Guessing you're referring to the Fantastic Four/X-Men crossover in which Reed and Doom are forced to work together to undo Kitty's state of "permanent phase", which she was stuck in ever since the Morlock Massacre, and which was slowly killing her?

Because she definitely spent a good portion of that series unable to talk, with Franklin and his dream-self the only one who could even communicate with her at all, and they definitely became friendly there. So a tie of sorts was certainly established.

>>> Does anyone else think that Chris Claremont has to get over Kitty Pryde and Excalibur? It seems like everytime he touches a project, he somehow brings them back into it.

It's not just Excalibur, though. Consider that, in the early 80's, he was bringing Captain Britain characters and Spider-Woman characters into the X-Men title, his Avengers annual was the one that created Rogue and basically turned Carol Danvers into an X-Men supporting character instead of an Avengers one... and so on. He's always been very keen at tying past favorite characters (even if he didn't invent them) into newer stories on different titles.

It usually doesn't bother me - he tends to come up with at least semi-plausible reasons for the inclusion, and it does foster the idea that all these people are living in the same universe, rather than keeping everyone's supporting cast eternally trapped in their own separate story ghetto. Though sometimes (like in the FF case in question), he does seem to be forcing it way too hard.

>>> The problem with political commentary in a medium that is meant to be entertaining is that it drives a huge part of your potential market out the door or up the wall.

The trick is that it's possible to write political commentary that is also entertaining, even to those with different beliefs - thus creating something very near akin to "art". The flaw is that, all too often, the writer is so concerned with getting their agenda out there and bashing the idea into the readers' skulls, they forget the "entertaining" part, and it just comes across like a preachy sermon.

My idea was concerning the bits of armour that the Jim Rhodes Iron Man had discarded when they stopped working after returning from Secret Wars. He dropped them in a snow-covered wilderness.

I had them found and taken to a research facility and shuffled around and experimented on. And, then, they achieved sentience (like Spider Man's costume had done) and killed everyone in the facility.

A group of people are investigating the facility, when they find it. It attacks and attempts to bond to one of them.

He finds that in exchange for parts of his own mass that the creature converts to energy (similiar to how Warlock "ate") he could control the metallic symbiote. With it, he could change shape, fire energy, exist without air, ignore pressure changes, and manipulate metal by touching it. He could pass through metallic walls, but not wooden, ceramic, etc.

I got back a form letter telling me that Marvel didn't accept "new character submissions." I wonder if maybe I'd come a little too close to what Morrison mentions?

Theno

As for the overuse of X-Men or Claremont characters in Fantastic Four, sure it might have gone a bit overboard, but it did mean the F4 got to visit other parts of the Marvel Universe that they hadn't before like Otherworld and Genosha and I liked that.

Yeah, that's never been done before.

and

"carving out a space for political commentary in a mainstream superhero book"

The problem with political commentary in a medium that is meant to be entertaining is that it drives a huge part of your potential market out the door or up the wall.

I can't remember her name but there was some lady that took over 'New Mutants' back in the late 80's early 90's who basically chose to use it as her soapbox to preach about how evil the CIA was and every other pet peeve she had. She lost me really quickly. (Of course if she had been able to tell good stories in the midst of her preaching I might have been able to stick around but damn that magazine sucked...)

I can just imagine him pitching for the Avengers:

Editor: So what plans do you have for us?

Claremont: Okay... so Saturnine shows up, right? And Merlyn's been killed... but Captain Britain can't handle it alone, so he and Meggan go and recruit the Avengers to help. But they need someone who's really good at technology and can phase through walls... so they pick up Kitty Pryde and of course Lockheed comes along.

I actually think with DC, they're actually worse with gratuitous narration now than they were back then. They just can't stop narrating every single panel, it's like they're trying to write a bad noir novel that combines the worst elements of Frank Miller and Chris Claremont. I read "Batman and the Monster Men" and got so sick of the constant narration I just resolved to skip all of it halfway through, which made the book a lot more enjoyable. Another great example of stupid nonstop DC narration was Countdown to Infinite Crisis.

What made Marvel 2099 an interesting concept was that it flipped the standard superhero setup on its head. The typical role of the superhero is to preserve the status quo from the forces of evil that want to disrupt it. By putting superheroes in a dystopia, though, you end up with heroes whose job is now to overthrow an evil and corrupt status quo. It's not a question of stopping the bad guys from winning; the story starts off with the bad guys having won ages ago. This isn't a new or unique concept, of course, but the use of familiar characters lends it a lot more resonance. So when an iconic supervillain like Doctor Doom becomes the world's best hope for reform, and an iconic superhero like Captain America becomes a symbol of the corruption of the ruling powers, it underscores the point in a very dramatic way.

And the whole point of using a "pretty straight-up dystopian future sci-fi" setting is to do social commentary (see "Batman: Year 100" for a more recent example). Warren Ellis wasn't just playing with superhero tropes in his Doom run; he was carving out a space for political commentary in a mainstream superhero book. When Doom holds up the unmasked alien insect skull of the most powerful CEO in America and screams at the country for never bothering to notice that its corporations were literally being run by giant parasites, it certainly isn't subtle, but it is remarkably refreshing.

Was the line a total success? Of course not; in fact, I'd really only credit Peter David's Spider-man and Ellis's Doom as the books that really exploited the potential of the concept. But the concept was a good one, and Millar/Morrison are talking about something fundamentally different.

And New X-Men was profoundly better and more compelling than any of the 2099 books

Who said anything about New X-Men? This is about Morrison and Millar's 2099 pitch, not about Morrison's X-Men run a decade later.

Of course, when they tried to make Batman a Marvel-style hero (his problem was his psychology, not the fact that he could get hurt like anyone else) they went too far and made him into a borderline mental patient and drove away what made the character great - his supporting cast...

Ha ha! No, I doubt that anyone needs that.

"The basic concept, though, was pretty great, and made for two very solid titles that provided more compelling versions of their respective title characters than anything Marvel’s canonical books have published in nearly a decade."

No, not really. It was pretty straight-up dystopian future sci-fi. Throw in some alternate, more bad-ass versions of the characters and you're set. And New X-Men was profoundly better and more compelling than any of the 2099 books.

I'm just glad they got Claremont off of the FF...that was a run that hurt, and hurt bad. "Reed's been trapped in Doom's armor--now I have to marry him!" Oy.

Dunno if I buy Kitty 'nearly turning majorly bad' although Claremont's more recent Kitty stories (from the 'Reloaded' launch on) had him nearly turning her into a rage-a-holic. One of the things I'm glad Joss scuttled; seeing her occasionally pissed is fine, but constantly steamed? That bugged me.

Dunno. They stopped that storyline midstream and went to the Clown Saga instead.

I think Millar's whole point is that Marvel's heroes traditionally do have psychological handicaps. It's not that Donald Blake has a limp, it's that he's a frail mortal. It's not just that Peter Parker's a nerd, it's that he's human, and has to deal with all the problems a human deals with, before and after he puts on his costume. Ditto to Matt Murdock's blindness. Murdock's blindness just underscores the fact that despite his alter ego's daring swashbuckling act and rooftop-leaping, the man himself is as vulnerable as anyone. None of these handicaps are there to really give characters physical problems to overcome; they're about drawing attention to the fact that these are relatively normal people who can be hurt and made to suffer like anybody else.

By contrast, DC's heroes have traditionally only had personal problems to the extent that they wanted to have personal problems. Yes, pre-Crisis Superman had to pretend to be goofy Clark Kent and Batman pretends to be a spoiled dandy as Bruce Wayne, but neither of these characters identify primarily as Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne. Their vulnerabilities are only for show, and point to no underlying weakness within the characters themselves. Superman pretends to be a weakling in order to mask his invincibility; Batman pretends to be a fool to conceal the fact that he's one of the smartest and most competent men on the planet. Now, this has changed within the last couple decades, but note that it's changed precisely because Marvel's approach to characterization proved wildly popular - so much so that "feet of clay" have become the norm in these stories.

(For the record, despite the fact that I think their actual Avengers/Galactus 2099 pitch is weak, I like the Morrison/Millar Iron Man idea. Iron Man, like all Marvel heroes, has always been at his best when we see the frail human under the armor; that's why so many writers have tried to redo "Armor Wars" and "Demon in a Bottle" so many times. They're the only really successful attempts to inject an element of humanity into the character.)

I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. The ideas in Doom Patrol are pretty interesting, but the execution is incredibly raw and unpolished compared to Morrison's later work. The dialogue in his Doom Patrol run tends to be stilted, overwrought, and weighted down with unnecessary exposition, while Morrison clutters the story itself with gratuitous narration. This is more a failing of the era than anything else - writers back in the late 80s/early 90s really hadn't learned to just shut up and let artists show you what's going on - but it's also very much a sign of Morrison's relative inexperience as a writer.

Morrison also has the good habit of showing us things happen, whereas Millar has the bad one of just telling us it happened, so it's always good to see that put in his stories.

Actually, the more I think on it, the more Millar desperatly needs Morrison for his stories to be as good as he thinks they are.
I mean he's stuffs alright, it's just that he (and way too many others) think it's the best shit ever.

I've never bought this argument. DC's heroes may have not necessarily have physical handicaps, but the mental ones were just as interesting. Clark Kent having to pretend to be meek and nerdy when he can move planets, Brice Wayne pretending to be a wussy dandy when he could kick the crap out of just about every non super on the planet (and many of the supers). On top of this, I call Bullshit on Matt Murdock being "blind". The guy can even read newsprint with his fingertips. And as for Peter Parker being puny, costume or no, this guy could still bench a truck.

Millar needs to get himself a copy of the Champions Roleplaying Game and specifically read the section on disadvantages. I think he'd quickly figure out it doesn't matter if the hero has a bunch of physical limitations or psychological limitation, it's all good.