X-Men Forever - what's your opinion?

[Filthy Mutie]

Absolutely this. But I still enjoyed it for being completely inconsequential crack.

Perfect Storm, Jean/Beast, and Hellcat were certainly entertaining.

[Uncanny Mutie]

Years before this book was made, he was on the record about his various plans for the books - up to #300. it involved things like:

• Lots of Upstarts stuff, but they were called the Wild Boys instead
• Wolverine being killed and resurrected by the Hand, appearing in all books for the duration as a villain
• Marvel Girl also going bad for Wolverine and the Hand, but it's revealed she was faking it to penetrate the Hand's hold on Wolverine
• Wolverine losing his Adamantium implants and Colossus ripping his claws out of his arms
• A continued build-up of the Wolverine/Marvel Girl/Cyclops love triangle, even while Wolverine is the villain, with a resolution "no one would expect"
• Gambit actually being the traitor - a tool (or form?) of Mr. Sinister
• Lots of "mutants being used as weapons" as evidenced by Omega Red, Gambit-as-traitor, Wolverine in the Hand, etc.
• Everything culminating in a final battle with the Shadow King - who has been pulling everyone's strings and igniting the mutant/human war that leads to DoFP - around #300
• Professor X dying in or right after the final battle to both win the battle and save Magneto
• Magneto finally becomes the true headmaster of the school and leader of the X-Men

There's probably more to chew on, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head.

Since this was pretty widely known, there was a lot of excitement to see all of this stuff put together and play out. Understandably so! It's why marketing leaned so heavily onto the hooks of "the story CC intended to tell if he didn't get pushed out by the artists and editors bullpen at the time."

As you can see, a lot of that got picked up by other writers later on, and also doesn't resemble X-Men Forever.

See, a lot of those ideas sound cool as hell to me and definitely would have been fresh and exciting had they been done at that time; I think many of those ideas would have REALLY translated well if they had been done BACK THEN while they were fresh on Claremont's mind. So to come back so many years later and try to revisit and execute those ideas---especially the way the X-Men franchise and the Marvel Universe in general have shaped up SINCE he originally planned to do those things---of course many of those ideas had no chance of panning out in X-Men Forever as well as they would have had he originally done them back in the day. Especially since many of those ideas had already been used (STOLEN) by later X-writers later on anyway.

[Havok83]

Nah, he would be writing both Uncanny and vol. 2, and all of those characters would be cast members in both books.

The only problem was Wolverine being in too many books - Marvel already had their foot on the Wolverine over-saturation gas-pedal by that point, in addition to not wanting to disrupt Marvel Comics Presents. Hama was on-board for the Wolverine solo book - which would've featured Wolverine (as agent of the Hand) taking on the likes of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, Secret Defenders, and so on - not unlike the version of that story that Millar took up years later.

As I recall, they reached some kind of compromise.

Youre assuming Marvel would have given him free reign to do as he pleased and knowing the landscape of 1991, that just wouldnt have happened unless he himself was editor. The artists were increasingly getting more creative control and clashes with Lee and Portacio had he stayed, likely would have nixxed these intended plans

[WhiteQueenEmmaFrost]

The first one from 2001(?) was good...the second one was glorified fan fiction.

[Filthy Mutie]

See, a lot of those ideas sound cool as hell to me and definitely would have been fresh and exciting had they been done at that time; I think many of those ideas would have REALLY translated well if they had been done BACK THEN while they were fresh on Claremont's mind. So to come back so many years later and try to revisit and execute those ideas---especially the way the X-Men franchise and the Marvel Universe in general have shaped up SINCE he originally planned to do those things---of course many of those ideas had no chance of panning out in X-Men Forever as well as they would have had he originally done them back in the day. Especially since many of those ideas had already been used (STOLEN) by later X-writers later on anyway.

Maybe. But, the point being criticized is they promoted the book relentlessly on the premise of it being a continuation of his run, of the story he always intended to tell.

"Chris Claremont writes a bunch of new stuff starting at a point in X-Men history you know about, but we guess is kind of arbitrarily chosen beyond marketing power" doesn't sound as sexy, I guess.

Youre assuming Marvel would have given him free reign to do as he pleased and knowing the landscape of 1991, that just wouldnt have happened unless he himself was editor. The artists were increasingly getting more creative control and clashes with Lee and Portacio had he stayed, likely would have nixxed these intended plans

No sh*t. Yeah, we're assuming a lot of things.

"Likely would've nixed his plans." An assumption, but for what it's worth, Lee and Portacio continued running many of CC's ideas after his departure -- up until they bailed from Marvel. (For example, Bishop and Omega Red, and their stories which dominated Lee and Portacio's post-CC tenures, were also CC's.)

[WhiteQueenEmmaFrost]

Claremont wasn't the infallible writer everyone makes him out to be. He had a lot of good ideas, but it took the editors to make him bring those ideas all together and that's actually what most fans liked...that there were all these little character stories and they came back together....every time he came back to the Xmen it was a total mess.

He ignored the continuity other writers created, put in gaps in the story so he could get to the parts he wanted to write without ever having a plan for how they got there and abandoned storyline after storyline.

X-men Forever was like every bad idea thrown at a wall and then some.

[gurkle]

Yes, if he's going to do things that no editor would have ever let him do in a "real" X-Men book, like kill off major star characters, then it can't be considered a continuation of anything. To be a continuation it would have had to acknowledge, broadly, the Marvel continuity of the '90s, but the Marvel universe it took place in didn't really resemble the comics of the period.

The series just didn't know what it wanted to be. It obviously wasn't a continuation of Claremont's X-Men run, but it wasn't really an Elseworlds story either.

I did like some things about it, like the Avengers team that fought the X-Men a couple of times in the second volume, which included the Scarlet Witch at a time when she was banned from the "real" Avengers comics.

In general I remember the writing of the non-X-Men characters to be better than the X-Men characters, probably because Claremont hadn't been burned out on the other characters yet. I think Marvel should just assign him to write about non-mutant characters he likes, like Black Widow and Carol Danvers, instead of sending him back to the X-Men well all the time.

[Phoenixx9]

I never knew Jean and Wanda faced off.

[gurkle]

One other problem with the dialogue that may not have been Claremont's fault: he was back to the traditional comics style of BOLDING every few WORDS to EMPHASIZE the RHYTHM. This actually works very well with a lot of writing styles, but Claremont is so wordy that he benefits from the lettering style Jim Shooter favored, where he ordered editors and writers to cut down on the bolded words and only emphasize something if it was really important.

Some of Claremont's recent work has not had all that bold type added - Marvel and DC don't use it as much as they did a few years ago - and it really helps.

I never knew Jean and Wanda faced off.

Just in that bit (though they also faced off in Ultimate X-Men and Wanda teleported Jean to New Jersey).

[From The Shadows]

I'll say one thing... Claremont was definitely having us on.

[Wind Rider]

As a Storm fan I enjoyed this take on the character. Perfect Storm was that B#$@%!