Broken Frontier

Claremont finishes off the X-Men with a galaxy sprawling brawl, a political message, and a dose of…spirituality!?

The 18-part opus bringing about an end to the X-Men has had its ups and downs, but has never stopped being some of Claremont’s best current work. In the final installment the X-Men have to battle a Cassandra Nova who has now become Phoenix, or as the Shi’ar call her, The End of All That Is. After a gruesome fight with the Super Guardians, Nova takes on the X-Men and things get…peculiar. While back on Earth, Kitty Pryde passes out right before the winner of the Chicago Mayoral Election is announced and Beast tries to save the inexplicably dying Wolverine.

Claremont has brought out all the stops in The End, revealing things like Gambit’s biological father, Bishop’s child, and Jean Grey’s ultimate destiny. It has seemed, throughout the run, that he has had this story in the works for quite some time, closing long dangling plotlines, opening new and different ones, and finally, blessedly, putting to rest the Phoenix. Has he been ruthless? Yes, several X-Men have died, hundreds even. Has he taken a few stabs at current storylines? Yes, almost mockingly at times. But he, above almost all others, has earned a stab or two. Has he been good?

Yes. The End is Claremont at his best. The story is chock full of classic X-Men action and sprinkled with moral messages so clear, avoiding them is an impossibility. Chris Claremont is the writer who made the X-Men what they are today. By mixing heroics with a clear social, spiritual, and political lesson, he grabbed the attention of the masses. While our attention was sufficiently grabbed he named one of his characters after the imaginary girl Anne Frank wrote to in her diary, he gave his readers what I like to call "the Colossus Quandary," and he ended his original run with a poem. The End echoes all of those highlights from his original run, and more. If the series has done anything for Claremont, it has proven that, though his current run on the regular X-titles may not be up to par with his past, he still has what it takes to create an intriguing story and moving message.

Sean Chen has been a valiant penciler to Claremont’s writer. While his style is not flashy and he will probably never make it on Wizard’s Top Ten List, his eye for structure and anatomy is clear in every panel. He may be a bit weak in the background department, but in the battle scenes on a destroyed Shi’ar planet, that criticism seems moot. The features, movements, and bodies of the X-Men are drawn so the reader is reminded of classic artists from the seventies and eighties who helped Claremont create the X-Men he is destroying. Though his art does not compare with some of the flashier work from other artists of Chen’s generation, it doesn’t have to. He has a style that will endure, never disappearing or being derided ten years later for having sucked (but nobody noticed—like a man with the initials R.L.).

The End has given curious readers a view of how many fan’s favorite X-writer would finish off the X-Men. Some may like the possibility, others may think it cleaned up too nicely, and others may scoff at the whole thing. But whatever the opinion, this X-Men comic has been a fun, well drawn read I would recommend over anything Claremont is doing on the regular X-books right now.