Chris Claremont: The real genius behind ‘X-Men’ and ‘Wolverine’
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The reviews of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ have been pretty dismal, earning the movie a lowly 37 on Rotten Tomatoes. But if you want to read a fascinating account of how -- and why -- Wolverine became one of Marvel Comics’ greatest success stories, check out this Slate post by Grady Hendrix, a New York-based writer who runs the New York Asian Film Festival.
Hendrix offers an engrossing history of how Marvel revived the fading fortunes of its original Spider Man, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk superhero line in the early 1970s by introducing a new set of oddball characters, including Blade, the Punisher and Howard the Duck, as well as a new supporting character in the X-Men team: Wolverine.
By 1982, Wolverine had his own miniseries, drawn by ‘Sin City’s’ Frank Miller. But the real driving force behind the continuing success of X-Men, Hendrix explains, was Chris Claremont, who authored X-Men for 16 years, from the mid-1970s to 1991. The most intriguing aspect of Claremont’s writing was that he had a true soap opera-style approach to dramatic storytelling, a perfect sensibility for the serial-like nature of comics. As Hendrix explains:
‘Under Claremont’s purple pen, abusive boyfriends and illegitimate children came crawling out of the woodwork, girlfriends died and their mourning lovers married their look-alikes, who, predictably, also died. More importantly, he spotlighted the fact that the X-Men were mutants, a persecuted minority in the Marvel universe whose trials and tribulations were thinly veiled commentaries on real-world racism.’
After Claremont departed, a variety of writers and editors clumsily provided Wolverine with all sorts of increasingly preposterous back stories -- he’s been everything from a Canadian cowboy and a bootlegger to a Vietnam vet and a victim of the Holocaust. All of his girlfriends have died (11 so far!). But why does he retain such an enduring popularity in an endless stream of cartoons, video games and Hollywood films?
In short, he’s the unapologetic outsider hero, which makes him part of a long American literary tradition, from Buffalo Bill and Huck Finn to Sammy Glick and Holden Caulfield. Here’s what Hendrix has to say:
‘The genius of Chris Claremont was that he made mutants a generic stand-in for all minorities and made Wolverine their Malcolm X. Black, gay, disabled and Jewish readers could project their own experiences onto the trials and tribulations of the X-Men, but so could misunderstood teenagers, nerds, fat kids, skinny kids, kids with braces, kids with glasses and anyone who ever felt persecuted (read: everyone). Wolverine refused to apologize for his identity, he refused to compromise, he refused to hide. On top of that, if you had a problem with his peeps? He’d kick your butt, bub.’