If you an old school X-Fan, Generation X member or New Mutant fan because of the film series, then you must realize staggering power and influence of living legend Chris Claremont.
This writer’s uncanny collection of co-creations include Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost, Mystique, Phoenix, Psylocke, Sabretooth and Mister Sinister. Claremont’s characters and epic stories Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past and God Loves, Man Kills have been the canon which inspired the X-Men and Wolverine film franchise.
Now there’s a new book celebrating the writer who literally wrote the book that made the X-Men a phenomenon.
Sequart Organization has published The Best There is at What He Does: Examining Chris Claremont’s X-Men, by Jason Powell.
Claremont was the first X-writer for generations of X-Men fans including this one.
Uncanny X-Men #116 To Save the Savage Land by Claremont and John Byrne was my first comic book and I’ve been astonishingly in love ever since. I was a young geek growing up on the Claremont era with amazing artists like Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Paul Smith, Alan Davis, Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee.
Claremont launched the record-breaking X-Men #1, wrote the Wolverine limited series and first solo ongoing, co-created the New Mutants and had a fantastic run on Excalibur.
When I finally met Claremont at Emerald City Comicon I said nervously something like, if comic books were songs you wrote the soundtrack of my life.
Dramatic I know but on to the new book.
From the publisher:
The X-Men franchise is a sprawling comics mythology, to which hundreds of creators have contributed over the past 50 years. The period from 1975 to 1991 is special, however, as the X-Men universe was guided by the voice of one writer, who wrote every single issue of The Uncanny X-Men during that span. His name is Chris Claremont, and he made the X-Men what it is today.
The Best There is at What He Does is an appreciation of the long-term narrative Claremont lovingly crafted month after month, over the course of nearly 17 years. Proceeding chronologically through the issues, this exhaustive overview analyzes the trends, arcs, and themes that emerge throughout his landmark comics opus.
The book is available in print and on Kindle and features a foreword by Geoff Klock and a cover by Steven Legge.
By Editor