Chris Claremont

A look at the X-Men crossover never happened featuring the mutant villains The Upstarts.

In the pages of Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, most of the members of that assassination team have lost something. Wolverine lost his son. Angel lost his life while Psylocke lost her love. Fantomex lost his independence. And Deadpool? Well, as in almost all things, Deadpool was the oddity in Remender’s story about the moral ambiguity of these heroes.

At East Coast Comicon, comics historian and researcher of the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe Peter Sanderson, former Uncanny X-Men editor and Daredevil writer Ann Nocenti, and former Amazing Spider-Man editor Jim Salicrup chatted and swapped stories about what Marvel was really like in the 1980s.

Storm, easily Marvel’s most high-profile female African-American character (and of the first such characters in superhero comics), is a character whose most prominent and well-executed storyline occurred nearly two decades ago. In the mid-80s, longtime X-Men scribe Chris Claremont crafted a long story arc for Storm, which found her shedding her ethereal, goddess-esque image in the face of the burden of leadership and a desire to experience life more fully in favor of a more striking punk look and sensibility. Then, she lost her mutant powers and was forced to prove her worth as leader of the X-Men on her non-superpowered skills alone, a feat she accomplished with aplomb, continuing to lead the X-Men through some of their darkest hours (including the massacre of the Morlocks) before ultimately finding a way to restore her superpowers.

The upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past motion picture directed by Bryan Singer bridges the time line between X-Men: First Class starring James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender and the earlier X-Men films starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. If its trailers are any indication, it promises to be an epic event and the “biggest” X-Men film to date. Its story is lifted from the seminal story arc “Days of Future Past”, created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne and published in January-February 1981.

Writer: Chris Claremont Artist: Todd Nauck Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg Letterer: VC’s Cory Petit Standard Cover by Chris Samnee with Matthew Wilson Published by Marvel Comics Nightcrawler #1 sees the return to the X-Men Universe of both Nightcrawler, the teleporting fuzzy elf who first debuted in Giant Size X-Men #1 back in 1975, and Chris Claremont, …

  Uncanny X-Men 108-109, 111-143 (1977-1981) Writer: Chris Claremont Penciller/Co-plotter: John Byrne Inker: Terry Austin, Colorist: Glynis Wein Publisher: Marvel Along with Frank Miller’s run on Daredevil, Chris Claremont’ work on Uncanny X-Men during the late 1970s and 1980s was the most innovative and creative Marvel Comics title. But the comic was at its peak of brilliance when …