The Claremont Run
Subverting Gender in the X-Men
"Although Chris Claremont did not create the X-Men nor did he revamp them into the All-New, All-Different X-Men, he took over the book soon after its revamp and lifted the mutant team to meteoric success during his unprecedented 16-year run on the comic. Even 30 years later, it is his work on the X-Men that inspires movies, television shows, and other media. A large part of his success on the book was due to the powerful women in his work and the sophisticated gender dynamics that were groundbreaking at the time and helped to change pop culture. J. Andrew Deman, with the help of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, has analyzed not only the hundreds of issues of Uncanny X-Men and related titles that Claremont wrote but also a thousand other Marvel comics of the time and issues of the X-Men pre- and post-Claremont in order to understand the writer's transgressive portrayals of gender during the years 1975-1991. Claremont's long history with the team gave him time to develop complicated characters and show their evolution, while the large number of characters allowed for diversity of depictions. Deman uses the data that he's gathered to examine this period and explore the implications of powerful women and toxic masculinity for the larger pop culture world, focusing on iconic characters such as Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and other X-Men and X-Women such as Dazzler, Psylocke, Havok, and Longshot"--