He had planned to return to this idea in the X-Men Forever series from 2009, in which he wrote the X-Men as if he’d never left the series in 1991 in that version of the plot, he said, he was going to build on the idea that Storm had become ruler of Wakanda, a plot development from earlier in the series, by having her reject the Panther Gods of that country. Claremont, as he did more than once during the panel, talked about his surprise that the character had been romantically paired with Rogue after he left the X-Men franchise, revealing that his original plan for the character was to have him pursue Kitty: “Rogue was totally out of the picture, because Remy’s assignment – because he was a bad guy at the time – was to seduce the leader of the next generation of the X-Men and lead her to destruction.” It was, he said, a play on what the Hellfire Club and Mastermind had attempted with Jean Grey in the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Let’s get the Shadow Panther thing out of the way first, shall we? The subject arose in response to a fan asking about the creation of Gambit, who they claimed as one of their favorite characters. While his comments about abandoned plans for his late-2000s series X-Men Forever – plans that would have seen Kitty Pryde transformed by the Panther Gods of Wakanda into being the daughter of Ororo and T’Challa, calling herself the Shadow Panther – and dismissals of Marvel Studios’ recent movies have drawn the majority of online attention, and with good reason, the panel as a whole was a fascinating glimpse into how one of the creators arguably responsible for the superhero genre as it exists today sees the contemporary superhero landscape… and his place in it. On the face of it, Friday’s Spotlight on Chris Claremont panel at C2E2 didn’t look set to be one of the most controversial panels of the entire show in fact, the last-minute panel – a replacement for the X-Men: Classics & Legends panel that was to have featured Claremont and Art Adams talking about their collaborations, canceled when Adams had to pull out of the convention due to injury – might have been considered by some to be little more than a trip down memory lane, with Claremont talking about his past works and teasing the upcoming X-treme X-Men reboot he referred to as “X-Treme 2022.” As responses on social media have shown, that wasn’t exactly what happened.

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