Under Claremont, the X-Men didn’t score clean wins over Magneto, the Hellfire Club, Marauders or Reavers. Yet, it didn’t seem to affect sales.

Yes, but not scoring a clean win against Magneto or Juggernaut is nowhere near as bad as a whole team of the Titans power level not being able to score a clean win against Brother Blood by himself or Deathstroke alone. Those guys wouild just punk them with ease while mocking them and not breaking a sweat. I couldn’t even understand what that Brother Blood’s power was, and he looked like a total ponce. Plus their human nonsuperhero supporting cast hung out with had guys like Terry Long, uber-douche. Compare that with an Alfred Pennyworth, J. Jonah Jameson or Wyatt Wingfoot. Even their supporting cast was wussy.

Teen Titans had a nice balance in the early going. Wolfman wrote, in essence, episodes of “The Real World” in tights and Perez drew amazing action sequences. When Perez left, all that was left the soap opera and the angst. As great as Eduardo Barreto was, he didn’t bring the same quality to the title.

Nah, people always say this and I don’t buy it. Barretto is a GREAT artist. It really bugs me how people have to downplay how great he is because they need to make excuses for why Teen Titans failed. Is Barretto really significantly worse than Cockrum’s second run, Paul Smith, or JR JRs X-Men run in the 80s? Silvestri’s 80s style?

Teen Titans was already slipping DURING Perez’s run, and I think it jumped the shark at Judas Contract and the introduction of Jericho, who’s aesthetic just pushed the wimp factor of an already wimpy team over the edge. This idea that the Titans absolutely needed Perez’s art to stay strong when X-Men kept going on well Cockrum’s 2nd run, Smith, JR JR and Silvestri, all of whom I think Barretto can truly hang with, just reaffirms my point that there was something subpar aboiut Wolfman’s writing to Claremont’s. To me, that was the fact that Claremont was more interested in writing a soap opera about low self-esteem wimps than a drama about a competent superteam.

Yes Perez drew amazing action sequences. But so did Barretto. And in those amazing action sequences by Perez and Barretto, unless the Titans were facing utter losers or nameless henchmen, you could be guaranteed they would get their asses handed to them or they’d scrape out a win by the skin of their teeth. By barretto’s run, people were probably just tired of it. I know i was.

When DC attempted to ape Claremont’s style with their Teen Titans and Outsiders series, they initially met with success. But as the runs continued and the writers began to feel obliged to resolve old plot-lines, the stories lost impetus and became a slog. Eventually both series were canceled.

Teen Titans had a nice balance in the early going. Wolfman wrote, in essence, episodes of “The Real World” in tights and Perez drew amazing action sequences. When Perez left, all that was left the soap opera and the angst. As great as Eduardo Barreto was, he didn’t bring the same quality to the title. Claremont had much better luck with the collaborators that followed Byrne. Paul Smith brought some buzz and a new sensibility to the X-Men. Romita, Jr., Silvestiri and Lee all generated buzz during their turns on the title. Even fill-ins like Art Adams made a mark.

The other weakness was that Wolfman and Perez had created a title about young people going out into the world by themselves for the first time. The cast was college aged at the beginning and they were dealing with those issues. As Wolfman aged them, the cast outgrew the theme of the title. None of the replacements were ever quite as interesting. Conversely, the X-Men is about a school. The older characters became teachers and Claremont always seemed to have a new student up his sleeve. It gave the title more breadth.

The criticism of “too little mystery” probably is valid with regard to Batman and the Outsiders. Mike W. Barr did a nice job drawing out some suspense around his fresh faces, but wrapped their backgrounds up neatly after a couple years. Those resolutions did take some of the dram out of the series. The bigger problem was the decision to remove Batman from the title. Batman was pretty much the straw that stirred the drink in BATO. He was clearly the boss, they all served at his pleasure and the extent to which the team rebelled was a huge source of dramatic conflict. Giffen and DeMatties used that dynamic to good effect in the Bwahaha Justice League, but Barr really pioneered it in BATO.

I don’t think it was “never scoring a clean win” that put readers off, but the opposite. Sales dropped when Wolfman started to wind up the various stories in long, cod epics – so we had Terra/Terminator four parter, followed by the Hive three parter, followed by the Trigon five parter, followed by the Brother Blood nine parter, and so on.

Under Claremont, the X-Men didn’t score clean wins over Magneto, the Hellfire Club, Marauders or Reavers. Yet, it didn’t seem to affect sales.

When DC attempted to ape Claremont’s style with their Teen Titans and Outsiders series, they initially met with success. But as the runs continued and the writers began to feel obliged to resolve old plotlines, the stories lost impetus and became a slog. Eventually both series were cancelled.

I never read Outsiders, but I think New Teen Titans lost sales not because they resolved storylines but because it was a touchy-feely emo lifetime movie for most of its run. After a couple of dozen issues of seeing them whine their parents and insecurities, wring their hands, cry every other issue, act neurotic, hug it out all the time and out-angst even Marvel, it just got tiresome. I get it, they’re a family, fine, so are the Fantastic Four. But the Fantastic Four also kick a whole lot of ass too in that classic Kirby slobberknocker and grand cosmic scale. That helps offset the soap opera aspects and the bickering and emo moments. With the Titans, they lost every fight, and never got a clean win over anyone. Usually a piece of rubble would fall on the bad guy or something from an explosion. I’m convinced that Titans sold well because it looked and felt like a Marvel book at first with the Perez art style and Wolfman dialogue and the angst and family vibe, but after being patient readers realized these guys were never going to score a clean win even against a guy like Deathstroke and got bored.

No offense, T, but it takes two to tango, and it’s as much the editorial regime’s fault for not doing their jobs and telling Chris when it was time to address the dangling subplots and should have blocked new subplots from being introduced until he resolved what he had planned prior. That’s part of the editor’s job, y’know.

I’m not excusing the editors, you’re 100% right. And at times I do believe that happened. For example I think storylines like Fall of the Mutants and Inferno were editorially mandated house-cleaning sessions for unresolved storylines. Unfortunately when Bob Harras took over, one of his editorial policies was to never resolve any questions ever, as he thought answering any resolution would hurt the series.

Now that doesn’t mean that I agree with you that plotlines should always be resolved. In fact, I hold quite the opposite view. I’d argue that the sheer number of unanswered questions in the X-Men series played a central role in its continuing success. Creating an air of mystery that appealed to a great many readers.

Sure I can see that from one angle, Claremont’s writing can look slapdash (Kitty Pryde never once said, ‘By the way, Wolverine/Rogue/Magneto, what is your real name?’ or ‘Where the hell have Stevie Hunter/Alexys Forrester/Rachel Summers gone?’), but that very same quality means that the series never got bogged down in details.

When DC attempted to ape Claremont’s style with their Teen Titans and Outsiders series, they initially met with success. But as the runs continued and the writers began to feel obliged to resolve old plotlines, the stories lost impetus and became a slog. Eventually both series were cancelled.

From Nightcrawler’s and Mystique’s first meeting it was clear they were related in some way – how they were related wasn’t clear, but did it need to be? A lot of writers would have given us a five part ‘Who is Kurt Wagner?’ saga that concluded with it being revealed that Nightcrawler was related to Mystique – Claremont knew that this would have been anti-climatic and have served no dramatic purpose, so he just let it dangle instead.

ps. If Claremont is starting from X-Men issue 3, does that mean all the Up-starts nonsense, which was going on at the same time in Uncanny X-Men will still be part of his continuity?

Loved Claremonts run hated i mean really hated Morrison’s run.

But also, note that you claim most of his problems came from editorial interference with his planned resolutions, not his own incompetence.

No, it is his own incompetence. He was a great writer at his peak, sure, but he had some annoying recurring flaws, and one of them was introducing a dangling plotline, and not touching it for a decade or more while he introduced 3 dozen more plotlines that he would also dangle for a decade or more. My point is that much of the editorial interference was totally avoidable. If I have an editor, and he okays a plot development, and I never end up using that approved plot development and instead create two dozen more unresolved plot developments, and I wait so long that a new editor with a new vision comes on board who now does not like the previously approved plot development, it’s my own fault for waiting so long to use it. It’s even worse in Claremont’s case because given that he already worked out the resolution of the dangling plotline from the moment he came up with the story, he has even less reason to wait around. At least during the Harras post-Claremont era they were totally making it up as they went along and had no idea what the resolution of a storyline was going to be when they introduced a dangling plot, so at least they had an excuse for dragging it out. Claremont on the other hand knew his intended resolutions before he even introduced the mystery, so what excuse did he have for waiting two decades to finally get around to resolving them?

Chris Claremont used to have a question and answer forum here on CBR. On it, he would discuss with fans what his intended resolutions for his mystery plotlines were, and he would discuss the editorial interference that ruined his intended mystery. And a recurring them kept coming up. He’d introduce a mystery under certain editors and under certain editors-in-chief. He’d tell them his intended resolution, and they would approve it. Then he’d proceed to never make any moves on said resolution until a new editor in chief or new editor came onto the book. This new editor or editor in chief would now have different ideas on the direction and tone of the book and the resolution of the plotline. Sometimes it would even be the same editor or editor in chief, but as time went by this same editor or editor in chief now had new ideas and no longer agreed with Claremont’s original idea.

Now I can understand if this happened once to a writer. Or even twice. But reading his forum, Claremont never seemed to learn. He got burned over and over and over again like this, but never seemed to learn that when a higher-up approves your idea, you should execute it within a reaasonable time before someone new with a new ideology is put in charge, or before that same editor changes his or her mind. It would be as if I was an employee and kept getting bosses to approve projects I propose, waiting years to ever execute the project, then acting surprised when the same boss, or the new management, no longer thinks my proposed project was a good idea. Even after Inferno, when he finally resolved a bunch of old plotlines in one fell swoop, he immediately reverted back to form and started introducing a couple dozen dangling storylines. This is why I don’t consider him blame-free in the whole editorial interference thing, as much of it was avoidable if he just implements story ideas within a reasonable time from approval.

But also, note that you claim most of his problems came from editorial interference with his planned resolutions, not his own incompetence. Those diversions, as you noted, made the situation worse.

But really, at least those continuing narratives kept readers interested for a seemingly unending run of issues. Now, they come and go with each three-to-six issue creative team, or jump on every time a title is relaunched (what, every 6 months or so?) and then disappear again.

See, back before Bendis, Brubaker and their ilk ushered in the era of Single Issue Rip Offs (also known as “decompressed storytelling”), comic book writers wrote stories that included plots carrying over from issue to issue in an ongoing manner, similar to this thing called “real life.” So stories would not be wrapped up in trade-collectible, 6-issue “arcs” in which no real character development happens and the equivalent of one 1980s 22-page story is dragged over 100 pages of pretty pictures.

I hate to break up your one-man snarkfest, but I think most of us understand how serial comics work. The problem is that even by serial comic standards, Claremont dangled plotlines way too long. Some of his plotlines never got picked up and resolved until decades later, and often by other writers, which led to confusing and unsatisfying and stale resolutions. He also had a horrible tendency to come up with a plotline resolution that was okay-ed by one editor, just dangle it and never get around to using it because he was juggling too many subplots, then when he was finally ready to resolve the aforementioned plotline, the new editor would object to the resolution the previous editor agreed to (for example his original idea for Mystique to be a man and Nightcrawler’s father), forcing him to keep dangling them further or reworking his resolutions until they became incomprehensible. Yet you would think after getting burned a few times from dangling plotlines from editorial regime to editorial regime he’d learn, he kept doing it throughout the decades and kept getting burned as a result.