Chris Claremont hints at his modern day wokeness

Twin Cities Geek interviewed veteran writer Claremont about his X-Men run, still one of the longest one could expect from a professional writer for monthly series, and along the way, he sadly indicates what kind of ideologies he apparently considers acceptable. First:

Comic books have always reflected the public affairs issues of the time, and arguably none more so than the X-Men, whose big themes have always included diversity and equity, “controversial” issues, and the impact those things have on the readers. You go back to the Golden Age of Comics, and Superman was introduced as a ray of hope following the Great Depression. Batman was introduced when organized crime was at a high point. Captain America and Wonder Woman both served as World War II propaganda and fought Nazis. The X-Men were a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and over time they also became a metaphor for LGBTQ+ rights, among other things.

The problem is that since the turn of the century, and maybe before that, there were LGBT ideologues who hijacked it far more for their own narrow agendas than anything else. Of course, if we take Grant Morrison's X-Men as an example, the franchise was also regrettably hijacked for Islamic propaganda, since the character Dust was depicted as an Islamist in a whitewashed manner. As a result, it's hard to say comicdom's always reflected certain issues, certainly not with objectivity. After 9-11, Captain America was made more into an apologist for Islamofascism than actually fighting against it, in the Marvel Knights line. A terrible waste of Simon/Kirby's classic creation.

In 2012, Astonishing X-Men #51 featured the first same-sex wedding in mainstream comics when Northstar married his boyfriend, Kyle. The issue had a foldout cover, and there was lots of hype around the story, which was written by Marjorie Liu. Claremont himself co-created Northstar with John Byrne in 1979, though it wasn’t until Alpha Flight #106 in 1992 (after Claremont’s run on the X-Men ended) that it was explicitly acknowledged the character was gay. In the years between, when the Comics Code Authority did not allow the open acknowledgement of homosexuality, everything was subtext.

Even without the code, Claremont doesn’t like grandiose gestures as a writer, what he likens to pointing a big arrow and saying, “Hey look, this character is gay.” Rather, he prefers to place his character in a life where are were already out—as he did in Uncanny X-Men #170, in which he had Destiny in her nightgown having coffee in the kitchen when Mystique walks in in her robe. It was clear they were together, and it was clear that that was their apartment, but it wasn’t stated outright. Claremont placed them in a normal, everyday situation that normal couples have, just living their lives.

In that case, does he also find the original "outing" of Northstar, written by Scott Lobdell, appalling? The biggest irony about a story that leftists were making such a big deal about at the time is that it wound up being more offensive to LGBT advocates than helpful. If Claremont had anything to say about Lobdell's rendition, they haven't included it.

But at the same time that some characters’ identities are being made more overt in recent comics and movies, there are other cases where identity seems to get lost. One of the things that struck Claremont about the 2020 New Mutants movie was the portrayal of Roberto Da Costa (Sunspot), another character he co-created. In the comics, Bobby is Afro-Brazilian—his father is Black, and his mother is white. His father is also a billionaire and a power player in the Brazilian economy. But all the other wealthy people around him hate him, because they’re white and he’s Black. This dynamic of prejudice is paralleled in the treatment Bobby receives for being a mutant.

In the movie, Sunspot is Brazilian, played an actor who’s Brazilian, but not Black. For Claremont, this leaves out a fundamental part of his character. To focus on him being from Brazil but eliminating the racial dynamics from his comics origin story misses the point.

“I have nothing against the actor, I have nothing against the performance of the script that he had to work from,” he stressed. “But the essential key is the comic was going for one specific metaphor. And the movie blew it out the window.”

Whether it’s sexuality or race, Claremont’s approach is not to highlight the issue out and say, “This is where we should be as a society—let’s get there.” Rather, he places us already there and challenges the reader to think about it, to face their own preconceived notions and try to explain or rationalize why it shouldn’t be.

Wonder what he thinks of Brazil now being run by somebody as awful as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva? That could make an interesting subject for focus in comicdom, but I guess Claremont's too woke at this point to admit it. In which case, is it any wonder his past writing may not hold up well? Especially considering what comes next:

One choice he struggled with was the comics outing all mutants and establishing a nation for them on Krakoa. “Once you cross that threshold,” he said, “you can’t bring it back: Everybody’s out, like it or not.” For him, that takes away the one thing that made the X-canon significantly different from superheroes like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. If you expose a hero’s secret identity, by extension, you’re outing their parents, their relatives, their friends; you’re putting them all at a measure of risk. But in the X-Men universe, it’s not just the heroes who have secret identities—it’s all mutants.

That’s why so many are scared in the first place and why being a mutant can be terrifying. It parallels the fear of someone who’s Black, Muslim, or gay and living among people who are prejudiced against those identities. Claremont elaborated:

For me, the point of X-Men is that it gets to deal with racism front and center. What I find disturbing about the current books, the current era of books is the decision that that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. And I think for it not to matter anymore takes away a very strong analogy that is why the X-Canon has been followed … analogous to being Black, to being gay, to being Muslim, to being Hispanic, whatever, for me, as it should be.

For Claremont, that connection between mutant identity and real-life identities and the need to take a stand is baked into the DNA of the X-Men. And the definition of who that stand is for is fluid: “You can’t put it in a single box and say this is what it is. It’s a box that reaches out and embraces a lot of different aspects,” he said. And it allows the reader to connect to the characters and see their own struggle against racism and other forms of discrimination represented, acknowledged and championed. Claremont wrote as he did because he felt that that metaphorical perspective was an important one, a needed one. “Maybe now, that’s 30 years after when I started, things have changed,” he said.

Well this is very sad he wants to put the Religion of Peace in the same boat as the other backgrounds mentioned, but not surprising, considering he did indicate as far back as the early 2000s after 9-11 in the pages of a 2nd Gen13 volume that he was willing to go woke and appease Islam, since he wrote up a Muslim character there depicted positively. It's just as well then that the whole run was ultimately written out of history by the end, since IIRC, the other team members besides Caitlin Fairchild herself turned up alive, and they went back in time to reverse their fate from the end of the previous volume. Claremont's practically even dampening whatever impact the story with Legion had in 1986. Then again, the prelude to Age of Apocalypse already did in 1995. That this interview took place after October 7, 2023 also speaks volumes of Claremont's potential failure to recognize that his messages of the past have spectacularly failed.

Besides Claremont, even the actress Leonore Zahn was also interviewed, and spoke about doing the voice acting for Rogue on the X-Men cartoon series on TV, and her leftist positions come about as well:

She said she looks to her own as inspiration for portraying the character. Like Rogue, she wears her heart on her sleeve, cares passionately about social justice, equality, and fairness, and will always stand up and fight for the underdog. In 2008, she took this to the next level: After living across Europe and North America, she returned to the town where she grew up—Truro, Nova Scotia—and went into politics. She explained:

I was asked to run for election for a state-run legislature in Canada, in Nova Scotia, which is where my parents moved to when I was a kid after we left Australia. … And so I was asked to run in the provincial election. And I won. And then I won three more elections after that. And the last one I went federal, so I ran for the Liberal Party of Canada, which is Prime Minister Trudeau’s party, and I won that one. So all together, I was in politics for 12 years.

Zann introduced a number of progressive bills to help bring the country forward in the areas of diversity and equality, women’s rights, and environmental issues. One that she is particularly proud of introducing involves a national strategy to address environmental racism and environmental justice. The bill was still before the House of Commons at the time of our conversation, but it passed on June 21, 2024.

I wonder if she also backed LGBT ideology that came at women and children's expense? What's told here is fishy enough, but in a country that's been tragically consumed by identity politics as much as antisemitism, it wouldn't be shocking. And what next, will it turn out Islamists are exempt from the demands of any LGBT bills developed? Who knows?

Anyway, this all explains why, whatever one thinks of these veterans, their modern leftist standings are very sad, and require separating the art from the artist. All Claremont for one is doing is suggesting he doesn't have what it takes to truly stand by certain messages, whether they apply to one and all, and whether say, the Religion Clause of the 1st Amendment is a good thing. Some veteran writers, if you know where to look, can turn out to be very disappointing people, because they don't understand even leftists can make mistakes. I own some of the X-Men today in Epic Collection format, and I don't regret it. But it's clear Claremont doesn't have what it takes to be a realist, and that's hugely regrettable.