Even in the face of the greatest adversity, the key is to never lose hope, never lose sense of the dream that drives you.
Chris Claremont
My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!
When you're an adolescent, you suddenly wake up one morning and your body is an enemy. There are hormonal changes, physical changes, emotional changes. People are saying to you, 'Now you have to make the decisions that define the rest of your life.' The X-Men takes those elements and pushes them one giant step farther.
One of the virtues of 'The X-Men' was that it managed to transcend the expectations and prejudices of the medium. It appealed to a vaster audience than anyone had ever anticipated from any superhero book, much less 'X-Men.'
But the key thing was that I knew of no other contrast between Wolverine as we understood him and Logan than you see in his behavior as a roughneck Canadian versus classical samurai society. That's the dichotomy in his soul.
My desire as a storyteller is to always catch the readers off guard; to give them something they aren't expecting, and take them in a direction that is satisfying in the here and non.
I'm an immigrant.
Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.
It seems that most of the projects I'm doing with relationship to Marvel's 80th anniversary occur during my core run on the X-Men titles.
X-Men has always been about finding your place in a society that doesn't want you.
I was an actor in New York, dude.
The fundamental thing that makes the 'X-Men' different from every other series out there is it's all about prejudice. It's about a group of young people trying to make a place in a society that doesn't want them.
No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.
Superman has always been a battle for hope.
I think there's a yin and a yang to everything.
The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.
No matter how good of a ball player you were, you can't keep going forever. You're not going to be able to hit .300 when you're 60. You still look around and you think, 'This is weird. Have I missed something?' Well, yeah, you have.
The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'
What you want to do in a film is encapsulate the characters and the stories into one focused, coherent two-hour time block, and that's sometimes hard to do especially when you have a group as varied and distinctive as the 'X-Men' are.
One of the seminal moments I remember as a young punk is, when Roy Thomas was doing an editorial read-through of a book before it went to press, and being so gob-smacked by it, he just canceled it right there.
I'd rather have Ben Affleck feeling something than twenty minutes of punching CGI Zod. You want moments that resonate with your audience.
I wish the 'Dark Phoenix' saga had been done more effectively than it was, but that was out of my hands.
My problem with both iterations of 'Dark Phoenix' onscreen, the original by Brett Ratner and the newer version by Simon Kinberg, is, I don't think you can do it effectively in 90 minutes.
One of the fun things in the old days about writing with Frank Miller was that every issue of 'Daredevil' was a challenge to every issue of 'X-Men.'
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.
In some films it wouldn't be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that's for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves.
The one thing I have never been comfortable with in the modern presentation of character - and it may have changed, this is some years ago - is their total isolation from the rest of the world. It's all about superheroes interacting with superheroes. There's no normal life. No normal people.
What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.
All things are possible, especially in the realm of superheroes.
If one were to go back to the '50s, the most popular TV genre on the air in the United States were Westerns. You could go turn on ABC or CBS on any night and you'd almost have three full hours of everything from 'Bonanza' to 'Rawhide' to 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'
I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.
The whole point of 'The New Mutants' was that the oldest of them, Sam, and maybe Dani Moonstar... they're 15. Rahne is 13. They are kids still. The whole point of being kids is half, if not two thirds of the time, they're making mistakes.
I was not creating icons when I wrote the 'The X-Men' and the 'The New Mutants.' I was creating people.
The first rule is you have to create a reality that makes the reader want to come back and see what happens next. The way I tried to do it, I'd create characters that the reader could instantly recognize, and hopefully bond with, and put them through situations that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.
The most basic excitement was the opportunity to work with Dave Cockrum. He was an artist I'd admired for years and our imaginations were ridiculously simpatico.
I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.
The weird thing for me is I'm sitting there in the '80s writing about the Mutant Control Act and here we are in the second decade of the 21st century with the Patriot Act, listening to presidential candidates talk about building walls to keep people out: who's acceptable and who isn't. It's very creepy.
For me, one of the things that makes the X-Men so crucial is they are relatively small in number but they have the potential to have a tremendous impact on the society around them.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.
All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.
On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.
Look at 'Avatar:' the foreign ticket sales were over twice the domestic returns. The mind boggles at those kinds of numbers, but that's what you get when you effectively reach out to a global audience. If that kind of thing came to comics, it would undoubtedly change how people perceive the mainstream industry.
The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.
Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.
When you're spending $100-plus million dollars, you need to give the audience what they want.
When I was little, I used to have nightmares about Godzilla walking out of the Great South Bay, because we had a fire alarm out where we lived that sounded just like his feet.
I guess you go back to the old writer's adage that when they do your stuff in Hollywood, you smile sweetly upon your credit - if there is one - and enjoy the show.
I think the biggest challenge is going to be finding a place that sells comics. Ideally, you want someone to come out of a movie theater, look across the street, see a newsstand, walk in and find a copy of the 'X-Men' sitting there. But that's not what's going to happen.
A lot of people didn't like the 'Fantastic Four' for the first year and a half. It took a certain measure of time for me to find my feet in terms of what I wanted to do with the concept.
