This is an interview conducted in London during May of 1994. The interview 
covered a lot of topics and lasted for nearly three hours. This transcript
is Chris Claremont's post-departure X-Men and his thoughts on the series.
(The full interview was originally published over two months in Comic
World.)

STARTS:

CC: The current issue of the X-Men is where Scott and Jean get married. I
gotta tell you, if I had stayed on the book: not a chance. Because everyone
would be sitting around waiting for it. Everyone was waiting around for
Wolverine to marry Mariko, but it's like, no. You screw it up, but you
screw it up in a way that is consistent to the character and leaves the
reader going "What happens next? Where is this going to go?" OK, so Scott
and Jean have got married, so what. Now what are they going to do with
them? "We're going to the future and we're going to see what happened with
Nathan and Stryfe and Cable. It's like, who cares?

It's like, Wolverine writes a letter "Dear Jean..." I'm sorry, but I
started reading this and it's just like... Wolverine wrote a letter saying
"Dear Jean, this ol' canucklehead's gotta go find himself" and I'm thinking
"Did I miss something?" I mean, I'm sorry... Lets way this here, Wolverine
loves Mariko, Mariko's dead, she gets shuffled off stage, gratuitously. So
he still carries a torch for Jean. OK, that's fine. Jean is marrying Scott,
so what's Scott's track record to date? (laughter) Well... he had a wife,
he got married in the mansion, everbody was there, he said "till death do
you part", they had a kid, and he walked out on them, without a second
thought and went to X-Factor. And then for various stupid, and I confess, I
had my part in this as well as anyone else, plot reasons didn't deal with
it for a long time. The reason he didn't deal with it was because he didn't
have a clue what to do with it. I mean, the guy was a cad and a bounder, no
ifs, no ands, no buts.

In one fell swoop, he was destroyed as a character, as a heroic, he made a
commitment to people and then walked out on them. And for various reasons,
not Weezie (Simonson), not me, we never dealt with that. We seem to take,
what seemed at the time to be the only sensible way out, which was, we made
Madelyne into the bad, you know, we set up a situation where rather than
have Scott face the consequences of his actions, we'd just, sort of like,
kill them all. And every one forgave Scott, because Madelyne was a bitch
anyway. And then... they gave the kid away. Don't deal with the fact you
have a child Scott, we'll just send him away to the future and... shit
happens.

All of this should be an element in the mix, mistakes or otherwise, this is
Scott's character, this is Jean's character, there must be a moment, and
maybe there was a moment and not having read the book I don't know, so if
anyone here knows, correct me if I'm wrong, but there must be a moment
where the two of them sit down and address this. "Jean, marry me?"

"Why?"

"I love you."

"You loved Madelyne."

"..." (pause)

"Yeah well, you walked out on her, Scott? You going to walk out on me?
Suppose we discover in a year that Madelyne isn't dead? Suppose I'm
Madelyne? Suppose I'm Phoenix? How are you going to deal with that? How am
I to trust you? You made a commitment, you did not fulfill it. You
abandoned a child."

What I was trying to do with Wolverine and Mariko, was that Mariko under
Mastermind's control, dumped Wolverine at the alter. She insulted him about
as fundamentally as you can insult someone in Japan.

When it was revealed that she had been coersed and that it wasn't her
fault, her reaction was "You've proved yourself worthy to be my consort, I
must now prove myself worthy to be your wife. I never got to fulfil that
story to its end and the same thing should apply here with Scott and Jean.

The onus is not on Jean to prove herself to Scott, she was dead, she got
better. He made a commitment to someone, he had to prove that he could make
a commitment to her. You can't just say none of this existed, none of this
happened it all goes away. You have to think, how does the character deal
with it? How does the story deal with it? Because, by answering those
questions, you might find the story going off in a totally different
direction, that may bring a vitality and richness of concept, that you
never even dreamed was coming in the door. It used to be that when you work
in comics you provide the illusion of change, you do a lot of stuff and
make people think something is happening, but nothing really has happened.
My point was that, no. If you look at the X-Men over my seventeen year run,
what I was hoping for was, if you pick up X-Men 94 and X-Men 194 they
should be different. There should be an evolution, the Wolverine that you
read in #94 is not the Wolverine you should read in #194 or the Wolverine
you read in #294, he should grow, he should evolve. Storm should be
different, Kitty should be different. The dynamics of the group should
change, the downside is that it pisses some readers off.

I found myself in this situation where kids would... where collaborators
would come up to me and say "I got into comics reading the stuff you did
with Byrne or Paul Smith, I gotta tell you, man, this new stuff... why
don't you do the old stuff?" I did the old stuff, I did the old stuff ten
years ago, I'm doing new stuff now. "Yeah, but, I wanna do the old stuff."
Sorry, but it's my book. And therein lies the seeds of destruction, because
it wasn't my book, it was Marvel's book.

DGS: Have we anything from the floor? Let's have something on Chris's
X-career before we move onto his future. Where did you want the X-Men to
go?

CC: Oh, good stories, good characterisation, fun and games. I wanted to
kill Wolverine.

DGS: Before Superman was killed in fact. You must have felt really annoyed
when they killed off Superman and got all the publicity for it?

CC: I was off the book for a year at that point, I didn't care. I was
pissed off about other things.

I remember sitting there after I'd had my big meeting with Terry Stewart
and realised that I was walking away from my career to that point. And I'm
at home thinking "I'm handling this really well. I'm cool about it. I'm a
mature individual, I'm forty years old, this isn't a mid-life crisis. This
is birth and change, evolution. $2000 worth of damage to my wife's car
later.... (laughter) what would've happened had I stayed around, um... The
first issue of X-Men, X-Men 1, my original idea was to do as a double
sized, sort of, entry level book. What do we do with 53 X-Men? I had this
great sequence worked out where, we sort of hinted at in what was X-Men 1,
I wanted to do this five page scene, where Storm and Scott are in the
danger room. Scott's up in the booth, Storm's down on the floor. You have
this incredible fight going on, Brotherhood of Evil versus the X-Men,
bodies flying everywhere, Storm just wanders through the middle of it,
fights going on around her, she's taking notes. They freeze it. displays
appear, assessing everybody's performance. And what Scott and Storm are
doing is running scenarios, mixing various members of the teams. A twelve
man team is unwieldy, you need to six people teams, who's the best mix.
Does Jean go with Storm or with Scott. Where does Wolverine go? If
Wolverine goes somewhere, where does Jubilee go? Should Jubilee go
anywhere, or are we doing Kitty all over again? Show them actually working
this out, actively figuring out, where do we go from here? How do we
protect the mansion?

Here's Xavier trying to deal with what I'm doing with Moira, because my
Muir Island story was much different from the one that appeared.

In the middle of this Magneto shows up. There's the obligatory
confrontation, there might even be a fight. The gist of it is that Magneto
and Xavier have come to a parting of the waves, they can't see each other's
point of view any longer. Magneto is certain that humanity will betray
them. Xavier is just as certain that humanity will not. The Statesman
versus the Terrorist, who knows which is right? They go their separate
ways. The X-Men realize that there is a nasty world out there and they have
to be ready.

They divvy up the teams, X-Men 2 and Uncanny X-Men 281 were where the
stories kick off. The first issue was a, sort of, Hi, if you've never read
the X-Men before, this is what we're all about. This is the mansion, these
are the characters, this is why the characters exist, this is the world
they live in.

Issue 2 I was going to kill Wolverine, he would have a fight with Lady
Deathstrike and she would rip out his heart. She'd die, he'd die. Except,
he wouldn't die, because he has a healing factor. And, he has his
followers. So the Hand grab the body, they resurrect him, he comes back as
the master assassin of the Hand, for two years, leading up to Uncanny X-Men
294, he would be the X-Men's greatest foe. The story would range from
Uncanny to X-Men and back again. Jean would go in and try to rescue him and
end up becoming his evil babe, though not really, she would be faking it
this time. She is trying to tap into the Wolverine which is buried beneath
all of the Hand's spell. Scott and company are figuring "Wolverine's gone
bad, we gotta put him down." Xavier is unmoveably adamant about the need to
save him. The need to salvage him, to bring him back to the light. Along
the way, an interesting thing was going to happen. Wolverine's healing
factor went into ultra high gear when he was "killed", it was essentially
rebuilding his heart. What would have happened if he had been left alone,
his arms and legs probably... this is really disgusting, but his arms and
legs would have rotted, as his heart healed. His conscious mind would have
been in total suspended animation, everything about him would have been
geared towards keeping his sentiency intact and repairing his heart,
everything else would have been left to go. So assuming no scavengers came
in and started to eat him, you would find that this partially decomposed
body, with a fully healed torso, at which point, the decomposed bits would
begin to heal. It would take a long time and be disgusting beyond words but
ultimately he would have survived. The idea was Wolverine really is almost
as impossible to kill as Death's Head and much more charming and better
looking.

Anyway, one of the side effects of this, the healing factor is purging all
non-organic matter, which means the adamantium. So what was going to happen
was it was start to leech out of his skin. There would be a time where
Wolverine would look like the Silver Surfer with hair. He'd be this
blinding, shining creature with killer claws. Ultimately, the adamantium
would just be part of his hair, he'd look like a silver porcupine. At some
point in the storyline, Colossus and he would have a major fight, and it
would have this great cover, it would be a black background with a
spotlight of light and in the centre of the spotlight are two sets of claws
with the housings, just as if they had been ripped out of his arms and one
of the claws would be broken. What was going to happen in that issue was
that Colossus, was just going to pull the claws off from their roots.

So, of course, the Hand would then give him artificial claws, they would
work or not work as the case may be, but again, as part and parcel of the
healing process, gradually he would realise that he was growing something
new. That there is a natural element in his body that gives him claws. And
over a span of six issues, you would see them grow. They would be growing
faster than normal because of the accelerated healing. So, when all is said
and done, it would come down to a major league fight between the X-Men and
Wolverine. A major component of the fight would be Wolverine's battle with
himself with the goodness of his soul, the warrior of his soul fighting
this demon he has become, and he would win. The adamantium would flake off
and eventually he would stand himself reborn as a totally natural being.
His bones and claws would be virtually unbreakable, they could be broken,
but they would also heal. But because of the incredible stress he has been
under for the past two years, his healing factor is like "I'm tired, don't
do this again... not for a while, OK." In the course of my storylines you
could cut Wolverine and the cut would heal instantly, shoot him, he doesn't
notice. He's healing so fast that normal wounds, normal injuries just have
no effect on him. So he got used to the fact that he could butt walls with
his head.

When all this is said and done, Wolverine is not only more vulnerable. He's
not going to butt his head through walls, because "it hurts and why do I
wanna hurt myself? Why don't I just use the key? Or get Colossus to do it?"
It is like Wolverine has come face to face with his own mortality and his
own limitations and it's like "I'm too old for this shit. We'll find a
better way." But at the same time it would create a bond between him and
Jean like nothing that's gone before. So that even if she was still in love
with Scott, there would be a level of communication between her and
Wolverine, that Scott could only dream about, or have nightmares about, it
depends on your point of view. And at the end of all of this, it would lead
to a final confrontation with the Shadow King, but that was my storyline,
my core storyline for the first two years of X-Men.

Now, as I understand it, they haven't done any of that. Obviously it looks
like a lot of the stuff they're doing it the stuff I was planning to do,
but actually, my plotline was rejected by Bob Harras. His comment being
that it is all very well, but what do we do with Wolverine in Wolverine at
the same time? How could I co-op Larry Hama's plots for the next two years?
I said "Hey, he can adapt. I write the X-Men, he writes Wolverine, which is
the senior book?" Bob would come and shake his head and act as if he
couldn't deal with this person anymore.

So, my answer was, you do two years of Wolverine as a villain, and
everybody in his book is trying to cope with that. You have situations
where you can bring in the Avengers, they could fight Wolverine and they
could win. Of course, the hero would then lose in his own book... or, the
hero can win in his own book, but that means the bad guys win. Lots of
possibilities and I would have thought it would be a lot of fun.

But I had my vision and Bob (Harras) had his vision, we were not agreeing
and we were getting further and further apart. Marvel had essentially to
step in and play referee and from their point of view, they did what they
felt, they had to do. As it was their company and their characters and we
were all employees, I might think it was a dumb move, but that's the game
plan, those are the terms of which you accept to go to work.

DGS: But wasn't it a sort of revolving door finale in that I seem to
remember hearing that you went, they got you back. They felt they couldn't
launch a new X-Men title without you? You did a couple of issues and it
was, "well we've launched it, we're up and running, we don't need this
Chris Claremont."

CC: No, the way we worked it out was, X-Men 1 was my severance pay.

DGS: Oh really?

CC: Actually I was ready to walk in March and then my wife pointed out that
we had a mortgage. I said, "alright, I will stay, I will do X-Men 1, to
launch it because I feel I've earned it." and they said, "OK, we can live
with that."

And, just the nature of the story, what was a one issue story, grew to two
to three issues, and that was that. My point was that I would stay for the
first story arc, whether it was one issue, two issues or three issues, that
was it. I'd gone this far, I was going to go that one extra mile, but
basically it was my severance pay. That was how I looked on it. It was,
sadly, not a lot of fun. It's a very weird feeling because a lot of people
come up and they say they really enjoyed those three issues and they
thought that the ending of issue three was very moving and very powerful,
and I nod and I thank them for it and I appreciate the compliments, but, it
wasn't fun. No one likes to be a lame duck, it's very hard to be a lame
duck, but it wasn't what I wanted to do, it wasn't the way I wanted to go.
It got to the point where I don't think Bob (Harras) and I haven't spoken
in two years and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't speak again. We were
communicating in the end by fax, solely because we each wanted to have a
written record of what we had said. That's not a working relationship that
anyone should have, especially not in comics, to me comics at best offer
fun, we should enjoy doing them, you should enjoy reading them. It should
be the kind of thing where you sit around and talk about characters and
stories and themes, and the sense of wonder that we all bring to this.