Transcript of Exclusive Interview with Chris Claremont Part III: From Gambit’s New Clothes to Industry Woes

The third installment of Review Fix Associate Editor Olga Privman’s Q&A with comic book legend Chris Claremont deals with his plans for Gambit, Sabretooth, Jean and Rogue, as well as the dilemma many writers of comic books face today.

REVIEW FIX: I actually have a question about another character you wrote. As of “X-Men” no. 3, Gambit was your creation and still a relatively new character. Were your plans for him different than what transpired in the comic books?

CHRIS CLAREMONT: Yes. Totally.

RF: What were your plans?

CC: You’re about to find out. One: he doesn’t wear that offensive costume – his purple zoot suit. Sorry, it was not one of Jim’s [Lee] favorite creations of mine. You win some; you lose some. That was just not one of the ones I loved. I mean, he’s from New Orleans, for crying out loud. You’re telling me they don’t know how to dress in New Orleans? I mean, shame on them. Shame on them – people who assume that. I actually think the way he was presented on-screen in “Wolverine” is very much in keeping with my vision of Gambit as a character. His visual trope in the comic is a dark three-piece suit, very cool long leather jacket, nice red shirt and tie, good hair and glasses – he’s a thief! And the rule of thumb is: readers may think they know him as “Remy LeBeau.” We’ve introduced him as “Remy Picard.” The only consistent element we’ll acknowledge is his first name. He’s a thief – everything else is totally subject to change. We don’t know his last name.

RF: Are we going to find out any time soon?

CC: He’s a thief. He wouldn’t tell you.

RF: We could find out in other ways. He doesn’t have to tell you.

CC: You could try, but he’s a thief.

RF: That’s true. And he’s a good thief – very charming – oozes charisma.

CC: He’s the best there is at what he does and what he does is a delight. But that’s the difference: as Sabretooth is going to say in issue six, “The kid always went around saying ‘I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.’ I’m better than he is and I love it. And that’s the thing with Sabretooth – he’s seven feet tall and if he’s of a mind, he’ll kill you without and second thought and no regrets. And the frightening thing is he sticks around with the X-Men for two basic reasons. One: they’re his way of getting to the people who killed his son, because in my concept, Sabretooth is his father. And he’s going to kill them all – and when he gets going, the X-Men had better get out of his way. But the other thing that he’s discovered is he sort of now has a granddaughter – Kitty. سباق حصان Well, she’s got the claw, she’s got some of his genes – she’s family, which means, of course, that conceivably, every year on her birthday, he’ll try to kill her just to show her who’s boss.

RF: So those are his notions of family (laughs).

CC: I didn’t say he was sane. He’s Sabretooth. Just because he’s part of the X-Men doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. He’s not. He’s Wolverine without any scruples. He has his own sense of honor, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t kill you if he has to – or if he wants to. You never know, so everybody around him is on their toes. But from Scott’s perspective, “I’d rather keep him in the school where I could at least know where he’s coming from, rather than throw him out the door and have him jump at me from anywhere. And if he’s with us, at least he won’t be killing anyone else – I hope.”

RF: Yeah, that’s true. Keep your enemies close and everything.

CC: Actually, that’s very much true – your friends close and your enemies closer, which means that Scott and he are likely to become the best of friends. But, by the same token, Scott in and of himself is undergoing a certain measure of attention from my perspective, simply because at this point in his history – I mean, think about it: it wasn’t that long ago that he and Madelyne Pryor got married – they had a kid. At which point, he walked out on them both and went back to Jean. He’s got a lot of things to karmically balance. And, perhaps, restore – regain his sense of honor and worth to himself, to the team, to the readership, which, for me, is fun.

RF: Can you tell us about your plans for some of the other characters – like Rogue, Jean?

CC: Jean’s just, if you’ll pardon the expression, all f*cked up right now. I mean, she loved Scott, but then she died. And she was happily dead for the longest time and then she got better. And after she got better, she still kind of loved Scott but she kept looking more and more at Logan and couldn’t figure out why. العاب ربح نقود حقيقية And then of course she discovered that Madelyne was around and even though, originally Madelyne was created as a totally independent character because Jean was dead, that changed after Jean got resurrected and now she’s the missing part of Jean, which now has been reintegrated to Jean except that Madelyne’s the betrayed wife who’s really pissed at Scott. So, Scott’s just really screwed every which way you look at it. So, Jean gives her heart to Logan and he goes off and gets killed. So, her life’s a mess; Scott’s life’s a mess. I can’t think of a better dramatic starting point for any series.

Storm has gone through a lot of changes and is about to go through a lot more. Sometime around Christmas-time we’ll show you where she ended up fleeing off to and the end of issue five. And that will in turn set up a whole new series of conflicts and resolutions that one might almost think would parallel what’s going on in the mainstream Marvel Universe, except we’re about to throw some really big curves that will hopefully infuriate everybody.

Rogue is about to discover something of her past. The same goes for Nightcrawler; and young ‘Ro is just hanging out with Lockheed and enjoying the ride.

RF: Since you mentioned both Rogue and Nightcrawler, is this related to Mystique in anyway?

CC: Well, there’s an interesting point of contact in that she’s definitely involved in Kurt’s past and very much involved in Rogue’s.

RF: Any plans for her?

CC: Oh yeah. Doesn’t mean she’ll show up in the book, but the history is definitely in the mix.

RF: Any plans you’re willing to talk about?

CC: Yeah, but I’d be lying. Because the fun of the series is that, being a bi-weekly, readers aren’t required to wait all that long to find out what’s going on. From our perspective, we’re moving a lot faster in “Forever” than we did in “Uncanny” partly because we don’t have “Uncanny’s” publishing tolerance. ماهي لعبة الروليت Marvel was a lot more willing to give books a year or two to find their floor.

You’ll hear the same complaints about TV series. “Seinfeld” – if you launched it in today’s market, would probably have been killed, if it even got bought at all. It took “Seinfeld” a year to actually sink into the viewer zeitgeist and click and suddenly take off. You don’t have a year; you have maybe three weeks. You can’t build your audience now. You have to hit it from the get-go – because the costs seem to be too high and the pressure too great on network to perform and that seems sadly much the case in comics. With “X-Men,” we launched – and partly because you had to wait six to eight months just to get the newsstand sales in – that gave you a year to build your audience.

Now, since everything is exclusively comic stores, they know – boom – your book comes out, you’ve got the orders, end of story. And no one looks at a series at terms of: starting at number A and building from that. It’s all now presented online as: you start at number A and immediately you begin to burn it away. So that if you launch at 35,000, the second issue’s going to be 28,000, the third issue probably 25, the fourth issue maybe 24 – by the fifth or sixth issue, you’re down to 20 and by the tenth or twelfth, you’re canceled. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you assume a book’s going to fail, it will.

On the other hand, “Forever” has gone back to print with four out of the first five issues and we haven’t heard a word yet on the fifth issue. So, on one hand, you’re thinking, “Wow! We’ve gone back to print on four out of five. Hooray! This is a good thing!” Then of course, you actually see the raw numbers – and, yeah, we’ve gone back to print, but for 2,000 copies. I mean, I could print for 20,000; I would think would be fun. But, okay, I’ll take what I can get. On the other hand, with a bi-weekly book, that means the retailers have to order realistically the first four issues, sight unseen, which means they’re gambling, especially when the book is four dollars a shot retail – which means two dollars wholesale – which means that’s a lot of money to commit to of an unknown title that isn’t part of the continuity – that isn’t going to be tied into any crossover that comes down the line. So, we’re asking them to make a tremendous investment. Well, the flip-side is: the first four out of five issues have sold out. There seems to be a tremendous audience enthusiasm for the title; therefore, maybe, expand your orders, try for a little more, see if we can build on this base instead of shrinking and shredding it. So, why knows – maybe issues six and seven and eight might actually go up and if that happens, let’s try to continue on that regard and keep building. That’s the challenge, the dichotomy, the necessity – we have to find a way to make it work. Otherwise, we just keep perpetuating the decline of the industry.

The first and second installments, as well as video footage of the interview, are all on the site too.