Feeling Bad For Chris

I FINALLY got around to picking this up and reading it today when I saw the trade on sale at a Bloor street book store for $11.

It was hilarious. It was touching. And yes, true to its title, Astonishing X-Men, it was, indeed, astonishing.

And yet, at the same time, despite the fact that I was overjoyed at one of the most entertaining renditions of the X-Men I have ever seen, despite my enthusiasm at getting my hands on even more and being blown away by the sheer entertainment value of it all, when I closed the book and put it down, there was one feeling that was predominant over all.

I felt really, really, really bad for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comics for 16 years.

As I understand it, Claremont’s not doing much these days, not for lack of demand for his talent, so much as a heart illness which has forced him to slow down considerably. But I can’t help thinking of my reaction to this new work written by Joss Whedon, he of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly fame. When I first started reading comics as a kid, most of them were, to be honest, terribly written when measured by any standard of literary quality. Shallow characterization, simple plots and a tendency to ignore character (not to mention physical) logic in order to resolve plot lines were the order of the day. Claremont was a step above that, providing more consistency, drama and imagination for his readers. He was hampered by the “Marvel rules” however. During his years, Marvel was still firmly of the opinion that the comics were read by children and that the stories should never make the assumption that people reading a particular issue were familiar with the ongoing plot–or indeed the characters of the series. As a result of that, Claremont was forced to work with rules such as the characters often reiterating who they were and what they did. Of particular irritation to me was Psylocke and her constant refrain, “This is my psi-blade! A psychic knife that is the focused totality of my psychic powers!”

And she would say this EVERY. SINGLE. TIME she drew that blade out, and people would just stand there and let her say that spiel before she plunged it into their foreheads and disrupted their neurons.

But Claremont also gave young comic readers of the 80′s what is undoubtedly the First Great Comic Tale of the 20th century. In 1980, he wrote The Dark Phoenix saga, the first story in the history of comics that really made the industry grow up a little. It was a story of how one superhero actually becomes corrupted by her power, does terrible things and then makes the ultimate sacrifice, giving up her life so that the absolute power she wields doesn’t corrupt her absolutely and endanger the life of everything and everyone around her.

While this might be the kind of thing that is fairly de rigeur for Japanese anime, in the comics industry of 1980, it was a bold, paradigm shattering move that laid to waste the idea that comics would forever have a “reset button” where at the end of a storyline, the characters reverted to status quo, unchanged and unaffected by the events they’d lived through.

That particular story was a cathartic moment for the industry, and if it hadn’t happened, we might never have seen the likes of Frank Miller attempt The Dark Knight Returns or Alan Moore try his hand at The Watchmen, because it was Claremont that finally taught the comics industry that the stories of comics could be “real” stories in the literary sense of pushing things forward to a conclusion with real and definite change.

I am, in particular, always brought back to that place where I was eight years old and read this final panel in the comic, almost a recalling of classic Greek narrative devices with a chorus closing the tale. You can click on it to magnify it:

When you’re a kid, particularly when you’ve been digesting “normal” children’s fare like Pippi Longstocking, or other DC or Marvel titles, this is pretty mindblowing stuff. I’d already read this kind of thing in the Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov that I was reading, but had already relegated comics to a place where they couldn’t do this.

But then a funny thing happened. I outgrew Claremont. I outgrew comics.

The rise in particular of Image comics, with its shallow, vacuous titles that really lived up to their name (with no substance at all) was the final nail in the coffin for me, and it would take Neil-O and the work he did with Sandman to make me rethink my previous assumptions that comics were juvenile and immature writing compared to the stuff I was reading in university.

Claremont, as progressive as he was, was a product of his time. Having spent so much time writing for a younger audience, having spent so many years Writing The Marvel Way, as I grew older, the limitations in his writing–at least to me–began to show. The X-Men had angst, yes, but after doing such an amazing job on the Dark Phoenix Saga, bringing Jean Grey back (though this wasn’t actually his idea and he was opposed to it) took its toll, and over the years, his writing seemed stuck in a constant cycle of angst, loss, resurrection, false hope, angst and loss again. Thought balloons w
ere already starting to seem like a cheap tactic to me by this point, the years, and years and years of writing the same characters had rendered them inert.

Which is why I was so amazed at my reaction to Astonishing X-Men. Not only was it apparent that Joss Whedon knew how to tell a story, he really knew these characters. He’d grown up reading them as well, but now he infused them with that same flirtatious dramatic/comedic sensibility he’d sharpened to a razor’s edge on with Buffy and Firefly. He took the history and familiar elements of these characters, but he breathed life into them. He gave them a friction that was far more entertaining and believable. He even poked fun at the inherent outrageousness of the Marvel universe, as when one character says “Jean Grey is dead,” and the rapid reply is, “Yeah, that’ll last…”

I couldn’t help wondering what that would feel like. To know that these where characters that you defined for a generation of readers, and then some punk comes along and blows you out of the water like that. Not that I’m insinuating Whedon is insulting Claremont’s legacy, it’s obvious he has MUCH respect for the material Claremont crafted. But there is such a dramatic difference in the quality between Whedon’s and Claremont’s writing that it’s positively night and day. There is a life and lightness and flow to Whedon’s story that Claremont could never accomplish. I don’t know if part of that agility comes from being trained to write episodic scripts that had to move really fast, or whether it’s simply a result of natural talent, but Whedon has a greater understanding of character and nuance that makes the X-Men not just real, but far more likeable and relatable than they have been in years. And not once does Whedon ever have his character reiterate their abilities for the umpteenth time. He even manages the rare feat of not abusing Wolverine by having him appear too much, something most writers who have tackled the X-Men have always fallen victim to.

Man, I’m just REALLY impressed with this. I found Ultimate X-Men to be fun. But what Whedon has done has actually reminded me, in an updated, more assured, mature, slick, glossy, post-millenial sort of way, why I liked these characters so much when I was kid.

Whedon’s just let me like them again as an adult. Not an easy trick.