We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of engaging storytelling and character development, even if it leads to challenging situations for the characters.
Chris Claremont's quote suggests that audiences crave compelling narratives that feature well-crafted characters and artistic expression. He recognizes that creating meaningful connections with characters often involves putting them through difficult experiences, thereby enhancing the emotional depth and richness of the story.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about character development in creative writing classes.
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
The key isn't winning -- or losing, it's making the attempt. I may never be what I ought to be, want to be -- but how will I know unless I try? Sure, it's scary, but what's the alternative? Stagnation - A safer, more terrible form of death. Not of the body, but of the spirit. An animal knows what it is, and accepts it. A man may know what he is -- but he questions. He dreams. He strives. Changes. Grows.
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
X-Men has always been about finding your place in a society that doesn't want you.
My desire as a storyteller is to always catch the readers off guard; to give them something they aren't expecting, and take them in a direction that is satisfying in the here and non.
Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.
It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.
There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold, and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience!
It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.
I think the only thing filmmakers can do is try to make good movies and make them as long as they allow us to keep making them. But at the end of the day, it is a business, and if audiences don't care, there's nothing we can do. It'll just go away, I guess.
At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.
And perhaps, those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center are niche experience, they are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.
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