Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: chris claremont, john byrne, marvel, x-men

Chris Claremont Describes the Ultimate X-Men What If? Project

Legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont, the greatest living comic book writer in existence, stopped by Reddit's /r/comicbooks community for an AMA and provided sites like this one with a large supply of clickbait article material for the coming weeks. One Redditor asked Claremont the old standard question: are there any Marvel characters he hasn't written that he'd like to? Claremont's response was a doozy.

"Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major Marvel characters that I haven't written!" he said. "I mean, in a practical sense, writing a character doing a guest appearance is easy. But getting into their head, into their heart, defining their life is very hard. There are a lot I would like to have written on a regular basis, but I was boxed into the mutant box for so long it wasn't practical. A 'What If?' I would loved—you know, Mystique, Rogue, Sabertooth, and Deathbird were all created as Ms. Marvel/Avengers/etc. characters. It would have been fun to play with them in that milieu."

That line of thinking led to an even bigger idea. Claremont continued, "What was amusing to me was that John Byrne had gone to Jim Shooter and made the classic 'you go or I go' challenge, and Jim basically came down to the idea that I would stay and John would do the FF. But what was intriguing to me was that everything I had created on the X-Men beside Kitty was created after he left—so what if Jim had agreed to John's pitch, and what if everything I had created for the X-Men would have been created for the FF or the Avengers? So that's the alternate reality. That would be an interesting 'What If?' miniseries or maxiseries."

That would be an interesting "What If?" indeed. So what's stopping Marvel from making it happen?

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