If you know the X-Men, it’s because of Chris Claremont. The writer spent seventeen years working on “The Uncanny X-Men” at Marvel and his stories including “Days of Future Past,” “God Loves, Man Kills,” “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and many others have been mined by the X-Men cartoon shows and films. Last year’s “The Wolverine” was loosely based on the Wolverine miniseries that Claremont wrote with artist Frank Miller and this summer’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is based on Claremont’s story. It’s hard to understate just how influential Claremont has been in and out of comics.



Claremont has written many novels including The Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy with George Lucas, which spun off of the film “Willow,” The “High Frontier” series, and “Dragon Moon” which Claremont has recently released as an ebook. Titan has just collected an older work of Claremont’s, “Marada the She-Wolf,” an adventure story about a sword-wielding heroine that Claremont made with artist John Bolton. The story began as Red Sonja story, but when Marvel lost the license, Claremont and Bolton turned the story into a stand alone adventure tale that is a violent fantasy tale, but bears many of the trademarks of Claremont’s work including interesting female characters and playing with genre tropes. He was kind enough to take time out to talk with us.





ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Marada. I hadn’t read it when it came out in the eighties. Was this one of John Bolton’s first comics?



CHRIS CLAREMONT: Not entirely. The whole thing got started because he had done stuff over in England, both independently and I think some stuff for Marvel, which I think is how Ralph Macchio became aware of him. Ralph brought him onboard to do a Conan graphic story. I saw his work and went holy cow, we should do something. Being a predatory soul, even the awareness of a great artist gets my juices flowing and John is a spectacularly great artist. I pitched the idea to him and he liked it. We pitched the idea to Ralph and Ralph loved it. We started working on it and Marvel lost the license and we were up the creek without the proverbial paddle which I relate in the prose piece in the graphic album. Archie Goodwin and Jo Duffy and John and I put our heads together and came up with a solution that was both surprisingly and surprisingly equitable.



AD: How much did the story change in going from telling a Red Sonja story to the story of Marada?



CC: Obviously we had to do some major tweaking to the costume, but that was in the cards anyway. What we were doing with the story was establishing something I often found myself doing with Marvel characters which was establish a timeline–a portion of the universe that was exclusive to that vision of the character. We were going to establish her in a more sensible, historically plausible appearance than readers were used to seeing with Sonja.



The fact is if you are ever the urge to try running around in a chain mail loincloth–leaving aside the brasserie–it gets really old really fast. And in a fight is not altogether practical. If you slip and fall down a hill–ow! Not to mention what happens when it gets cold. Or hot. We decided we wanted to establish our own visual sense of what the character would be. It was no effort to give her a whole unique visual trope that had nothing to do with Sonja and everything to do with a vision of Marada and the last century BC/first century AD, which is when the story takes place.



AD: You mentioned the late Archie Goodwin, the editor who was running the Epic line at Marvel. What was he like and what was his role in the book?



CC: To use my own trope, he was the best there is at what he did and what he did best was breathtaking and multifaceted. One of the best writers I’ve ever worked with, one of the best storytellers I’ve ever worked with, certainly one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with. One of the best people I’ve ever known. He was the kind of man who made the writers who worked for him better because of what he inspired them to do just by asking questions. Why are you doing this? Why is your character turning left and not right?



The best illustration [of this] is John Byrne and I were doing Iron Fist and we’d pretty much come to the end of the run. John was about to take over X-Men from Dave Cockrum. The sales were not great. Archie had a brainstorm which was to combine Iron Fist with Luke Cage. John and I had the responsibility of launching the concept. We’re both sitting there and thinking that Iron Fist didn’t have a whole heck of a lot of villains. Luke Cage certainly doesn’t have a lot of villains because up until then he’d been a, if you’ll pardon the phrase, blaxploitation character. How are we going to work this? Archie just gave me a look and said: You’ve got Luke Cage. You’ve got Danny Rand. You’ve got Misty Knight, who loves Danny. You’ve got Colleeen Wing who’s a samurai, is Misty’s best friend and hates Danny’s guts. If you can’t come up with a year’s worth of conflict and adventure out of those four characters just walking into a room and saying good morning, you don’t deserve to be behind the typewriter writing a book. He was right. You didn’t need to build it around this issue’s grand villain. All you needed was literally the rich white rich kid from Southeast Asia walking into a room and interacting with the poor black ex-con who’s the size of a small mountain. And oh yes, the young kid from the Far East’s girlfriend is an ex-New York City detective, so she and Luke Cage don’t get along right off the bat. You’ve got it right there.



AD: That’s something that’s marked all of your work. People remember the larger events like Days of Future Past, the Dark Phoenix Saga, but one of your great skills has been using these larger plots to tell stories about the characters, tear them down, put them back together in a way that’s often very subtle but often profound.



CC: Ideally that’s what any writer does with their characters whether it’s Arthur Conan Doyle tossing Holmes off Reichenbach Falls or Ian Fleming having Rosa Klebb stab Bond with a poisoned knife at the end of From Russia With Love. As far as the audience is concerned, he just pulled the one unforgivable sin, killed off the hero. Well he didn’t kill off the hero, but Bond was a different person, a more rounded person in his way, after that. And to an even greater extent by killing off Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The whole point of writing adventure tropes is that you take the heroes up to the edge of oblivion and sometimes you push them over and sometimes they get yanked back and sometimes they don’t.



The key is to present the characters in as realistic and human a way as possible so that the reader can accept the surrounding unreal reality whether it’s superheroes or the first century AD/last century BC as familiar. If one were to do an absolutely totally by the book depiction of life in that era in the story, it might not be as attractive to the reader. The key for me is to define Marada in terms of relevance to a reader in the mid-eighties London or New York or wherever so that they can enjoy, holy cow there’s a beautiful woman with a sword fighting a demon, but thinking of it in terms of the conflicts she’s overcoming are things that they might be able to relate to themselves.



Big events are easy. Coming up with Galactus landing on Earth, well, it’s another giant Jack Kirby character. It’s a brilliant Jack Kirby character. It’s an amazing scene. But you can look at it and say, it’s The Day the Earth Stood Still turned sidewise. The key is not the arrival of the antagonist. That lights the fuse. The important thing is what happens once the flame starts burning. The key is not that Marada is a she devil with a sword. That goes without saying. That’s a given. The question a writer needs to answer–to convey to the artist so he can present it to the audience–is, what does that mean? What brought her to that position? What happens if she gets knocked off her feet? How does she recover? The whole point of the first dozen pages of the first story is she’s just been hammered by a demon. There she was thinking I can deal with any threat that comes my way that I’m likely to find on Earth, but what if you run into something that isn’t part of the Earth. What if it possesses powers and abilities beyond those of mortal human beings? What are you going to do then? How are you going to deal with it? How do you recover? That’s hard. And once she does that, what happens next? And so on and so on.



AD: You and John Bolton seemed to get on well. You did another book together a few years later, The Black Dragon.



CC: We also did a couple years worth of X-Men miniseries that were just as good in their own way. John is the best there is at what he does and what he does best is really cool. I love paraphrasing myself. [laughs] Pretentious and silly all in the same breath.



AD: Considering the artists you’ve worked with in your career, that’s high praise. I know there are a lot of collections of much of your Marvel work but are there any plans for The Black Dragon or other work?



CC: The challenge with The Black Dragon is it’s something like 250 pages, which makes it a whole other level of investment. One could hope, one does hope, but I have no idea. We have to get to an offer. That’s always the pesky thing, you have to have an offer.



AD: I did want to ask about novels. I remember when "The Chronicles of the Shadow War" series came out. I know you’ve been putting out ebooks recently, original and reprints of some of your out of print books and I was curious about your thoughts on ebooks and how publishing has changed.



CC: My problem, I guess, is I started out as a prose writer and then moved over the comics for what I thought would be a short while and ended up on a seventeen year run on Uncanny. Then I bounced back and forth from Marvel to Dark Horse to DC and back to Marvel ultimately. A great deal of the time that I might have in another reality spent building my career as a novelist, I devoted to building a comic book career. Which was fine at the time, but the brutal fact is that you don’t own the characters and not owning the characters makes a fundamental difference. I’m coming back and saying to publishers, hey, here’s my novel. It’s finding the right editor at the right house who loves the work and going on from there. Unfortunately that’s a lot easier said than done especially these days when the publishers themselves are undergoing a total reassessment of their reality and their position in that reality.



The long answer to the question is that I look around and I think well, I’ve got a fanbase, I’ve got a means to get material to that fanbase directly, why not give that a try and see what happens. It won’t be any worse off than not doing anything. So it’s in process. The obvious difficulty is the first requirement–which is write the damn book. The problem with novels as opposed to comics is that comics are easy from a structural standpoint because they’re so tightly focused and quickly produced in the sense that you’ve got to have one out every month. Novels you have to figure out the beginning, middle and end and then start embellishing, structuring, playing and that takes longer. The fact is that was really rough and tough work back in the days when it was just me. Now I have to factor in, I have a wife, I have kids, I have a life. It’s very complicated.



AD: You released your novel First Flight, the first volume of your High Frontier series, as an ebook recently, which was out of print.



CC: It’s done well. We’re in the process of bringing out Grounded and Sundowner. As I tell readers at conventions when I’m doing signings, if there’s sufficient interest, if there’s sufficient market, perhaps it is time to do the fourth book and see where the saga leads.



AD: You also recently released a new ebook, Dragon Moon.



CC: The overall structure of The Black Dragon is that the Dunreith family exists, has existed, will exist for as long as I can get away with it. Dragon Moon introduces Cassandra who is the present day iteration of the dragons’ alter ego on Earth. I had a miniseries going with a European publisher. Panini teamed up with Soleil and created an imprint called Fusion which would be involved with publishing creator-owned work. I was doing a trilogy of graphic novels with a European artist Christian Alamy that was telling the story of the Dunreith family in sixth century England in the aftermath of the death of Arthur. The first volume came out and the second volume was finished and the deal died. The publishers split up and it’s been sitting in a drawer at Panini waiting to see if anyone there is ever going to get around to producing it again.



With the Shadow War Trilogy, I created a whole world that totally expanded out of the little bit that we saw in the movie. The hope was that if there was enthusiasm we could keep on going and there was enthusiasm everywhere but at Lucasfilm. They were just wrapping up with Young Indy and gearing up to do Episode I of Star Wars and the Willow concept was never high on their sense of priority. Now that all that material is presumably owned by Disney, who knows. The flipside is that I presume it would have to go through Marvel, which is a whole other kettle of fish altogether. It’s very hard for Marvel to conceptualize the production of material that is not exclusively and totally theirs because why devote aspects of a limited budget and limited attention to promoting stuff that will not totally benefit us in return? Why waste time doing Shadow Moon when we can do Spider-man instead?



AD: I have to ask about the next X-Men movie, Days of Future Past, which is based on the story you wrote. Are you involved at all with the film?



CC: No I just wrote the source material. What Bryan and Laura end up doing with it, we’ll find out in May. They got the title right. They got the concept right. They decided that Hugh Jackman was better to go through time than Ellen Page. If I were in Bryan’s shoes and I had to flip a coin between Hugh Jackman and Ellen Page as the tentpole around which to build a story, well, being me I’d try to find a way to do both of them, but that’s just me. That said, Bryan’s track record on the X-Men movies speaks for itself and I can’t wait to see it when it comes out in May. You couldn’t ask for a more ideal foundation on which to build a film in terms of the people involved.



AD: You can’t go wrong with the source material.



CC: I hope not. Even though it is a movie that involves superheroes, Days of Future Past, much like the gut story of X-Men 2, is not about mutants per se. It is about a minority fighting for its survival against an oppressive majority. It is about racism. That has always been the fundamental basis of the X-Men as a concept and the source of its relevance to what is now three generations of audience. It is why the conflict between Xavier and Magneto is, at its heart, heartbreaking. They’re both fighting in their own way for the same thing. It’s just that one of them is totally scarred by the tragedy of his young life and he cannot let it go. As was shown in X-Men: First Class, he’s been hunting down his enemies all his life out of fear of what they will do if they ever get back into the seat of power and he’s just shifted his aim from Nazis to those who would exploit and destroy mutants. He and Charlie are the deepest, oldest of friends, but he thinks Charlie’s a fool because of Charlie’s trust and faith.



For me, as a long ago former actor, that’s stuff to play with as a performer. It’s a hell of a lot of stuff to play with as a writer. Hopefully the readers having enjoyed the original story will in six months have a chance to enjoy the film. Fingers crossed. Hope springs eternal. But given the people involved, I don’t think the hope is unreasonable or the expectation.