X-Men Forever #4

"--Oh, BOTHER!"

That line from Kitty Pryde was the most entertaining comics dialogue I read this week.

I'm going back and forth between choosing either this or Detective Comics as my Pick of the Week. I gave both 3s. I'm really stingy with my grades, but I'm more than happy when something rates a 3/5 in my eyes.

I suppose the thing most fans of this book say in its defense is that "It's FUN!" Yeah, it is, but X-Men Forever also provides an opportunity to think about how comics have changed in the past twenty years. The considerations that I'm confronted with when reading this series--thought bubbles, decompression, exposition--are subjects too big to go into in any depth in the space of this review. Suffice to say that my appreciation of X-Men Forever entails more than just "fun". I don't necessarily think that comics twenty years ago were any better or worse than comics today--but the differences between the two approaches are worth thinking about, and X-Men Forever provides a curious opportunity to do so, even though the style of the Claremont we're reading here is NOT the same as what we read twenty years ago.

And therein lies the second non-"FUN" reason for me to enjoy X-Men Forever. It's rare that we get to evaluate a comics writer in this way. This isn't Stan Lee returning to write cute, but ultimately meaningless, 11-page stories in a Spider-Man anniversary issue (not that there's anything wrong with that). Nor is this Len Wein or somebody writing as if it were still 1975 (I only use Wein as an example because he wrote that Final Crisis Libra one-shot last year). No, this is a lot more complex than that. There are a lot more factors to consider when thinking about Chris Claremont writing X-Men:

1) As we all know by now, he wrote X-Men for 16 years, and arguably did more for the property than ANY writer has ever done for an already-established comics property.
2) But you have to understand how much his style evolved over those 16 years; it's like there were several different writers during that time.
3) Chris left X-Men in late '91, but he returned to it in '99 or early '00 (I wasn't reading it anymore).
4) Then he left and returned again.
5) Then he left again in '06 or so. All of his post-'91 X-tenures are somewhat of a mystery to me, but the thing to remember is that he pretty much failed with all of them, creatively. He couldn't step back into the current continuity of the X-titles.
6) So in that case Marvel lets him step back in as if he never left in late '91, and that's X-Men Forever.
7) So the title is purposely retro, and yet Claremont's writing is sort of an amalgamation of how he used to write and how he would write now...or how he thinks that we, now, would think he would write THEN. (If this were 1981, Claremont would have fit the events of X-Men Forever #1-3 into ONE ISSUE, with Byrne illustrating. If this were 1988, and Silvestri were illustrating, X-Men Forever #1-2 would have fit into one issue, and #3-4 would have fit into the next issue. As it is, this arc is going to be five issues long, but if your average 2009 comics writer were doing it, it'd probably take 6-8 issues.)
8) Oh yeah, his ideas for the stories in X-Men Forever are also an amalgamation. If you want to you can find out about the stories Claremont WANTED to tell in '92-'93, the stories he had planned up to issue #300, which is when he was going to bow out of the title gracefully, after killing Charles Xavier. But those proposed plot threads, eh, they're not EXACTLY what we're getting in X-Men Forever.

This is all a longwinded way of saying the following: If you really know a lot about Chris Claremont's career vis-a-vis the X-Men, then X-Men Forever provides an interesting critical space to investigate all these different aspects of his writing, as different "Chris Claremonts" play off one another, creating a new sort of hybrid X-title, a cross between the way he used to write, the ideas he used to have, and how he would approach it today, in response to the stories that happened in the meantime, the post-'91 X-ideas that color everyone's opinion of the X-Men property even if they're no longer relevant within X-Men Forever continuity. *breath*

It's all very complicated, and not all of it is exactly "FUN" in the purest sense of the word. But it's interesting, if you're into that sort of thing. And I sort of am.

The reappearance of child-Storm on the last page of this issue, though? That's not complicated--that's just an amazing geek-out moment. See, if this were 1992, you'd get an asterix and an explanation of who this child-Storm is. Part of the enjoyment of this series is knowing that there are probably a lot of X-Men Forever readers who have no idea what the backstory is with child-Storm. So as a veteran fan, it just adds to my amusement that moments like this are even MORE "WTF" for some people than they are for me. And the whole thing is pretty much a big, gleeful, festering "WTF". X-Men Forever is like a huge psychological case file of Claremont's personal fantasy world, and I can't help but read this whole messed-up thing with a half-smile permanently fixed on my face.