in the 400,000, 300,000 range
and New Mutants were selling 100,000.
And they said Rob, we'll let you do
whatever you want in here.
(upbeat pop music)
- Rob said he wanted stories
with a lot of action and character,
and when I wrote stories with action and character,
I often got a lot of people standing around posing,
you know, trying on costumes in front of mirrors.
- Everyone in the field needed a refresher
or needed a breather.
That new energy was necessary.
- He had all these sketches, he was like,
"This is a new character I got, Deadpool,
do you think people will like him?"
I was like, "Yeah, he looks pretty cool,
I think people will dig him.
- If he didn't like the plot that Louise Simon son gave him,
he would sort of just draw what he wanted to draw.
And then Louise would get back pages
that she had to make sense of.
- But I was not comfortable with what Rob was doing,
and I don't think he was comfortable with what I was doing.
- My first issue of New Mutants went from 100 to 115,000.
We went up every month.
- And it was seen at Marvel
as being the result of Rob Liefeld's contribution.
- It was an unfortunate alliance,
and I was very glad to get off and go do Superman.
- But that left Chris with few of the allies
that he had built up over the years.
- When the artists started to push back a little bit
on what Chris Claremont was asking for in the stories,
Bob Harris was very sympathetic to these artists.
- There was definitely a power shift, I think,
where Jim Lee became the one
who everyone saw as driving the book.
- And Chris Claremont, who had been doing X-Men
for 15 years at this time, was hardly the type
to just roll over and accommodate.
- Jim had his own ambitions
in terms of directions he wanted to take the stories,
things he wanted to do with the characters.
There was a growing sense of unease, editorially,
with the fact that I'd been on this thing for 17 years.
- The X-Men became so successful
that it could no longer remain an auteur book.
- Stories began to be handed down from the top down
more and more and more.
So it became a less fun place to work.
- The thing that is so frustrating
is that, you know, the memory of sitting down
back in 89 and 90 and 91 and looking at the numbers
and thinking, holy shit.
We are at a point where comics
is not a peripheral industry anymore.
We could actually think in terms of how can we expand?
How can we make it even bigger and stronger?
- [Narrator] With comic sales rising in the early 90s,
Marvel planned a new X-Men title.
For this series, Marvel wanted a return to the status quo.
The X-Men would return to the mansion,
and Magneto, the school's current headmaster
and reformed villain, would return to his evil ways.
This was all ordered through a,
- A memo from higher authority.
No, I mean, you mean, X-Men one?
[Interviewer] Yeah.
No, that was Bob and Jim and higher-ups
deciding, editorially,
- It was the profit driving the progression of the book
and progression of the story as, honestly,
maybe it should.
- You know, for someone who really puts the creative first,
like Chris did, that's a tough thing to take.
- It was a moment where
they didn't want to do what I wanted to do,
I didn't want to do what they wanted to do, and, er,
tempers carried everyone away.
- [Narrator] In 1991, Chris and Jim Lee
released X-Men number one,
which sold 8 million copies and still holds the record
for highest-selling comic of all time.
Two issues later, after 17 years as writer,
Chris was off the book.
He felt,
- Betrayed.
But that was then, you know,
I mean, we're talking literally 20 years ago.
- Marvel itself didn't even really
acknowledge it in the books.
There was no goodbye from Chris.
There was no note saying this is Chris's last issue,
which reflected, I think, Marvel's philosophy at that point,
which was that they're just, you know,
that the characters sell the books and not the creators.
- It was easier to walk away than stay immersed
in a situation that was frustratingly unproductive.
In retrospect, I should have been smarter,
but, you know, that's,
that could be said by a lot of people
over a lot of circumstances.
- I thought that they didn't appreciate Chris
as they should have, you know,
especially over time.
- At the end of the day, you're playing
with somebody else's toys,
and you may write that character for years
and be forever associated with that character,
but once, the moment you step away,
somebody else is gonna fill that spot.
You know, those toys are never coming home with you,
they're always gonna go back in the Marvel sandbox.
- In Marvel comics of the 21st century,
there is no auteur like Chris Claremont was.
It's just probably never going to happen again.
- After Perelman took over the company
and brought in all the marketing people,
they kinda strip-mined it.
You know, they said, "Hey, if they'll buy one X-Men title,
they'll buy two, or four, or six."
- [Narrator] Despite numerous successful projects
in the years since, Claremont never again
reached the heights of his run on X-Men.
- I still think people don't give him his proper due,
and I think it's because he was so ubiquitous
and so successful.
- People bought the X-Men
'cause they wanted to see what happened next month.
- Those early X-Men issues dramatically changed
mainstream comics, I think, and sort of set the stage
for everything that's come since.
- And I liken him to Babe Ruth, you know (laughs),
'cause Babe Ruth didn't invent the Yankees
and Claremont didn't invent the X-Men,
but each of them built a house.
- Fox was interested in doing X-Men movies.
We had a meeting with Lauren Shuler Donner and Bryan Singer.
- There were a number of scripts written,
most of them quite forgettable.
- Nothing was gelling,
and it was very close to going into turnaround.
So I wrote a memo, and I just said,
"This is what it's all about."
"These are who these characters are."
"This is what the conflict is."
"It has nothing to do with superheroes and super-villains."
"It has to do with race and prejudice
and trying to find a home for yourself in society."
Next thing I know, I got a postcard back
from one of the heads of production at Fox,
saying, "Thank you, this got us off the ground,"
it gave us an identifiable hook to hang his ideas on.
And from there, the series was off and running.
- Before X-Men opened, nobody was sure
that a movie that didn't star a really well-known superhero,
like a Superman or a Batman, was ever gonna find
a significant audience or be successful.
- The opening weekend, it rolled in
with $78 million and number one at the box office,
and everyone sorta went, holy shit, this works.
And X2 did even better.
- The movies continued to draw on the stories
that Chris wrote and worked with Louise Simonson on,
Days of Future Past, Apocalypse.
- I mean, I get to see my characters,
characters I created and relationships I defined,
dialogue I wrote, spoken by performers
whose work I have respected my whole working life.
You know, when I was a punk kid,
I would hang out in the back of Broadway theater
watching Ian McKellan performing on stage.
To come back decades later and see Ian McKellan
doing my Magneto is just utterly, utterly breathtaking.
- The Legion TV show is boldly experimental
and really challenges the forms of television,
just like the comics by Chris and Bill Sienkiewicz,
in which the character was introduced.
X-Men, especially under Chris, really became a franchise
with a lot of depth and a lot of variety to the stories.
They did a lot of very unusual things
for the mainstream superhero genre,
and the TV show really sort of reflects that.
It is able to go to these unusual places,
visually and creatively,
because the comic went there 30 years ago.
(gentle guitar music)
Logan brings a lot of the heart and emotional depth
of Chris's run on the character to the screen
in a way that no other movie has.
It took the character into places
that almost no superhero movie has,
in terms of maturity, violence, and emotional resonance.
One of the reasons Logan is such an enduring character
is because of all the work
that Chris and the people he worked with
put into developing the character over many years,
in the largely unnoticed form of comic books.
- And if you'd asked, 30 years ago, could this happen?
We'd have both said, "Yeah, right,
that'll be the day."
But it just goes to show, truth is stranger than fiction.
- Not everyone knows who Chris Claremont is,
but everyone knows who the X-Men are,
everyone knows who Wolverine is.
He may not get the recognition that, say,
Stan Lee gets for creating The Avengers or Spider-Man,
but his creations and his stories are just as significant,
if not more so, in the comics field.
They continue to have relevance today,
and they continue to entertain and to inspire people.
- I want this to mean something.
I want this to matter.
I want this to have a sense of legitimacy and validity.
I don't want them to just slough it off and say,
"Ah, it's just a comic book."
- You have a charge, you know, especially,
we used to think a lot about the younger readers.
- [Louise] Right.
- Because the younger readers believe
these characters are real,
and you get a shit-load of traumatized mail,
no matter what you did to a character.
It kept you in touch with how every little thing you did,
you know, was profoundly, you know, hit some kid somewhere.
- I was at a coffee klatch one night,
and there was a young woman there who was Mormon,
and she was talking about how she loved the characters,
that they spoke very eloquently to her as a person,
as a woman, but also as a Mormon, as an outsider,
trying to find a place that worked.
She was married, and her husband was willing to indulge
her affection for the X-Men,
so long as the kids were too young to read comics.
But now the kids were getting older
and they were starting to read,
and he felt that these comics were inappropriate,
because they dealt with themes
that he felt were wrong for kids.
And she was heartbroken, because these were her friends,
and she was facing a future
where she would be unable to follow their lives.
Not their adventures, their lives.
And it had her in tears.
And I'm sitting there, I was thinking, "Holy shit!"
This is real for her.
Not that the characters are real, but the conflict is real.
The life, the moment is real,
and she is going to lose something she holds of value.
As a creator, as a writer, as a person,
I not only have to respect that,
I have to do my best to be worthy of that.
If someone is going to commit to this work, to my work,
to my, these characters, with that level of intensity,
I have to make the characters and the stories
worth that commitment,
and find a way to fulfill the promise.
Our goal is to tell really great stories,
and, 30 days later, find a way to make it better.
And if we're lucky enough to do that and sustain it,
we have, we and the audience can have a whole lot of fun.
But that's the challenge and it's--
The miracle is that we get a chance to try.
The wonder and delight is that we pull it off.
(ambient electronic music)
(industrial music)