21 – Kurt Busiek at the Coffee-a-Go-Go

What a treat to have such a thoughtful conversation with Busiek! A lot here struck me as incredibly prescient given the ups and downs of the X-Men over the last decade and change, and so I wanted to get your thoughts about the question of Claremont’s legacy.

As you’ve been going through the Claremont years, it stuck me again how much Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men is both an incredibly earnest valentine to, and utter deconstruction of, the high notes from Claremont’s X-Men. So, on the one hand we have gigantic space operas, the return of the Phoenix force, an expanded student body at the Institute, and a balls-to-the-wall riff on “Days of Future Past.”

On the other, though, it seems like much of what Morrison did was pick up on exactly the sorts of innovations that Busiek wants to see in the books, and which seem to run counter to the BIG HUGE STAKES of the Claremont years, which often had nothing to do with mutants apart from the X-Men. So, Morrison gave us a sustained interest in the Institute as a functioning school, he had Jean give a public relations press conference on par with Busiek’s “XTV,” and we see Xavier act more as a public intellectual than paramilitary patriarch.

Morrison’s run considered mutants as a subcuture very much fashioned after LGBT communities in the fallout of the AIDS crisis. We saw mutant punk bands (like queercore), Xavier’s interest in post-identity mutant politics (like queer theory), and a much more concerted effort to take seriously those mutants who can’t pass or assimilate, or who don’t want to (like radical queers). At the same time, books like NYX wanted to think about mutants without the superheroics, and Claremont’s own Excalibur book around the time dealt mostly with the fallout of an act of genocide. There seemed to be space in Marvel’s publishing for quieter, more intimate “thought piece” stories about mutants and the mutant metaphor.

And then House of M happened and we couldn’t have nice things.

In this way, Morrison’s run–and some other books around that time–seemed to suggest that maybe the melodrama, violence, and outerspace adventures of Claremont’s run–though fantastic in their own way– kept the X-Men from really thinking things through. To wit, the first panel of Morrison’s run shows Wolverine punching a sentinel in the face as Cyclops says, “Wolverine, you can probably stop doing that now.” The run concludes, meanwhile, with the realization that all acts of violence surrounding the X-Men and other mutants were basically goaded on by a sentient, malicious bacteria that Jean simply excises from the timeline using Super Phoenix powers. (WHAT?!)

I know that much of the mutant metaphor isn’t more fully developed by Claremont (or others) until later, and yet it seems like that metaphor was, as Busiek pointed out, more-or-less fully proposed from the start. I also don’t want to downplay Claremont’s tremendous innovations on the book–his attention to characterization, his narrative “long game” as you call it, and the sheer pulpy joy of his books are why the X-Men are what they are.

And yet, in light of Morrison’s response through New X-Men, what do you make of Claremont’s legacy for the mutant metaphor? Were the X-Men too busy fighting xenomorphs to fight the mutant PR war on earth? Was Xavier too distracted by his spacebirdgirlfriend to write all his really cool posthuman philosophy that we still only see glimpses of? What are the pros and cons of Claremont’s legacy in this light?

On a related, less hypothetical note, do you see a space in the current comics market for the kinds of stories and books that Busiek imagined in your interview? Or, in the age of interminable BIG SUMMER CROSSOVERS and movie tie-ins, has the possibility for more introspective X-Books gone extinct?

I know this is really long-winded (sorry!), and that you all are a long way off from wrapping up the Claremont run, but I wanted to get all this out in responses to your fantastic talk with Busiek. Thanks, as always, for the awesome work you guys do. I go for long runs with your podcast every Sunday, and always look forward to it.

Best episode yet, guys.

This is what I’d love to hear in future podcasts, too. Not that they each have to be an interview on the scale of Busiek, but delving behind the surface of the story line or issue(s) you’re covering. Why did that decision get made? Who came up with that idea? Or, what almost happened here would have changed the entire outlook of this character. Giving some historical context beyond the usual character banter of your personalities, this really begins to give you guys a platform that sets your podcast apart from the rest.

YBL