Can you go home again? Looking at Chris Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men

Word Balloons #1211: Storm leads a team of globe-trotting X-Men in this 2001 series

If anyone is associated with Marvel’s mutants, it’s writer Chris Claremont. He steered the team for 16 years, from 1975 to 1991, during which the team became the stars of comics’ most popular title. His “X-Men” #1, with Jim Lee in 1991, is still the best-selling American comic book of all time. 

So it’s not terribly surprising that Claremont was eventually asked to come back to the characters he had left behind. 

What I wanted to look at with Dean Compton was the first issue of 2001’s “X-Treme X-Men,” a title that let Claremont and artist Salvador Larocca take some of Claremont’s favorites off into their own adventures. 

This was actually Claremont’s second return – in 2000, as part of the company's "Revolution" event, he wrote both “Uncanny X-Men” and “X-Men.” And later, he would return to “Uncanny X-Men” in 2004 with artist Alan Davis, with whom he had created “Excalibur.” 

But the longest-running of Claremont’s return titles is “X-Treme X-Men,” which ran for 46 issues. Dean Compton and I looked at the first issue of the series, which featured the team of  Storm, Beast, Bishop, Psylocke, Rogue, Sage and the new Thunderbird.

Matt: The core mission of the early series is for this team to locate the diaries of Destiny, the precognitive mutant who had seen the future of the X-Men and others. In the wrong hands, these journals could bring about, we are told, the end of the world.  

Dean: To me, this was very disappointing. It's excessively wordy even for Claremont, who isn't known for brevity.

Matt: Larocca utilized a different art style here than most books of the time. It appears to be colored directly from pencils. This is a different look for the X-Uniforms than the traditional team, or even what was going on in Grant Morrison’s “New X-Men” around the same time.  

Dean: I am not a fan of this color scheme for the X-Men.  I am unsure why, but the blue and red just don't say X-Men to me.  

The art is dynamic, though! I love the way Larocca makes everything feel surreal. The infodumps that happen in that hypertech dystopian prison are backed by scenery that evokes the creepiness of the state's seeming omnipotence better than all 600k of Claremont's words do.

Matt: In the first issue, a new bad guy orchestrates an attack on Storm’s handpicked team, who are in Valencia, Spain, as they begin their search.  

Dean: I don't buy how easily Spanish Special Forces took out some very powerful X-Men. It just seemed too easy. You don't even get a chance to cheer or fear. I want that. There was certainly room for it because later, the infodumps just go on and on and on and on.  

Matt: I enjoyed this somewhat better than you did, I think, Dean, but it doesn’t have the immediate wow factor you got from “New X-Men” #114 at around the same time. Claremont certainly writes a good Storm, and I like some of the characters he’s chosen for his team, but despite the heavy action, this didn’t click with me as much as his original “X-Men” run. I consider myself a big Claremont fan, though, so I still think at some point I’ll make my way through these 46 issues, as they definitely have their fans.  

Dean: I wouldn't get the next one based on this, but I would definitely skim future issues.  It feels a lot like "New Coke".  It's close enough to what I want to make it try it, but not good enough to make me regularly buy it.

Matthew Price, matthew@matthewlprice.com, has written about the comics industry for more than two decades. He is the co-owner of Speeding Bullet Comics in Norman, Oklahoma