kathy@gsg.UUCP (Kathryn Smith) (10/08/85)
I attended the 1985 NASFIC (North American Science Fiction Convention) about a month ago, and while I was there went to an author's forum given by Chris Claremont. He has been writing prose as well as scripting comics recently, and spent about half the forum reading from the story he is currently working on. It is a fantasy set at a Pensic War (a Society for Creative Anacronism gathering for those who aren't familiar with it) in which some elements of real magic intrude into the medieval recreation going on. I enjoyed it very much, and hope he finds a publisher for it soon, as I would like to know how it ends! After his reading he took questions from the audience. Unfortunately, I didn't have my tape recorder going, (and if I had he probably wouldn't have answered most of the questions he did), so the information below is based solely on my very fallible memory, and on my interpretation of what he said combined with his facial expressions and tone of voice. The following is correct to the best of my recollections. He began by offering to take questions about his work, X-Men, New Mutants and (grimace) X-Factor. He was reluctant to answer questions about the plot of X-Factor since it had not come out at the time, but someone in the audience pointed out that we all already knew that [..basic plot summary of X-Factor ...] was going to happen, and that what we really wanted to know was WHY. He said that basically John Byrne had proposed this scenario that Phoenix was not really Jean Grey, and Shooter had liked it. (This is open to dispute. I thought he implied that the original idea to bring back Jean Grey was Byrne's. A friend who was also there thought that he meant that once the idea had been proposed, Byrne came up with a not too badly crocked way to explain it. Anybody know for sure?). He seemed thoroughly disgusted by the whole idea, and when asked how he felt about it said something along the lines of 'How would you feel if you were an author and someone came to you and said "We're going to completely destroy your major plot line for the last ten years. You don't mind, do you?"'. He mentioned that he had pointed out that Phoenix not being Jean, and therefore not being human, made the moral of her ultimate sacrifice on the moon completely meaningless. (Read the epilogue to issue 136-137 for this). Judging by the latest FF this at least got through to somebody. He also implied that there had been some pretty dirty infighting among the writers/ artists involved. As a sample he mentioned that John Byrne was so angry over the final version of FF 286 that he refused to have his name appear on it. (Go look -- it doesn't say 'by John Byrne', it says 'by you know who'.) I have since heard a rumor which may or may not be reliable that Byrne is going over to DC. Anybody know for sure? He also commented that he had spent all this time trying to make Cyclops come across as a decent human being, and now look at what they were going to have him do. (meaning ditching Madelyne and baby). He apparently plans to keep Madelyne and her baby as characters involved with the X-Men, as he said he had plans for her over the next year or so. Someone asked him what was going to happen with Rachel, and just how powerful she really was, and he said that "She is her mother's daughter, and she has the Phoenix power." In light of the fact that he has already said that Rachel is the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey/Phoenix, it sounds like he is planning to ignore the whole X-Factor mess as much possible in the X-Men. He also mentioned that he had been planning to do a Nightcrawler mini-series until Dave Cockrum got his in ahead of him, and that he was now going to use the material he had planned for the mini-series in the regular issues of X-Men. It seemed to me that he sounded a little annoyed about Cockrum's mini-series, but that may have been my imagination. At any rate, he said that he plans to spend a lot more time of the male members of the X-Men during the coming year. There will be a Colossus/Illyana mini-series in which they return to Russia, and as he put it, "the Politburo isn't ready for Illyana yet." It sounds promising. Someone asked him how he felt about crossovers with the Secret Wars, etc., and while he didn't say in so many words that he didn't want them, the implication was definitely there. He did say that the reason for Secret Wars was to give Marvel an opportunity to introduce a new line of toys. Again, the above is correct to the best of my recollection. Apologies for any errors. In writing this, I have had to stop myself from using the word disgusted, or variations thereon, in nearly every other sentence, and that pretty well sums up my impressions of Claremont's feelings about X-Factor. He didn't really seem angry about it, just disgusted that it was so stupid and he couldn't do anything about it. That pretty well sums up my own reactions as well now that I read the latest Avengers and FF. The net has already seen all the arguments about the logical holes you can find in the premise of Jean Grey being at the bottom of New York Harbor in a 'giant tylenol capsule' (Claremont) inside a multi-million dollar shuttle which nobody ever bothered to try to recover, so I won't go through them again. What got to me most about the issues introducing X-Factor is that they seem to think that nobody in New York noticed the events of the Dark Phoenix saga. Do they really mean to tell us that after Phoenix took the Hellfire Club apart and the police called the Avengers, that the other Avengers never bothered to ask Beast why he wasn't on duty when the President called, and why he erased the earlier message about Phoenix and the X-Men? I for one find this hard to believe. On the other hand, I find the whole thing hard to believe. Kathryn Smith (decvax!gsg!kathy) General Systems Group, Inc Salem, NH