25 Years Ago, Chris Claremont Created an X-Men Book That Was Too Weird to Become a Classic

Chris Claremont took the rough clay that was the X-Men in 1975 and molded it into the greatest superhero team ever. Sure, the Justice Society was first, the Justice League birthed the rest, the Fantastic Four was the perfect family, and the Avengers are truly the mightiest heroes, but the X-Men have always been something special and a big reason for that is the work of Claremont. He created the best X-Men stories imaginable, giving readers classics like “The Dark Phoenix Saga”, “Days of Future Past”, “Mutant Massacre”, “LifeDeath”, “The Trial of Magneto”, “Inferno”, and so many more. His work played a huge role in the maturation of the comic medium – X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills came out in 1982, when Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing had just started – and he crafted Marvel’s merry mutants into a bestselling legend.

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Claremont’s first run on the team lasted for 16 years. He took them from a new beginning to the bestselling superhero team of all time, creating all of the best stories and characters. Claremont returned to the X-Men in 2000, writing nine issues apiece of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (Vol. 2) for a run that most fans don’t like. However, instead of being shown his walking papers, he was given another series with his Fantastic Four art partner Salvador Larocca (that’s right, Claremont wrote the FF and you know nothing about it; I mean, neither do I, but that’s because I didn’t read it when it was coming out). It has the most ’90s name ever, which is why it’s so funny that it came out in 2001: X-Treme X-Men. While the series has its high points, it’s also one of the weirder X-teams out there.

X-Treme X-Men Was Claremont Unleashed

Chris Claremont was an often revolutionary writer and that played a huge part in what made the X-Men so popular as the years went on. Claremont was great at reinventing the team every so often, doing his best to keep the group fresh while establishing their voices and histories. When he returned in 2000, he picked up where he left off – one of the reasons why it ultimately failed; X-Men fans are obsessed with continuity – creating an all-new kind of mutant in the Neo. Fans just didn’t really jibe with any of his ideas this time and Marvel decided to give him his own little corner to deal with (probably because of his contract; he was signed by Harras, but then Joe Quesada took over Marvel and cleaned house, bringing new creative teams to the main books).

Claremont took characters he created like Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Gambit, Tessa, and Thunderbird II (with more joining in the years to come) with Beast and Bishop to X-Treme X-Men and reached back into his own past for the series’ central idea. Destiny was Mystique’s second in command, using her precognitive powers to guide their actions. Destiny was killed, but she left something behind – a series of diaries she wrote over her life of her visions of the future. It was the ultimate guide to the destiny of mutantkind and it became the McGuffin of this new series, as Rogue led a group of X-Men to go after them, with new villain Vargas out to get them for his own goals.

That’s a solid premise and honestly, it’s a pretty solid book. I love Claremont’s return to the X-Men in the year 2000, but one of the things that a lot of people didn’t like about it was that he was writing it in a very old school style. There were a lot of captions describing actions and scenes and a lot of thought bubbles. X-Treme X-Men saw him change up his style for a more modern feel; while it was still character heavy, and he had never met a panel he couldn’t make better with purple prose, Claremont let the artists do a lot of heavy lifting. It definitely helped make this book better, but it was still Claremont.

Right off the bat, Claremont dropped a shock on the reader, killing off Psylocke, giving the book the feeling that anything could happen here. This wasn’t the main books; you could kill the big names and they would be gone. He brought in the character Tessa, who had been Sebastian Shaw’s assistant for decades, revealing that she was actually an X-Man named Sage, a secret operative spying on the Hellfire Club for Xavier. He’d introduce interesting characters like Lifeguard, whose powers allowed her to do anything to save someone, and would continually bring in characters he created, with various members of the New Mutants showing up and the book’s final story arc pulled Rachel Grey-Summers out of the timestream, setting her up for return as Marvel Girl in Claremont’s third (that’s right – there were three of them) run on Uncanny.

However, this was also a Claremont book. It dealt with complicated history, calling back the glories of the past constantly. As far as it goes, if you love Claremont, you’ll love X-Treme, but if you’re merely looking for a new X-book to give a try, this one isn’t for you. The quest for Destiny’s diaries took the various characters to some cool places, but in the end, it was an example of something too old school to be truly cool. The team has popped back up a few times since the series ended back in 2004, but it’s basically become something of a weird little aberration in X-history that really only existed to bring Rachel Grey-Summers back.

X-Treme X-Men Played a Key Role in the ’00s X-Books but Couldn’t Really Stand Out

Chris Claremont made the X-Men into superstars. He made Wolverine into one of the most popular heroes in Marvel history. He is a legendary writer and his work with the X-Men is some of the greatest of all time. However, his return in 2000 showed that he wasn’t always going to wow everyone (although I feel like if he would have gotten more time, it would have worked out) and that’s what led into X-Treme X-Men. The book was honestly better than what came before, as it was Claremont working on his own, away from the main books, allowed to do what he wanted with characters that he created. It was basically his own sandbox, where his fans could go and get the kind of work they liked.

When people think of ’00s X-Men, they think of New X-Men, Astonishing X-Men, “Decimation”, “Messiah Complex”, and the like, but they should think about X-Treme X-Men. The book played a big role in building Rogue and Bishop into better characters, made Sage into one of the coolest X-Man ever, fleshed out numerous plots of the time like X-Corp, and brought back Rachel. It’s a rather important book when you take close look at it, but it’s so Claremont that it’s never going to catch on in the greater fandom in the ’20s.

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