And, of course, all those covers do not, ah, cover the near constant REFERENCES to Jean and Phoenix. Seemed sometimes as if the characters could not get thru half a page without some memory.

One that particularly bugged me, mentioned before, was when I did a Wendigo-eye-view of Kurt as the monster approached him, unbeknownst to him. I included a color note that the panels should all be red, which Chris also read, and wrote as a sunset -- the colors of which then "reminded" Kurt of Phoenix!

ANY excuse!!

The worst offense, mind you, did not include Phoenix on panel. That was when Chris included an "editorial comment" in X-MEN, on my story in which the FF and Avengers and others join together to save the life of Galactus. Galactus had become a particularly big stone in Chris' craw. Why did Phoenix have to die, but Galactus doesn't?? he would demand to know. The answer "Galactus is not evil, Phoenix was" was not good enough. So he snuck that scene into an issue of X-MEN, where Lilandra confronts and threatens Reed and Sue (in their bedroom, no less!). The scene was NOT shown to the FF office. We knew nothing about it until the book was published.

Thanks for the reply JB!

I do find it less than forthright for Chris to say now that it was the wrong thing to do after all he had done to try to keep Phoenix around.  I suspect he his mostly upset that the resurrection didn't occur as HE plotted it.

There's no denying that deciding to make Wolverine's claws a part of the man instead of the costume was a key decision-- and having Wolverine be very private about his past. But apart from that there's little of
what we think of as core to Wolverine added between GSX#1 and UXM#108 when JB came along. And Dave tried a lot of quirky things that kind of dropped away once he left.

I don't consider the post-JB run awful. I consider the Byrne/Claremont X-Men the essential comics in my collection but I can't say that I disliked the X-Men after JB left. The second Cockrum run had some high points and there were some really good Paul Smith issues. JRjr's run was probably the last of the issues that I really enjoyed. In retrospect, I could have dropped the X-Men after the Secret Wars II crossover when they fought Sentinels in San Francisco and Wolverine popped his claws in Rachel but I continued to follow the comic thinking that I enjoyed it. It had changed too much from the team that I'd been reading years earlier.

My retrospective problems with Chris Claremont's X-Men post JB:

-Writing Cyclops out of the book

-Turning former enemies into X-Men

-Having to overhaul the team every so often (mainly from 86ish to 90)

-Writing Xavier out of the book

-Keeping a powerless Storm on the team

Interesting first part...and what an interesting site. I've read several of the other interviews already. Thanks to the OP for posting the link...great site.

Casey