That cover up there marked the return of Chris Claremont to the X-Verse after 101 issues away. On the heels of the terribly disappointing "Apocalypse: The Twelve" story, the meh "Ages of Apocalypse" follow-up, as well as a really terrible 2-issue arc where everyone lost their powers, the man who made the X-Men into Marvel's premiere franchise finally returned! The results: blargh....with an addendum.
See at the time somebody (Bob Harras it seems) decided to herald the return of the prodigal creator by putting a 6-month gap (storyline-wise) between ishs 380 & 381, as well as across the X-line. Almost all the titles saw some level of change from this gap, with X-Force, X-Man, and Generation X, undergoing the most radical changes in the form of "Counter-X". Warren Ellis writing X-books??? Whodathunkit! The "Counter-X" books got a story arc called "Shockwave" to explain what happened during the gap, a luxury none of the other books received, and something which certainly hurt Claremont's two books the most.
In the 2 books Claremont got handed (Uncanny & X-Men), the gap saw new members to both teams, new leaders in the form of Gambit and Rogue respectively, new characters like Thunderbird III, and new villians in The Neo and The Goth. Little explanation was given as to what happened during the time-jump, and new stuff was immediately thrown at the reader.
At the time, reading these as a devout Claremont fan, I felt let down. Re-reading these a few months ago, not much has changed. It felt rushed at times, too much crammed into the readers' brain all at once, and little attention given to the how and why. To his credit, Claremont did attempt to tie his new villains into the "powerless" story arc that preceded his run (an arc he may or may not have been ghost-writing anyway) but it still felt....forced. The idiosyncrasies of Claremont (extensive internal monologues for example) did not translate well to an audience 10 years later, and the idea of long drawn out stories that took years to flesh out were not entirely feasible either. Call it a lack of patience from the reader, or maybe just the feeling of being alienated from the book as a result of "6 months later", but after 9 months...two of which were spent in crossovers ("Maximum Security" and "Dream's End"), it didn't look good for Claremont.
At least "Dream's End" was an X-Over where as "Max Security" was a Marvel wide story shoehorned into the two books. "Dream's End" one real lasting effect on the X-Verse was the death of Moira MacTaggert at the hands of Mystique as well as the discovery of a cure for The Legacy Virus after what felt like a million years. All in all, as a fan of Claremont's, these issues were not indicitive of his talent as it pertains to new fans of the book. Later on, with some research, one can find out that his run was cut short by the promotion of Joe Quesada & Bill Jemas and they wanted changes in light of the 1st X-Men movie's success. The slow-burn story that was Claremont's specialty wasn't going to happen and without any "Shockwave" style arc like the "Counter X" books, it left readers...especially this one...very disappointed with the highly anticipated return of Claremont to the X-books.
Claremont got thrown the bone of "X-Treme X-Men" after getting bumped from the other two books...well actually it was either take his own book or stay on the flagship books and coordinate with someone else. He opted to do it on his own, and for me, this is where Double C's wheels truly fell off. A nobody villain kills Psylocke right off the bat and injures Beast (who at this point was already in "New X-Men" looking completely different), forcing the book to initially be set before "New X-Men" starts. Of course since Chris wasn't remotely attempting to coordinate with the other X-Writers, no mention of Beast's beating or Psylocke's death is ever mentioned by Grant Morrison or that other ass clown who was busy trying to ruin Uncanny X-Men at the same time as Grant was revolutionizing the X-Men. "X-Treme" started on the basis of a hunt for Destiny's diaries (a subject introduced in "Dream's End"), but that plot point quickly went away in favor of...well in favor of doing nothing of importance.
It's was like Big Brother and MiniTrue; Tessa is a good guy, and has always been a good guy in secret. Bishop is named Lucas, Rogue is Anna, and they've always been that way. Fans spent years begging to know Rogue's real name and he just pissed it out like so much dreck. There was an attempt to recapture "God Loves, Man Kills" but instead it felt like, as it did for most of the series, Claremont was writing characters he had never written before. Nobody felt like the characters they had always been. Rogue got tattooed (no other artist has ever acknowledged this), Masque came back (Cable blew his head off and burned the body), Callisto got tentacle arms again (this was just dumb), it was one giant clusterfuck! The only positive that came from the whole damn series was bringing back Rachel Summers into the X-Men. I tend to hold onto a series until it either ends or gets so atrociously bad I can't justify spending a dime on it. X-Treme became the latter after only 20 or so issues. I didn't even make it for 2 years, but I did go back in later years and scour back issue quarter bins for issues I misssed just cause I'm a completist.
What followed? A New Excalibur book that shat all over the way Grant Morrison ended his run and forced subsequent writers to create some BS rationale for why Magneto wasn't dead despite being killed by Wolverine pretty definitively. This was actually worse than X-Treme!
Another run on Uncanny X-Men as part of "Reloaded" that saw the return of Psylocke, the introduction of X-23 to the team, and the Shiar scarring Rachel with the Phoenix tattoo...oh yeah they slaughtered the entire Grey family too. This wasn't terrible, but was totally overshadowed by the amazing work of Joss Whedon on "Astonishing X-Men". In the same way that Morrison's "New X-Men" highlighted how behind the times his X-contemporaries were, in my opinion, Whedon bascially did the same to Claremont & the assclown writing X-Men.
Now-a-days Marvel still seems to think they can make some money off letting Claremont write a book with a X on it. So we get "X-Men Forever" and its sequel of the same name. With the premise being that this was CC's intended story line if he'd stayed on the book after X-Men #3, the book immediately goes to hell by not following the premise at all. Just like "X-Treme" we are treated to characters and storylines that are totally unrecognizable given that premise. Wolvie and Jean Grey are having some kind of tryst, Storm's a little kid again, SHIELD is all up in the X-Business, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The dialogue is like taking the worst of CC's traits and amping them up 1000%. This book managed to alienate me pretty quickly despite having an interesting premise of mutantkind nearing extinction (the opposite of the now-ignored Morrison plot from "E for Extinction"). So repulsed was I by this book that I dropped it after ten issues (and having a bi-weekly schedule was ridiculous). The 2nd volume could be great, I'd never know, because as much as it pains me to say it...
I have given up on one of the writers who turned me into a comic book fan. No book with Claremont's name on it will see my dollars, hell I won't even take the time to download it for free ;) "X-Treme X-men" hurt me, "Excalibur Vol. 3" tore out my heart, and the combination of reading "X-Men: The End" and "X-Men Forever" shattered my soul. Melodramatic? Most certainly, but highly appropriate when discussing Double C.
So instead of thinking of those books, I will think of the man who gave me "Inferno", "X-Tinction Agenda", "Fall of the Mutants", "Mutant Massacre", and much much more...
RIP
Chris Claremont
1975 - 1991
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