Marvel’s Mutants

In 1975, Marvel Comics revived the X-Men, a failed title which hadn’t used new material for half a decade. It was a marginal project in an industry then in crisis. Five years later, it was the bestseller in a revived comics market. Unusually in the comics world, one man, Chris Claremont wrote the comic over seventeen years, from 1975 to 1991, developing new characters such as Wolverine and Storm, and taking themes from Freudian psychology, Christian temptation narratives, Existentialist philosophy and the language of sub-cultural identity.
Marvel’s Mutants is the first book to be devoted to the aesthetics of these comics that laid the foundation for the worldwide X-Men franchise we know today. Miles Booy explores Claremont’s recurrent themes, the evolution of his reputation as an auteur within a collaborative medium, the superhero genre and the input of the artists with whom Claremont worked. Also covered are the successful spin-off projects, which Claremont wrote: solo Wolverine mini-series and whole new teams of mutant superheroes.