8 – What We Talk About When We Talk About Claremont

In which Chris Claremont defines the X-Universe; Sunfire quits the team (again); Nightcrawler is the best; the narrator is nobody’s friend; Colossus is a good kid; Cyclops has a long series of bad days; everyone is a bondage Viking; Rachel is a space pedant, we meet the Phoenix, and Wolverine is the Batman of Marvel.

X-Plained:

• Polaris’s kinda-powers
• Our first crossover event
• How much we love you
• Chris Claremont, and why he’s the definitive X-writer
• Comics In Focus: Chris Claremont’s X-Men
• Why Nightcrawler is the best point-of-view character
• The long game
• Tom Orzechowski’s dimension-folding lettering skills
• Claremontisms
• The malicious narrator
• Count Nefaria
• Sliding-scale ransom
• The life, death, and occasional reanimation of Thunderbird
• Friendship
• The care and feeding of cairns
• Erik the Red
• Quiet moments
• Sentinels and X-Sentinels
• Steven Lang
• The (first) death and return of Jean Grey
• Accents

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

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Next week: Leprechauns!