In this post (and likely a couple more) I’m going to talk about one of my childhood friends who I’ve never mentioned on the blog before. We were never close friends by any stretch. But there was a brief period during middle school, seventh and eight grade, when we hung out a lot, mostly because he would invite me over to his house and I would go because I had nothing better to do. And we would just lounge around his room, where he had a tv and a bunch of comics. He was the only person I knew who was more into comics than I was, and he introduced me to some specific issues which still loom large in my memories. For blogonymity purposes I will refer to this friend as TD, which is short for teenage dirtbag. He was a very decent human being, but he had longish hair and wore a denim jacket and listened to heavy metal (in fact he loaned me his copies of Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Iron Maiden’s Live After Death on cassette, which is what got me into heavy metal back in the day) so in our small town hierarchy he was definitely considered part of the dirtbag crowd.
Anyway, I rode my bike to TD’s house one Saturday and we hung out with Knight Rider playing in the background and I picked up his copy of Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It was a couple of years old by then, but that’s more or less the point: via TD’s collection, I could access comics I had missed even if they weren’t hugely historically important. I had read X-Men #1 because the town library had Son of Origins, in which it was reprinted. But a random annual from two or three years ago? If not for TD I would never have been aware of it.
Although ironically this annual has since been reprinted, and I own the collection which includes it. Because, as it turns out, it was historically significant, which only became clear in hindsight. I am getting ahead of myself (as usual) so let me come in again.
X-Men was nearly one of Marvel’s also-ran titles. From 1963 to 1975 it was just kind of there, a team book about younger heroes united by their common origin as mutants rather than gods, radiation-related accident survivors, inventors, aliens, etc. (As Stan himself wrote in Son of Origins, the book was nearly titled “The Mutants” but he was talked out of it because that was too technical/scientific a term to appeal to the kiddies.) It didn’t have top-tier art (save for a bit of Kirby at the outset) and only had a dash of Stan Lee’s plotting, so it was fine but never truly great. In fact it switched from new ongoing stories to reprints from 1970 to 1975 and no one really cared. Then in ‘75 Chris Claremont took over as writer, right around when the whole team lineup was revamped, and over the course of the next five years it went from quasi-cancellation to producing one of the greatest modern classic epics of all, the Dark Phoenix Saga. And it kept getting better from there.
The general consensus is that Claremont elevated the writing on X-Men in two major ways: he amped up the complexity of the plotlines and he ladled on the soap opera dramatics. Claremont deeply grokked the utility and appeal of continuity. He was willing and able to look back at stories that had been written by those who’d worked on X-Men before him, identify interesting loose ends, and directly connect his new stories to those old strands of the tapestry. Of course he also had a million ideas of his own, and a lot of them were slow burn long plays. In the original days of Marvel, a good idea for a story had to fit inside a single issue of disposable media. If the resolution of said story idea required any background context or explanation, it would usually show up in a huge word balloon dump in the second to last panel. But by Claremont’s time it was no longer an ironclad rule that comics were for eight year olds with short attention spans. The audience was assumed to be reading almost every issue, and the writers could plant seeds in one book that wouldn’t bear fruit until later. Claremont excelled at this, particularly via layered plots. Any given issue of X-Men might see the team dealing with a threat, but also see one member of the team dealing with a personal issue on the side, and also have a scene in the middle that didn’t involve the main threat at all. The next issue would see the personal issue escalate to full blown threat, while the new plot from the previous issue crept closer to directly impacting the team, plus another new subplot would be introduced. On and on the wheels within wheels would turn, so that every time a particular plot culminated it had been building for a while, without any down time, because the narrative was constantly multitasking.
And it wasn’t as predictably formulaic as I’ve summarized. Sometimes a subplot would be introduced but not followed up on immediately, either because the pacing of the main plot didn’t have room for it, or because Claremont was deliberately slow-rolling to avoid a boring pattern. Or both! Overall it was nuanced, thoughtful longform storytelling which really did make every issue a must-read, because you never knew when something was going to be innocuously introduced that would pay off big later, or in fact when those big payoffs would suddenly materialize. And as I’ve tried to explain previously, every issue being important is a feature, not a bug, to fans who want to immerse themself in that kind of self-rewarding familiarity with a fictional universe.
All of that is just the plot stuff, and as I mentioned there was another facet, too: everything was emotionally heightened. These slow-burn plots which showed the danger coming from a mile off didn’t just involve random evil-doers. It would inevitably be some long-lost family member, or a former lover whose grudge was really a broken heart, or a jealous ex-friend or ex-mentor. And that was just the external conflict, while at the same time within the X-Men were rivalries and unrequited love, distrust and disputes, an intricate web of relationships and complicated feelings which were neither a distraction from the main event slugfests, nor bolted on, but integral parts of the overall whole. It’s quite a feat to be able to pull that off, and yes, of course, after many many years of constantly having to raise the stakes while still basically maintaining the recognizability of the intellectual property, Claremont got excessive almost to the point of self-parody. As evidenced by the ability to distill it all down to a joke meme template by way of the animated series.
But that was later. In the 80’s - and this is a story about me, reading comics in 1987, remember? - Claremont was at the top of his game.
So, Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It’s the X-Men, plus the New Mutants (once the X-Men grew up and were no longer teenage students of Charles Xavier they had to create a whole spin-off to keep the school-for-mutants thing viable) … IN ASGARD! Now, I had never really been into Thor comics, I knew who he was and liked him in The Avengers comics but wasn’t super familiar with the Marvel version of the Nine Realms, but this was a year or so after I had done a deep dive into Norse mythology for a school project so I was primed. And frankly, even after years of reading Spider-Man and other random comics, this opened my eyes to just how unlimited the possibilities were in a shared universe like Marvel’s continuity. Most of the big titles tended to build up their own little corners, where Doctor Strange handles the mystical stuff and the Fantastic Four do science-fiction exploration adventures. But why not mix and match with wild abandon? Why not take the mutants, some of which don’t even look human, and scatter them across Alfheim and Nidavellir and every realm in between, with fairies and dragons and witches galore? Why not take Loki’s current scheme, which has already gotten Thor out of the picture, and progress it to its next logical conclusion, installing a new Thor under Loki’s thrall, a mortal who already has experience with weather control and being worshipped as a goddess, the X-Men’s Storm? Storm was actually powerless at that point, due to some other previous subplot where her mutant abilities were “permanently” (spoiler: not really) neutralized so she was a soft target for Loki’s manipulation - take this hammer and reclaim the skies! The X-Men annual was actually the second part and conclusion of a story that started in New Mutants, where Loki abducted the underage mutants to remote corners of his world. And that was a follow-up from a previous project Claremont had masterminded where the X-Men and Alpha Flight had teamed up to fight Loki, and soundly defeated him, with Loki swearing revenge. (So it’s all four of those comics, the X-Men/Alpha Flight crossover and the New Mutants and X-Men sequel, that eventually got collected, once Claremont was firmly established as a Big Deal because the X-Men were the Biggest Thing Ever.)
The comic I picked up off TD’s floor was a great read, extra long and ridiculously dense, where the rest of the X-Men go to Asgard to rescue Storm and the New Mutants and have to throw down against Loki, physically and philosophically. And to give credit where it’s due, even though I knew next to nothing about the current X-Men storylines or the Thor-adjacent stuff, I was able to understand most of it, because Claremont wrote in such a way that things were never totally impenetrable to the newcomer. There was definitely a suggestion that certain details could be found in earlier sources, but the main thrust was clear enough. But most of all, it was the very everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nature of the story, opening my mind to the possibility that mutants didn’t have to always just fight a government trying to regulate them out of existence and/or Magneto, and Asgardian warriors didn’t have to always just fight ice giants and fire giants.
I don’t know that I’ve ever expounded on this theory here before, but if you look at speculative fiction and break it roughly in half with sci-fi on one side and fantasy on the other, you’re often as not breaking it down into stories set in the future or set in the past, and/or on secondary worlds which resemble our archetypal concepts of those timeframes. When you have speculative fiction clearly set on Earth in the present, usually the imaginary element is limited - one time travelling robot and one time travelling resistance member, or one clan of vampires living in secret in the shadows, etc. If the introduction of the speculative leads to chaos, it’s horror; if it’s orderly, it’s urban fantasy or plausible sci-fi. But somewhere in the middle of that diagram you have the present Earth, plus tons of other secondary worlds, plus outlandish sci-fi inventions, plus magic, plus monsters, and equal measures of chaos and order, and that’s a superhero comics universe. People love to use the phrase “anything can happen” to describe an exciting fictional premise, but my hot take is that nothing comes close to embodying that philosophy the way that superhero comics do. So why would you build silos within that premise, to have the sci-fi and the fantasy co-exist side by side but never interact? If the universe allows for anything and everything, then don’t be coy about it. Jump in and splash around, like Uncanny X-Men Annual #9.
Reading that book in TD’s room deepened my love for superhero comics in general and got me more interested in the X-Men specifically (which was good timing because about four years later a relaunched series’ X-Men #1 would become the best-selling comic of all time to that point - I bought all five variant copies). I clearly remember reading some other specific comics at TD’s as well, which had their own repercussions on my fandom, and I’ll get deeper into those next post.
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