Originally Posted by
Peanutsinspace
Lately I've been reading Previously On X-Men by Eric Lewald. In it he interviews many of the cast and crew of the 90's animated series, one of which was the late Len Wein who wrote four episodes on the show and co-created many popular X-Men including Storm. I thought some of you might find some of his insights interesting, particularly in the creation of Storm and the eventual treatment of Chris Claremont.
Len Wein: The idea to resuscitate the X-Men came from somebody upstairs, one of the accountants, of all people. He discovered that some of the Marvel books were selling very well in foreign countries, so he thought if we did a book combining heroes from those countries, it might sell. He pushed this idea for several years...When I co-created Wolverine for The Incredible Hulk (1974), I specifically made him a mutant, so if they needed a Canadian mutant, they had a Canadian mutant, little knowing I'd be the guy stuck with the (new X-Men) assignment. To this day, I'm not sure exactly what happened. The guy they had in line for the book just didn't pan out, and so editor-in-chief Roy Thomas calls me and says, "Do you wanna write the X-Men?" I said, "Sure, why not." He says, "You know we're going to do a whole new book, it's brand new, almost from scratch?"
Eric Lewald: With almost all new characters.
LW: Almost, about a third of them are old. He said, "Your artist is Dave Cockrum." I danced around the floor for a little bit, Dave, God rest him, was an amazingly talented artist and one of the great costume designers of all time. He had three or four binder books that he kept with him, full of costume designs; for most there weren't even characters to go with them, just possible visuals for characters. We decided to go through this books and see what worked for us, what looked good. We managed to cull what became Colossus, what became Nightcrawler, what became Thunderbird. There were two other characters: one called Black Cat and another called either Tempest or Typhoon, with weather powers. These last two characters were not coming together for us, we couldn't make them work. We went to Roy and said, "Hi, we've got these last two characters, not working." We described them. He said, "Well, one's got a good personality, the other sounds like she has a good power. Why don't you just combine them?" That gave us Storm.
EL: It's amazing how many simple answers to seemingly unsurmountable problems make memorable characters in TV, in books. It's just a craftsperson doing this day-in and day-out work, who's done it a hundred times, thinking, "I know how you can fix that." Suddenly someone is born who lives for 40 years as a character.
LW: Exactly. But that's how we got the characters. We decided what countries they came from, we put the book together, and we were off and running. The funny thing about the entire process was nobody from upstairs ever came down to tell us what countries the books were selling well in, so we chose our own. To this day I have no idea if the X-books ever sold two copies in nay of the countries we picked, but we tried to pick a good international group; we tried to pick a good power mix....
EL:As I understand it, you've got what turned out to be a huge success on your hands, but you didn't know it at the time. You write the first double issue, you've laid out the story for the next four issues, and you get a call saying, "Oh, by the way, we're going to bump you upstairs and take you off the book."
LW: "We're making you editor-in-chief." They said, "You've got room to write one book on the schedule." I was writing at that point Spider-Man, Thor, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and I'd just started X-Men. The powers that be said, "You can really only write one book a month and do this management job." I had been writing the Hulk for the longest time and having the best time; I loved writing my Hulk...Anyway, I figure, "All right, I'll stick with the Hulk," and I did for another year or so. In the meantime, I was looking for someone to replace me on X-Men. I was in the editors office in the bullpen and my whole crew was outside in the bigger room and Chris Claremont just sat there going, "Me! Me! I'll do it, me!" waving his hand like a windmill.
EL: Is he about your age, or is he a little younger?
LW: He's younger, he just looks a lot older (laughs).
EL: So you would've been in your late 20s and he was in his early 20s.
LW: Chris took over the X-Men and did it for the next seventeen years, and God bless him, I love the book. I have my frustrations with some of the things he did. For one thing, he gave an origin to Storm which was essentially the origin to Modesty Blaise, the famous fictional character by Peter O'Donnell, and I said "Really, you couldn't come up with one of your own?" He tended to never finish stories. He'd start these protracted things and then wander off and the next thing that interested him, and I'd yell at him, "Finish a story, pick one, finish it!"
EL: But he got the X-Men.
LW: Then he was sort of forcibly taken off the book by some incarnation of editorial that thought it was unhealthy for a company to rely on one writer for its backbone.
EL: By that time it had become by far the biggest title for Marvel.
LW: So they worked a very nice contract for Chris and took him off the book to put him on other things, and within six months I had stopped reading every X-book. They had become incomprehensible to me. At least Chris could juggle four or five titles a month of X-People and keep it all in focus.
EL: Good old management again, thinking you've got something going that's too good to be true, so let's mess with it and ruin it.