{"id":6186,"date":"2021-01-16T21:10:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-16T21:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6186"},"modified":"2021-01-16T21:10:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T21:10:43","slug":"chris-claremont-anniversary-special-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6186","title":{"rendered":"Chris Claremont Anniversary Special #1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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CHRIS CLAREMONT ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1<\/strong>
by Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sean Chen, Diego Olortegui, Brett Booth, Marc Deering, Roberto Poggi, Adelso Corona, Chris Sotomayor, Rachelle Rosenberg, Erick Arciniega & Guru-eFX<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now there’s a title. You don’t often get creators named in the title of a comic – not unless they’re Stan Lee, at any rate. But Chris Claremont is a special case, and this issue is intended to celebrate five decades of his contribution to Marvel Comics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I confess to being a little unsure what exactly<\/em> this is taking as the starting point for its anniversary. His first credited script wasn’t until 1973; his first uncredited contributions were for stories that came out in 1969. But whatever. When you’re talking about a half-century career, a year here or there is no big deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What we have here is a new Claremont story, but illustrated by a range of artists. Of those creators, Bill Sienkiewicz has the closest links to Claremont’s career, from their classic run on New Mutants<\/em> in the 1980s. Sean Chen worked with Claremont on X-Men: The End<\/em>. Brett Booth doesn’t have any particular links to Claremont’s back catalogue, but he does do a respectable rendition of the style of 1990 and general and Jim Lee in particular, which is clearly what his segment ought to look like. Diego Olortuegi is a more curious choice – his only previous X-books work was an arc of X-23,<\/em> which felt a little more polished than his pages here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot involves Hela testing Dani Moonstar as a new Valkyrie, by sending her through time and space to deal with the Shadow King as he tries to interfere at various points in Marvel history. In other words, it’s a framing sequence in which to revisit parts of Claremont’s back catalogue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it’s a greatest hits story, then? Well… yes and no. Claremont selects three stories to revisit, and they’re not the obvious choices. After all, this isn’t a celebration of his 15 year initial run on Uncanny X-Men<\/em>; it’s meant to celebrate his whole 50 year career. So instead of opening with the X-Men, he kicks off by reprising his late 90s run on Fantastic Four<\/em>, which had its merits but is hardly the book that springs to mind when people talk about his career. The middle section involves Binary fighting a holodeck version of Rogue aboard the Starjammer, Carol Danvers always having been one of his favourite characters. And then we have pre-X-Men Rogue with de-aged Storm, during one of the Shadow King’s earliest arcs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So no Wolverine, then. No X-Men, if by that you mean characters who are actually in the X-Men at the time of their appearance. We’ve got Gambit and Storm from a time when they weren’t<\/em> on the team, and we’ve got one of the New Mutants serving in the framing sequence, but that’s as close it gets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is an interesting choice, isn’t it? Not that Claremont is downplaying the series that made his name – New Mutants<\/em> was effectively the second X-Men title in its heyday, and Claremont seems to think of the Shadow King as a classic X-Men story. But he doesn’t need the actual X-Men to make that point; he wants to nod to the breadth of his career by doing at least a little off the beaten track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not the clearest story in the world. Of course, it won’t mean all that much to readers who are unfamiliar with Claremont’s work, but it’s hard to imagine many of them picking Chris Claremont Anniversary Special <\/em>#1 as their entry point. It’s fair enough to assume that the audience is broadly familiar. Even so, the Fantastic Four<\/em> segment is a bombardment of story ideas I hazily remember from 20 plus years ago. And the Rogue\/Binary segment is confusing, even after the holodeck reveal. Was the Shadow King… possessing a hologram? Why on earth does Dani’s arrow make Binary briefly turn into modern Captain Marvel? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The upshot is meant to be that by driving off the Shadow King repeatedly, Dani proves to Hela not only that she’s fit to be a Valkyrie, but that she’s a hero who can be more than that, and (thanks to her new mythical status) has the potential to transcend the duality of life and death, good and evil and all that. It’s a reasonable way of getting the framing sequence to pay off, and it feels like Claremont is tying back to the anniversary theme by restating one of his pet themes, however blatantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The format of these things never exactly lends itself to a great story, and there’s an obvious tension between letting the nostalgia play out and getting on with the Shadow King plot. For the first couple of segments Claremont errs in favour of nostalgia, which is fair enough; the Gambit section builds more directly. The ending feels abrupt, but it’s got Sienkiewicz art, which is always a pleasure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a bit of a mess, but mostly in the ways that come with the territory with this sort of reprise story. As against that, it’s very Claremont indeed, and if ever there was a comic where that ought to be a selling point, this would be it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHRIS CLAREMONT ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1by Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sean Chen, Diego Olortegui, Brett Booth, Marc Deering, Roberto Poggi, Adelso Corona, Chris Sotomayor, Rachelle Rosenberg, Erick Arciniega & Guru-eFX Now there’s a title. You don’t often get creators named in the title of a comic – not unless they’re Stan Lee, at any rate. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6188,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6186\/revisions\/6188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}