Milestone acknowledgement: huge thank you to everyone for helping us crack 10K followers, 9,750 more than I had originally aimed for. In honor of that, I thought it might be a good time to reflect, in general, on the things that I’ve learned from this project. #xmen 1/8
The Centrality of Storm: the more I study the series and the character, the clearer it is to me just how much the entire run pivots around Ororo. Wolverine is the most famous (and a wonderful character in his own right) but Storm is the engine that moves the X-Men. 2/8
The Joy of X-Twitter: though afraid to enter a public discourse on social media, I found those fears to be unfounded. I’m sure there’s toxic fandoms out there, but X-Twitter has been, on the whole, delightful – welcoming, kind, thoughtful, generous. Deeply grateful there. 3/8
Team Effort: Claremont had many of the best collaborators in the entire world of comics at the time. His success is their success, and arranging to have the best people on his books (including often going out-of-pocket) is a big key to his success. 4/8
Ivory Tower (Un)Detachment: one of the reasons my followers goal was small was the assumption that there wasn’t an audience for academic discourse on comics on twitter. It’s been really buoying to see how much people seem to like applying theoretical models to pop culture. 5/8
Social Media Scholarship: I actually presented on this for the CSSC, but I am continually impressed by how powerful social media is as a vehicle to disseminate scholarly work, especially on comics. The integration of visuals, hyperlinks, and symmetric media is powerful. 6/8
Spinoff Success: where I think there’s a real danger in stretching a franchise too thin, Claremont used the X-Spinoffs to experiment, and the results were genuinely transformative, with the sexually-charged glee of Excalibur, and the horrifically dark New Mutants. 7/8
There’s other observations to be had as well, and I’m not done learning about my subject yet, so more to come. The main thing is to just say ‘thank you’ again to the community for letting me ramble at you about X-books. 8/8
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As a collaborative medium, comics are sometimes denigrated for their committee approach to character-building, but a closer look at the 'committee' behind Wolverine shows how a character like Logan offers a multifaceted connection to creative genius. #xmen #wolverine 1/10
As noted by Marvel historian Sean Howe, Wolverine was first “named and conceived by Roy Thomas, who detected a need to exploit the Canadian market” before being “developed further by Len Wein and John Romita” ahead of Logan’s debut in “The Incredible Hulk.” 2/10
Throw in Claremont, and the pedigree is quite impressive already. Thomas is perhaps best known as the greatest writer of Conan comics, a character that later artists would draw from quite directly in their interpretations of Wolverine. 3/10
In UXM #220, Claremont takes a moment away from a chaotic era to touch back upon the longstanding, well-evolved relationship between Storm and Wolverine, giving readers another character-revealing scene between this iconic X-Men duo. #xmen #wolverine #storm 1/9
The scene initiates a journey of self-discovery for Ororo, one of many throughout the series but this one will specifically create the rising action for the “Fall of the Mutants’’ event. She has to go alone, but someone has to lead the X-Men in her absence. She recruits Logan 2/9
The power dynamic is foreshadowed in the simple fact that Wolverine (an archetypal hunter) has literally scaled the highest mountain to be alone, but it doesn’t matter. Even without her powers, Ororo has tracked him down. 3/9
In an introductory essay penned in 1980, John Byrne recounts his personal perspective on Jean Grey and her transformation to Phoenix. His candid account paints a less grandiose view on the cultivation of the character within the series than we normally hear. #xmen #JeanGrey 1/7
“I’ve never liked Phoenix. There, I said it...It’s not that I don’t like Jean Grey. I have an abiding fondness for readheads, and have been in love with Jean since we first ‘met,’ about a millions years ago when I was 13.” 2/7
“Granted that her power were not nearly as spectacular as Cyclops’, or Angel’s, or even Iceman’s, but she looked real good in a tight uniform and could – and did – serve to get the X-Men out of tight places.” 3/7
Placing Kitty Pryde into the position of viewpoint character has to represent one of the most groundbreaking decisions within the entirety of the Claremont run – a move that ultimately impacted the series, comics as a whole, and even Western media in powerful ways. #xmen 1/10
The Claremont run begins with Cyclops as the main viewpoint character. Kitty joins the team right at his departure and soon enough takes over as a main viewpoint character for the rest of her tenure, as reflected in our data (noting that Kitty’s only on for 70ish issues). 2/10
At the time of her arrival, Claremont had already executed a turn toward more adult-oriented stories (something that becomes even more pronounced after the death of an X-Man in DPS). It’s therefore perhaps odd to bring on a teen protagonist. 3/10
Despite having all manner of characters (good and evil) express romantic interest in her, Storm’s first canonical love is Forge, a possibly counter-intuitive choice. But this might be the point, as Forge can better connect Ororo to her humanity. #xmen 1/10
Storm is routinely courted (or abducted – or both) by the wealthiest, most powerful beings on the planet/cosmos. She could be a queen, a goddess, a vampire, you name it, but she rejects all of these suitors out of concern for her own independence. 2/10
When asked in interview why it took so long for Storm to receive a relationship partner, Claremont would often reply “because nobody was good enough for her.” 3/10
Sharon Kelly is introduced to the readers in UXM #246 and is all-but killed in that same issue. She’s a character whose entire life and especially death exist in service to the plot, but, in spite of that, Claremont gives her story complexity, contradiction, and pathos. #xmen 1/9
We are first introduced to Sharon as she arrives at the Hellfire Club during a meeting between her husband (Senator Robert Kelly) and Sebastian Shaw. It’s revealed that Sharon was a Hellfire Club servant before marrying the senator. 2/9
Her brief interaction with her former colleagues showcases the kind of class exploration that one would see in a Bronte novel or, more recently, Downton Abbey. Hers is a story of rare class mobility and the perspective that comes with seeing both sides of the class divide. 3/9