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No. 218426
>Claremont did Shock Deaths
While he may have played by "anyone can die" rules, at least some of the time, "Shock Deaths" is going too far. He wasn't trying to be "shocking". When he killed someone, they almost always went out in a moment of heroic glory, or making a noble sacrifice, or at the very least being a badass villain unaware the hero is about to pull a Hail Mary killshot. Compare with... oh... Whedon's "whoops a character you like got killed by a mook," Johns' "I'm going to kill 80s and 90s characters like bitches, so you'll know this is important," or Bendis' "everything Bendis has ever written".
Frankly I'll take how Claremont writes deaths over the all-too-common refrain of contemporary authors that since in real life death is often sad and pointless, it's okay to have characters die stupidly in books too. I read this shit for escapism, I don't want to see characters I enjoyed reading about dying completely depressing deaths.
>1. A tendency towards needless overcomplication.
I'd have to disagree with "needless". From a literary POV, sure. But he was trying to sell a product, a monthly comic. I wouldn't recommend his methods for a modern comic, but for something published back then? Characters like the DC mainstays were so well-established their books could be stand-alone-tales every issue and they wouldn't have to worry about readers wandering away. Newer titles like X-Men had to make sure you kept coming back for more, and the plot threads constantly being stringed along were an effective way of doing that.
It's also worth noting that he clashed with Shooter and Harras a LOT, leaving Marvel when things got bad enough with the latter. A fair number of the plot threads were left dangling or were strung out too long because he was fighting with editorial to do his stories, and sometimes lost.
>2. A juvenile sense of 'cool'.
Subjective.
>3. A serious case of orientalism, of the 'this is so cool and different' fetishisation variety, especially towards Japanese culture.
He also had something of a fetish for Britain. Of course he was a first generation Brit, whose family moved to America when he was three, and who read British comics growing up... but my point is that he walked on more than one cultural tightrope. But the "Orientalism" accusation is unfair. There was lots of LAAAAZY Orientalism in comics in the 60s and 70s, people with a vague idea that "the Orient is cool!" and no interest in doing research. Guys like O'Neil and Claremont Did The Research (at least as well as was possible at the time). And let's be clear here, this was a different era. The 70s and 80s saw Japan becoming the second biggest investor in America after Britain, saw unprecedented corporate alignments between the countries, and saw Japanese companies positioning themselves to be leaders in their respective fields. There's a reason so much sci-fi from the era depicted a future where Japanese and American culture were thoroughly fused: people thought it would happen. These days, of course, we know that the East Asian economic dominance will come from China, and it'll be the triads not the yakuza that one day rule the world. Duh. But considering the international nature of his book (Russians, Germans, and Canucks, oh my) NOT treating Japan like a big deal during a period when it WAS a big deal would have been a glaring omission. And he did it a HELL of a lot better than many of his contemporaries.
>4. A tendency to write female characters with his hands down his pants.
As opposed to his peers, who from the looks of it didn't write them at all, and were surprised to see the artists had added women into the finished project.
Look, the guy had/has his kinks, no shit. He was also writing women so much better than anyone else on a regular comic at the time it was ridiculous. Even Wolfman on Titans paled in comparison. Sorry, but I'm fed fucking up of people that focus on the fact that the guy clearly had a sexual interest in women, while ignoring the fact that he was doing "women as capable badasses THAT ARE ALSO well-rounded PEOPLE" at a time when pretty much nobody else was. He elevated Misty Knight and Colleen Wing from "the girls" into the women we know and love these days. Carol Danvers? He made her cool, he gave her motives and foibles of her own, and for an idea how she fared with others just hang around in a Captain Marvel thread for five minutes. Someone will point it out. Storm, Jean Grey, Shadowcat? Invented the third, made the second one useful and powerful (she was pretty much useless or a convenient hostage before), and Storm he made the X-Men's best leader. To see how his peers wrote a woman leader, just look at Shooter's Wasp. Or do yourself a favor and don't, it's a pretty cringeworthy mix of attempts at badassery mixed with flighty woman stereotypes worthy of Zsa Zsa Gabor (or Rarity the pony, for people too young to get that reference). He didn't just write women that could kick butts and take names (itself a rarity at the time), he gave them their own fears and motives, and basically treated them like they deserved to be good characters. And he did it at Marvel, the company where Wasp and Sue Storm spent their first ten years constantly apologizing for being silly useless women, and he did it beside John Byrne, whose attitude toward women frankly stinks. And people bitched at him constantly in the letters pages about how his "feminism" was emasculating all the male characters, male readers, and probably America.
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