The creative partnership between Chris Claremont and Leinil Francis Yu

In order to bring visual life to Claremont’s X-Men return, Marvel teamed the legendary 50-year-old writer with 23-year-old future-legend Lenil Francis Yu. Though both creators would achieve creative heights in the pages of X-Men, arguably, they did not do so together. #XMen 1/14

The strategy of pairing Claremont with an up and coming young penciler wasn’t just viable during the original Claremont run, it was a go-to strategy with Claremont often scouting young artistic talent at conventions himself. 2/14

Iconic X-illustrators such as Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, and Paul Smith created dynamic images to accompany Claremont’s dense text, but Yu’s style can be seen to struggle a bit when confined to that type of accompaniment – something Claremont’s scripts can impose. 3/14

Building on the work of Thierry Groensteen, Charles Hatfield argues that there’s a distinction between “illustrative drawing” which leans more toward the decorative while deferring to the text and “narrative drawing” which carries a rhetorical burden in telling the story. 4/14

Famed comics scholar Robert C. Harvey attributes this phenomenon to a sort of “two schools” approach for comics storytellers: a tradition of comics storytelling (Harvey Kurtzman/Will Eisner) and a tradition of “figure-drawing” (Gil Kane/Kurt Swan/Neal Adams). 5/14

This distinction between art that illustrates the text and art that drives the story is, of course, a spectrum (rather than a binary) with any given comics art finding its place somewhere between these opposing traditions/schools/extremes. 6/14

Yu, though aesthetically gifted, is quite evidently a masterful visual storyteller… when given space to do so, something he would prove with his work on Superman: Birthright, and something he would continue to prove, even up to his Krakoa-era X-Men return. 7/14

Claremont’s text-heavy style (firmly out of fashion in a post-Image era) may not pair well with Yu’s ability to work with the page (rather than the panel) as the main unit of composition. Without space to operate, Yu’s work comes off a little flat compared to later efforts. 8/14

Furthermore, in an article for The Beat: Comics Culture, writer/artist Ken Niimura (of “I Kill Giants” fame) speaks to the importance of synergy between the writer and illustrator on a given project: 9/14

“When you work with someone, you’re also helping bring their ideas to life, so unless you understand them, and – most important of all – agree with them, it can be a real struggle. It’s not just illustrating, it’s being in the same wavelength.” 10/14

This issue might also be in play with the Claremont/Yu pairing – two artists at very different stages of their careers: one trying to hold on to an outdated style with a modern facelift while the other struggles to find the space he needs to enact his specific skill-set. 11/14

It’s hard to criticize Claremont or Yu as individuals. Yu’s interpretation of house style of the time is on-point (beautiful even, at times) and Claremont was brought in to write in his singular Claremontian style, which he absolutely did. 12/14

For a lot of people, however, the pairing didn’t really work. It could be synergy, or competing interests, or simply the passage of time and the evolution of the medium, but, if nothing else, it gives us the opportunity to think about the synergy of creators in comics art. 13/14

For more on Charles Hatfield’s work, you can read “Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, while Robert Harvey’s thoughts on divergent comics visual traditions can be found here.