Chris Claremont Hasn't Read Marvel's Wolverine Origin, He Has His Own

Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: chris claremont, fabian nicieza, john byrne, louise simonson, wolverine

Chris Claremont Hasn't Read Marvel's Wolverine Origin, He Has His Own

Chris Claremont Hasn't Read Marvel's Wolverine Origin, He Has His Own... Might Abrams Like To Hear It?

Published Sun, 16 Aug 2026 06:35:11 -0500
by Rich Johnston
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Article Summary

• Chris Claremont says he has never read Marvel's Wolverine: Origin and insists the reveal should have been his call.
• Chris Claremont argues Wolverine's past was a one-shot mystery, like Peter Parker's marriage, impossible to undo.
• Alongside Louise Simonson and Fabian Nicieza, Chris Claremont explains why creators avoid successors' takes.
• Chris Claremont also reacts to John Byrne's X-Men: Elsewhen and hints he has Marvel stories he'd still pitch.

At Terrificon this past weekend, Chris Claremont made one thing crystal clear: he has never read Origin, the 2001-2002 miniseries that finally gave Wolverine a definitive past, and he has no plans to change that. Sitting alongside Louise Simonson and Fabian Nicieza for the Uncanny X panel moderated by Word Balloon's John Siuntres,

Fabian Nicieza said he wrote New Warriors for four or five years and poured everything into it creatively and emotionally. When he left, his friend and former assistant editor Evan Skolnick took over the title. "I didn't read his run for over 10, 15 years. We would get together, our families would get together for dinner, and he'd be looking at me and I'd be like, 'No, not yet.' I didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole."

Louise Simonson added, "I don't read other people's work after they've taken over mine. There are several reasons. One is that after you've done it, you're almost a little tired of it, and you just don't want to hear it anymore. And the other is that when other people write your characters, even if they do it brilliantly, you kind of end up comparing what you would have done to what they did. And that's not fair. The sandbox we play in… we have to share our toys. You don't want to be mad at somebody because they did something terrible to your toys, which I've done. I've done terrible things to other people's toys. So when they do terrible things to my toys, it's like… things to your toys."

Claremont added, "My working mantra was always: why should I read it? If I like it and it's good, I'm going to be jealous. If I hate it and it's bad, I'm going to be angry. Why do I want to be jealous or angry? I don't have much more emotional range in me than that. So I don't do it."

The Origin Of Wolverine

And that extends to Wolverine's origin. He was asked about the long-running mystery of Logan's background. For years under Claremont, Wolverine remained deliberately enigmatic. John Siuntres mentioned the World War II flashback, his time in Japan, hints of longevity, but never the full picture. When the conversation turned to the published origin, Chris Claremont's response was immediate. "Thank God I can't be blamed for this one… it's always a lot of fun being yelled at by a publisher. The writer or the origin, and I have agreed over the century, he has his version. I have mine," Claremont said with a small smile. "I'm right." He went further. "I've never even read it. I will never read it. And honestly, it wasn't written by the people who had the right to write it. So I never bothered with it."

Claremont did not claim the idea of revealing the origin was inherently wrong. He simply believes the moment it happens is irreversible, and the people who had spent more than a decade carefully building the mystery should have been the ones to decide how, or whether, to resolve it. He recalled a major editorial meeting years earlier, when the X-office was hunting for the next big event. "The point was made: the one question that everyone wants answered is Wolverine's origin," Claremont said. "And my comment was, you can only do that once."

The Spider-Man Marriage

He compared it to another seismic, permanent change in Marvel continuity: Peter Parker marrying Mary Jane Watson. "Most people don't go to Satan to get a divorce," he deadpanned. "If it works, that's great for the first generation. If it doesn't work, you have a problem. But you can only do it once." In Claremont's view, revealing Wolverine's full origin carried the same weight as the death of Jean Grey. Once the curtain is pulled back, the character can never again have the same kind of unknown quantity. The mystery that had fueled years of speculation, fan theories, and quiet storytelling was spent. As to the writer of the Origin,

Chris Claremont's experience returning to X-Men in 1998 saw him initially set a firm boundary. "Part of the deal was I would write whatever you've got. I will not write the X-Men. It's been too long, they've changed too much. That would be pushing it." Within six months, of course, he found himself writing both Uncanny X-Men and the Fantastic Four. "It was the funnest thing in the world… because that was the book that got me hooked and got me into the business. I didn't have to worry about hurting Stan's feelings because he'd already won a huge settlement, and he was happy as a clam. I could just do anything, and as long as I played it straight with the FF, it was great."

The X-Men were different. "All I want to do is the first thing I did when I saw Kitty was, 'Oh, the writer really screwed this up. I'll fix it.' And we got more emails of protest than ever because we want Kitty to be old enough to have sex." Claremont's verdict on the experience was blunt: "You should never go back to a series that you left simply because it's changed. And if it's changed that dramatically, you want to change it back or you want to take it in a different direction… but it's no fun."

Fabian Nicieza added that the emotional distance is sometimes a form of self-preservation. After leaving his role as editor-in-chief and publisher at Acclaim, his relationship with the work changed. "I became far less emotionally enmeshed in both the stories, the work, and the business itself," he said. "Which isn't a good thing, by the way. I'm not saying that as a positive. It was just a reality."

Chris Claremont pointed out the unique difficulty of his own situation. Almost no one else has ever written the same book for sixteen straight years from the very beginning. When you finally leave — or get pushed out — and later get asked to come back, the emotional math gets complicated. You wake up one morning and you've been reassigned to the book," he said. "Things get very complicated picking up the pieces. You have to clean up everybody's messes."

The conversation was not bitter. It was practical and protective. These are creators who lived inside these characters for years. Watching someone else move into the house they built can feel less like creative succession and more like emotional trespassing — even when the new tenant is brilliant. And like a lot of relationships, sometimes the healthiest thing you can do after it ends is not keep checking in.

John Byrne's X-Men: Elsewhen

But they then turned to the recent move by John Byrne, who wrote and drew over thirty issues of what he would have done on X-Men if he had stuck around as fan fiction for his message board, which was recently published by Marvel Comics and Abrams Books. He was asked if John had mentioned any of those ideas he used to him at the time.v"I haven't a clue." He made clear he has not read the new material and has no plans to. "I wrote the story. Why do I need to read it again? … It's his story. Mazeltov."

Fabian Nicieza recently talked to John Byrne, said "I have no interest in reading it, but I'm fascinated by the process. For someone to choose at his age with his experience to work on a whole bunch of stories for no reason other than feeling like he wanted to work on a whole bunch of stories"

Louise Simonson added "I mean, honestly, it's kind of cool that you would want to do that," Fabian Nicieza said, "I think I described to John as both cool and pathetic… I kind of described it as both, and I see it both ways."

Chris Claremont noted it was mentioned at the convention that John Byrne was "starting a three-part graphic novel Phoenix story." Fabian Nicieza exclaimed "It's a little weird isn't it?", as Chris Claremont asked "How do you qualify things Fabian?" Nicieza replied, "He hasn't worked on these characters in 50 years…" Claremont interrupted, "Neither have I"

Fabian Nicieza concluded, "But to go back on his own dime at his own time with no guarantee, no expectation of publication, to do that much work seems odd to me. It's not how my brain works… I just turn 65 in December I have this cracking NFL SuperPro story I'm dying to tell."

Chris Claremont was asked if there was anything like this he'd like to pitch to Abrams. "I have lots of things I'd like to pitch", but that everything at Marvel Comics was in flux… maybe someone at Marvel and/or Abrams might like to reach out??

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