Uncanny X-Men Writer Chris Claremont Donates 40 Years of Archives to Columbia University

Posted on November 19, 2011

Award-winning comic book writer and novelist Chris Claremont is donating his archives to Columbia University. Claremont, who wrote Uncanny X-Men for years and who created many X-Men characters including strong female characters such as Mystique and Emma Frost, has cut a deal with the university to donate the material to Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Publisher's Weekly reports that Columbia University is aggressively expanding its comics section and will hold a conference called Comic New York on March 24-25, 2012 at Low Library. The conference is still being planned. Karen Green, Columbia University's Ancient/Medieval Studies Librarian and Graphic Novel Librarian, is the guiding force behind the acquisition says she wants to establish a research center for New York City-based cartoonists and comics writers. She said, "We hope this is the first of more comics papers to come to the University. We want it to be a magnet for these kinds of archives in New York City, where the comics medium was born."

Claremont's archive is huge: it includes materials covering the last 40 years of his career. There are notebooks with story ideas, drafts of many kinds of works and other material. From all accounts, Claremont was a meticulous archivist himself: everything is neatly organized and ready to do. It's a wonderful donation, that will hopefully lead to more donations to the expanding comics research section at Columbia.