I think it would be cool if Hugh Jackman showed up in 'Avengers: Infinity War,' even if just for a tryout.
— Chris Claremont
In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.
The really nice thing with 'Future Past' is that you actually have a superhero film - much to everyone's surprise, I will hope - that is about something. It's about racism, I hope. It's about resisting oppression. It's about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.
My resonance to Magneto and Xavier was borne more out of the Holocaust. It was coming face to face with evil, and how do you respond to it? In Magneto's case it was violence begets violence. In Xavier's it was the constant attempt to find a better way.
It's a fascinating world to drop a finished product on the marketplace without the intercession of a publisher.
But the key thing was that I knew of no other contrast between Wolverine as we understood him and Logan than you see in his behavior as a roughneck Canadian versus classical samurai society. That's the dichotomy in his soul.
The one immutable reality of film is, no matter how wonderful the actors and the performances are, every year the actors age and grow older - Sophie Turner's Jean Grey was wonderful!
If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.
A lot of people didn't like the 'Fantastic Four' for the first year and a half. It took a certain measure of time for me to find my feet in terms of what I wanted to do with the concept.
When I was little, I used to have nightmares about Godzilla walking out of the Great South Bay, because we had a fire alarm out where we lived that sounded just like his feet.
Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.
Look at 'Avatar:' the foreign ticket sales were over twice the domestic returns. The mind boggles at those kinds of numbers, but that's what you get when you effectively reach out to a global audience. If that kind of thing came to comics, it would undoubtedly change how people perceive the mainstream industry.
All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.
The weird thing for me is I'm sitting there in the '80s writing about the Mutant Control Act and here we are in the second decade of the 21st century with the Patriot Act, listening to presidential candidates talk about building walls to keep people out: who's acceptable and who isn't. It's very creepy.
The first rule is you have to create a reality that makes the reader want to come back and see what happens next. The way I tried to do it, I'd create characters that the reader could instantly recognize, and hopefully bond with, and put them through situations that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.
I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.
What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.
There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.
One of the seminal moments I remember as a young punk is, when Roy Thomas was doing an editorial read-through of a book before it went to press, and being so gob-smacked by it, he just canceled it right there.
Comics are primal, down and dirty.
The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'
No matter how good of a ball player you were, you can't keep going forever. You're not going to be able to hit .300 when you're 60. You still look around and you think, 'This is weird. Have I missed something?' Well, yeah, you have.
For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.
The wonder, especially about the 'New Mutants' is, they're all kids. They're all growing. They're changing, literally, from page to page in terms of character and approach, past, present, and future. As a writer, that's the most delicious thing to play with.
People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'
I think the biggest challenge is going to be finding a place that sells comics. Ideally, you want someone to come out of a movie theater, look across the street, see a newsstand, walk in and find a copy of the 'X-Men' sitting there. But that's not what's going to happen.
I wish the 'Dark Phoenix' saga had been done more effectively than it was, but that was out of my hands.
The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.
The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.
I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.
I was not creating icons when I wrote the 'The X-Men' and the 'The New Mutants.' I was creating people.
If one were to go back to the '50s, the most popular TV genre on the air in the United States were Westerns. You could go turn on ABC or CBS on any night and you'd almost have three full hours of everything from 'Bonanza' to 'Rawhide' to 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'
I think there's a yin and a yang to everything.
Isn't it amazing how the X-Men always managed to be ahead of everybody's curve no matter how they look at it?
What I love about Hugh Jackman is he just brings all the elements of my vision of Logan. The pain, the nobility, the duality of his existence.
The best moments in comics come from a primal image that captures the emotion and the conflict. What you add are the pieces that get you to the point and what happens next.
The one thing I have never been comfortable with in the modern presentation of character - and it may have changed, this is some years ago - is their total isolation from the rest of the world. It's all about superheroes interacting with superheroes. There's no normal life. No normal people.
My relationship with Marvel is that I work for them.
Maisie Williams was my first choice to play Wolfsbane when I heard about the 'New Mutants' movie - but in comic books, I can keep the New Mutants adolescent for decades and have as much fun writing them at the end as I did in the beginning.
It seems that most of the projects I'm doing with relationship to Marvel's 80th anniversary occur during my core run on the X-Men titles.
I actually tried replying to what I thought were some unfair comments on the Internet once or twice, and I never heard back. What seems to happen with some people is they're very much interested in voicing their own opinions, but not in having them challenged.
I guess you go back to the old writer's adage that when they do your stuff in Hollywood, you smile sweetly upon your credit - if there is one - and enjoy the show.
When you're spending $100-plus million dollars, you need to give the audience what they want.
In some films it wouldn't be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that's for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves.
On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.
For me, one of the things that makes the X-Men so crucial is they are relatively small in number but they have the potential to have a tremendous impact on the society around them.
The most basic excitement was the opportunity to work with Dave Cockrum. He was an artist I'd admired for years and our imaginations were ridiculously simpatico.
The whole point of 'The New Mutants' was that the oldest of them, Sam, and maybe Dani Moonstar... they're 15. Rahne is 13. They are kids still. The whole point of being kids is half, if not two thirds of the time, they're making mistakes.
All things are possible, especially in the realm of superheroes.
