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Chris Claremont loves the X-Men, and he wants you to know he's not done with them yet. The legendary Head of X from 1975 to 1991 has been active on several Wolverine flashback series over the past year and a half, with two Wolverine miniseries and a new sequel to 1985's Kitty Pryde and Wolverine publishing throughout 2025. There's a real earnest sense speaking to Claremont that, but for a disagreement in 1991, he'd still be writing the franchise in full today.

We had the chance to sit with Claremont recently while he signed copies of God Loves, Man Kills, the Dark Phoenix saga and Chicago's C2E2 2025, and so on from a long line of adoring fans. Claremont shared insight into his upcoming X-Men comics, what he'd have liked to do during the X-Men's Krakoa era, and even thoughts on mutants in Marvel Rivals.

Popverse: Chris, while you’re signing that, I would love to ask you, what are you working on currently that you want folks to know about?

Chris Claremont: This is the sequel to the Kitty Pride and Wolverine miniseries [proudly holds up a copy]. This first issue – now it’s Wolverine and Kitty Pryde. 

This is what happens when you're 13 and stuck in Japan. And have to save the world yet again. Actually, the conflict of the first issue is, as Kitty herself says to her father, I used to think the idea of being a superhero would be fun. Now I just want to go home to Chicago and go back to school and be ordinary. Because you know, Colossus just broke her heart. Shame on him. He's a Russian. What are you gonna do? And she just got almost turned into a villain by Ogun the Ninja Assassin.

And now she's stuck with Wolverine. All she wants to do is forget about what happened, and Wolverine is now training her with brutal enthusiasm, shall we say, to hone all the skills that she got. He doesn't want her to lose. I mean, she's saying, stop speaking Japanese, stop teaching me. I want to forget all this. And Wolverine just says no. When he says no, he means no.

It sounds like you're having fun returning to Kitty in particular.

I always have fun with these characters. I mean, that’s the whole point: if you're not having fun, why are you writing them in the first place?

The thing is when I wrote the Fantastic Four back before the turn of the century, Stan [Lee] had been off, stopped writing the book 30 years earlier. And I wasn't hanging around the office, looking over people's shoulders, and I had no desire or intent to do anything that would hurt his feelings.

So I was just there to have fun. I would mess up the team, but I'd put it back together again when the story was over. I would love to just have a chance to fool around with the X-Men.

So it was reported that you had pitched X-Men for this new From the Ashes era. What direction would you have wanted to take things post-Krakoa?

A different one.

I mean, forgive me, I consider my ideas, well, my ideas. And, I rarely talk about them, especially if they've been passed on. Because I figure I can use them somewhere else.

Would you have liked to play in the Krakoa Mutant Nation playground, or do you think you would've moved on from that?

I think if you're going to have all these interesting characters in the series, if you're gonna have this island, which has all sorts of fascinating aspects, why not play with them? Why not have fun with them?

There are all these parts of it that I never saw played with. If, let's say, you'd started the series with the evolution in process, not saying everybody's on Krakoa. How did you get there? Are there mutants who don't, who disagree with the concept? Who wants to find their own path, or who wants to stay where they are?

I mean, I created this whole city, Valle Soleada, in California. But those mutants had families, they had relationships, they had relatives who were not mutants. What would it have been like for them if you've got a situation where all the other countries in the world throw out their mutants that you must go to or whatever. Basically, throw in a different twist to it. See how the audience reacts to that. Does it work? Does it not work? You should never have everything locked in the same. You should always provide variety.

So, folks at a con obviously want to talk about the God Loves Man Kills days, and all the classics that you've written, but you're still progressing. In what ways do you think you approach the X-Men differently or better now than you did from what folks consider the classics?

The difference in a conceptual sense is that everyone who's writing it today, the characters are much older than when I was doing it. And I understand the why of it. Because everyone wants to relate to people on their own terms. And writing, it's hard to write Colossus at 18 after he's been around for 50 years. Mind you, it doesn't seem to bother Supergirl or Superboy, you know, a Batgirl, or you know, the younger kid characters of DC. But that's a whole different discussion.

Do you think it loses something when they have to grow up that way? For example, the New Mutants in particular, they get into their, what, upper 20s maybe instead of a new crew.

Now, well, see from my perspective as a writer, I find once people get into their twenties… Meaning no disrespect, I find grown-ups boring. I find kids where everything is evolving a lot more fun. A lot more interesting.

It always pissed me off when some writer would change the age of a character because they wanted two characters to have sex, and be of age to do so legally. Because - it doesn't matter in DC Comics where no one pays attention to the books as they relate to each other - but in Marvel, if you make a character seven years older, that changes everything around them as well. Now Franklin is seven years older, and so's Peter Parker. It changes the whole Marvel Universe.

So, do you think the X-Men concept works best with the school element?

From a conceptual standpoint, at some point, you've got too many characters. And where do you put 'em all? How do you present them all to the audience in a way that the audience finds fulfilling and the creators find fulfilling?

And the basic challenge now is most people don't stick around very long. Most creators don't stick around. It’s usually two years, three years, and then move on to a different project. I broke the rule. I stuck around for 20, and chances are, if Marvel and I hadn't come to a significant disagreement back in the day, I'd still be on it now. Because I like the characters, and I was having way too much fun.

And if you create, say, another two dozen characters to be the next mutants… If they don't all work the way the first group worked, then you're sort of stuck.

Talk about Gambit as a movie star is a thing these days. Can you talk at all about what your involvement was with the Gambit movie treatment?

My feeling was if you're going to do Gambit, the first rule is the audience has to fall in love with Remy. So I was gonna leave the X-Men totally out of it. This is going to be a story all about Remy in a situation where he runs into someone who needs his desperate help. Ideally, you end the story of the film with him taking the first step towards the expansion. But the first one is all about Remy. I mean, the first Deadpool is all about Deadpool.

Do you wrinkle in any of your Sinister designs on Remy? Would you go with that sort of darkness in the background, or do you delay that?

It would depend on the circumstances. That's the first step, is getting your foot in the door, sitting down, and then talking with the director, the actor, the principal actor, seeing where you might want to evolve it or what direction you might want. What the studio wants, what the audience wants, and see what works. But you know, my pitch didn't even get that far. Apparently, the actor had different ideas, and that didn't involve me. So there you go.

Have you seen the Marvel Rivals video game at all? It's very popular right now.

I don't have the intellectual depth to do video games.

The question doesn't require video game knowledge! There are six X-Men you can be, in a game where you're effectively battling groups of 6 Marvel heroes and villains. Basically. You got Wolverine, Emma Frost, Psylocke, Storm, Magneto, and Magik. Who do you think you would gravitate towards playing?

Since when is Emma an X-Men?

2001 maybe on and off [laughs nervously]

Well, it also depends on how you view things. I mean, you've got Wolverine for muscle, you've got Emma and Betsy. So you've got the two Premier Telepaths on the block. You've got Magneto, who is in his own way the most powerful mutant, potentially the most powerful mutant there is. And last, Magik and Storm.

My guess for you would've been Magik. 

Why would you have Magik in this at all? 

Giant sword. Teleportation through limbo. 

I don't understand this giant sword thing. I mean, it was a real sword. Have you ever seen a real swordsperson use something, a blade that was as big as a person? I mean, okay, if that's what you want. 

Who would they be up against? I'm not sure it's a fair contest. 

Like, any six characters from the Marvel Universe. Could be Loki, Thor, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, a whole mix. Scarlet Witch. 

Why are they fighting?

I mean, it's a very thin rationale. There are multiverse shenanigans, and Dr. Doom's involved. 

Why aren't both sides fighting Dr. Doom? 

Because he's trying to conquer the multiverse, I think. 

But why? So, wouldn't all of the heroes be banding together to fight Doom? I am confused. I mean, if you were to come up to me and say, okay, Dr. Doom wants to conquer the multiverse. Sure. Yep. Here's your group of 12 characters, six non-X-Men, and six X-Men. Well, you could say, okay, Doom had a thing about Ororo. Does that involve which side she's on? Maybe he's grabbed her to make her his queen. If you're going to set up a parameter, figure out what the story is. Then choose your characters, and then see what happens next. 

The flip side would be to say, just off the top of my head, Mister Sinister has grabbed six characters from the real, from the mainstream universe, and from the X Universe. And the only person capable of saving the multiverse, and of defeating him, is Doom. So Doom's gotta go out and recruit the characters to do this, that he needs to take out that Sinister.

I mean, me being me, I'd say something stupid like, 'Of course the first person [Doom] would go to because she hates his guts, is Sue.' Why? His argument would be that if Sinister wins, Franklin's future is doomed. So to speak. You are always playing with variable dynamics.

 Sinister has found a way to set this all in motion, and Doom has to find a way to stop him. But it involves him appealing to heroes who hate his guts.

[Chris is handed a copy of Fantastic Four]

See what I would've loved to have done with this is have spent another three or four issues with Sue's evolution into whatever creature that Ronan the Accuser wanted. 'Cause he was doing this just to torment the Fantastic Four. And it worked.

There's actually a point in the series I'm writing now where Wolverine’s telling Mariko, you shouldn't love me, you can't love me, I'm a monster. And she's saying, aren't we all in our own way? She points out to him if the situation were reversed, and you were the noble and I were the monster, would you love me? Still, he said yes. There you go.

Any final things you want to make sure everybody knows about?

The point of comics, ideally, is that they should be fun. The idea is always to do stories that are fun.

So in retrospect, I think that the story where Sue turns into the monster gradually over issues, it was like, what if it were Reed? But then I thought, no, because we've been doing that for, well, since Stan created the book. Ben is the monster. Reed, in his way is; all the guys are monsters in their own way. All Sue does is vanish. So by turning Sue into a monster, all Ronan's done is made the FF what they were actually meant to be from the start. They were all monsters. And then, of course, you sit back and say, What if she stayed that way? It's like Franklin could deal with it because he's Franklin. How would Reed deal? As a writer, you can have so much more fun with things that break the rules.