Charles X. Claremont
From CerebusWiki
Appears in issue 23, issue 24, issue 25, issue 56, issue 81, issue 86, and issue 87.
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Character History
The sorcerer Charles Claremont is disguised for most of issues 23 and 24 as Madame duFort, headmistress of Madame duFort's School for Gifted Debutantes. Cerebus takes shelter there after suffering a leg wound.
In issue #56 he comes back from the head of Wolveroach: "Dead!? Nonsense, child, being crushed between my Apocalypse Beasts merely transformed me into a near-deity. However...My physical form, after undergoing the ordeal, was in no condition to house my omnipotence! So I've borrowed bozo here for a while..."
Basis
Claremont is a parody of the Marvel Comics character Professor Charles Xavier of The Uncanny X-Men, whom he strongly resembles (although Xavier is confined to a wheelchair and Claremont is not). Xavier was the dean of Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The name is also an allusion to the writer of The Uncanny X-Men during this period, Chris Claremont (who also wrote the Man-Thing comic book for a time).
Quotes
"Think of all the excitement ... angry mobs of frightened villagers with torches and pitchforks screaming for my blood ... led by local priests with wooden stakes and garlic-flavored holy water ... oh, how I love being evil!" --issue 25, page 4
Dave Speaks
"I decided to do a tongue-in-cheek treatment of Chris Claremont's X-men series. Having read (and heard) so often at this time that Chris, when faced with developing a new character in the series, would ask, sometimes rhetorically but more often not, 'Is there any reason this character can't be a woman?' ... Marvel was also on a kick at this time about protecting their trademark on major characters by doing female versions of them. They ended up doing two around the same time -- Spider-Woman and She-Hulk. The implication of this move, at least in my mind, was that any publisher doing a female version of a Marvel character that wasn't Spider-Woman or She-Hulk would have free rein to use those characters -- Thingette, The Woman Torch. So taking the bull by the horns, I decided to do Woman-Thing."
--Swords of Cerebus, volume six, introduction to issues 23-25
External Links
- Wikipedia Article on Chris Claremont
- Wikipedia Prof X Article on Professor X
