Claremont's available, Marvel

[Mike_Murdock]

I'd be up for it. At least when Claremont's plots got ridiculous it was usually a fun sort of ridiculous. I can't say the same about other writers.

What about Liefeld/Nicieza?!!!!

[Saturius]

Bring him back please! He's the only one that can save Storm and I know he wouldn't have stood by and let her be totally destroyed like she has been the past 12 years. And I don't know why you guys are ragging on X-treme and his third Uncanny run. They were fantastic and everything he did had a purpose. It was blatantly obvious that editorial hijacked a lot of his plans in his third UXM run which took some of the bite out of End Of Greys, the new Hellfire Club and a few other arcs, but they still were great. MUCH better than the crap we have now. He has/had his problems of course( as been mentioned the regressing of Rachel and ignoring some other traits of characters elaborated on by other writers) but you rarely get the perfect writer. I'll take his flaws over any other writer's ANY day of the week.

[BlkGldBlu]

Xtreme was so bad at one point , God Loves , Man Kills II was such a terrible piece of shit arc , years later no one can tell you what exactly it was about beyond Kitty Pryde and Stryker. Then you had his X-Men run...which was such a terrible set of start up ideas and dropped. Some you can blame on Marvel then. Some you really can't. But really the worst part of the crap sundae was End of Grey's which really happened for....well no real reason and had no impact overall.

Claremont was great at one time. But his stories just never delivered that same magic.

Are you serious?
End of Grey's was the $#!+.
It was truly his best work before leaving.
What didn't you like about it?

[WhiteQueenEmmaFrost]

To be fair, he killed Psylocke off because he planned to bring her right back but in her British body, something he had been planning to do way back when she was first turned Asian anyway. But Marvel's Dead is Dead rule prevented him from doing so. Then when he finally did bring her back, he was told that he wasn't allowed to drastically change any character's appearance from their most iconic look or something like that so he had to keep her Asian. Basically, Psylocke ended up dying for no reason.

I have no excuse for the End of Greys storyline. There really was no reason for that to happen.

A part of that doesn't make sense. Psylocke was killed in like issue 3, or rather early in the launch of the Xtreme Xmen. Marvel/Xeditors would have had to know she was going to be killed...and then they said dead is dead...so if the plan was to keep dead is dead why didn't someone say something to Claremont and say "hey if you kill her you won't be able to bring her back per editorial mandate?" Claremont probably didn't tell them he planned on bringing her back which is crappy.

The mandate of not changing the character came from copyright and either the sale or impending sale of Marvels characters.

For no reason? That End of Greys issue was the most powerful x book of the 2000s.

Everything, including deaths, was done with a deft masters touch.

It had the depth of a rain drop.

[Rotm]

Of course they should, maybe even stop throwing main characters down the trash too.

[DDM]

It had the depth of a rain drop.

You have the depth of a rain drop.

[ClanAskani]

He undid all of the character development that Rachel, one of his own characters, had had and turned her into an incompetent child.

In Claremont's defense, the argument against Rachel for years (even going back to Fall of the Mutants) was that she was too powerful. In every event, there had to be a discussion to figure out how Rachel would be not involved.

After Excalibur #75, Rachel had been assigned as character to the Cable series and many of the Cable writers wanted to use her - but the editorial response was always that Rachel was too powerful, especially as a Mother Askani type character who could be used as a McGuffin for Cable.

When Weinberg did finally convince the editors to let him bring Rachel back to the 616, he did so in a way that she was significantly depowered with no trace of the Phoenix - it abandoned her. She's traumatized and doesn't want to do the superhero thing.

Now, the problem with Rachel's character development with anything Askani related is that Claremont refused to even consider it. People asked him about it on another forum and he said he created the Askani and never intended for Rachel to be part of it. So he ignored it. Weinberg's Cable suggests that Rachel did have memorizes from her time as Mother Askani, but Claremont was not interested at all in exploring that.

That's the problem with bringing in Claremont now is that he has his vision of the characters and when he doesn't agree with something that was done because it wasn't what he intended, he ignores it.

Even now editors like Brevoort constantly say Rachel is too powerful, so there's no winning at all. Rachel has to be a helpless child for the editors to not say she's too powerful.

[NotABadger]

You can severely reduce a character's power levels without making them a helpless child. Look at Nate Grey in New Mutants. I would have been far happier if Rachel's powers had been reduced to the same degree but she'd retained the ability to not fall down stairs. Instead, she went around creating black holes, rewriting her own genome... and tripping over her shoes.

I absolutely agree with the point about Claremont ignoring other writers, though. I'm not sure I'd want my other favourite characters reset to the last point Claremont was writing them, even if I haven't necessarily liked everything that's happened to them in the meantime.

[Agatha's Ghost]

Claremont at his nadir surpasses other writers, especially those currently writing the X-books with a few exceptions, at their zenith.

Craft matters. I would like Claremont to be the writer who ushers the Fantastic Four back onto comic racks. The mutants have been too damaged.

[anyajenkins]

A part of that doesn't make sense. Psylocke was killed in like issue 3, or rather early in the launch of the Xtreme Xmen. Marvel/Xeditors would have had to know she was going to be killed...and then they said dead is dead...so if the plan was to keep dead is dead why didn't someone say something to Claremont and say "hey if you kill her you won't be able to bring her back per editorial mandate?" Claremont probably didn't tell them he planned on bringing her back which is crappy.

Oh, it totes could have happened, . Claremont also had beast on his team, but no one in editorial told him that Morrison was using him so Claremont had to write him out. PAD went on a mini rant about how the other writers didn't have mechanisms to talk to each other. He had Siren in X Factor, but didn't know that Banshee was getting killed until the issue came out.

[nnelg]

Give him the reins and this ship gets righted in short order.

I would be very happy with this.

[Jaddor]

Are you serious?
End of Grey's was the $#!+.
It was truly his best work before leaving.
What didn't you like about it?

Xtreme was one of my favorites X-Men books until after Schism.

[DungeonmasterJim]

I got into comics when Claremont was on his firts run with Uncanny. A grand time to be a comics fan even though there was a lot of junk titles out there.
I don't know if I've changed, Claremont changed or some combination of both but I can recall and enjoy a lot of the stories from his first run but the later runs not so much.

Seems somewhere along the lines I started to notice that some of Claremont's written characters became obvious favorites, which is fine, but some of those favorites got all the best scenes. Even that is somewhat okay but where other capable or more than capable characters where involved they started becoming props to make the favorite character the star. Sage is the biggest example of this.

Like all creators, they then to repeat themselves after a while. I got sick of several female characters evolving into indomitable wills and master hand to hand combatants. Storm, Sage, and Sue Richards all became that under Claremont.

I would have some interest in reading more Claremont stories again but it would be a short leash because I'd expect to see something I've seen from him three times already.

[Indigo_Lady]

I'd like to see Claremont back, and as others have said, give him a book and stop interrupting it with constant crossovers.

He likes to take time to let a story develop so just let the man tell his stories. When they are cut short like the editorial staff always does anymore, then they don't make sense. I am still angry that the story he was developing in Uncanny in his mid 2000's run was never completed because of the stupid House of M arc was put into effect. I would have loved to see where he was going with it and now we'll never know because of editorial interference.

[AbnormallyNormal]

I'd like to see Claremont back, and as others have said, give him a book and stop interrupting it with constant crossovers.

He likes to take time to let a story develop so just let the man tell his stories. When they are cut short like the editorial staff always does anymore, then they don't make sense. I am still angry that the story he was developing in Uncanny in his mid 2000's run was never completed because of the stupid House of M arc was put into effect. I would have loved to see where he was going with it and now we'll never know because of editorial interference.

People don't understand that though. They freak out and get upset about things that are not in any way Claremont's fault or under his control but they blame him for it somehow regardless.

I mean I definitely understand the critique that he is "so nostalgic" or "long winded" or "prefers weird British Isle mythology too much". Fair points. But a lot of the people saying he is worse than other writers or runs are just not reading carefully or don't remember their continuity. Tell me the runs and writers you think blow Claremont's MODERN runs out of the park please so I know what you really prefer, otherwise it's just "hating".