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I appreciate the effort, ineffective as it is!

My "favorite" comment, thus far, has to be this one:

"Leave us alone Byrnes! You have ruined enough of the Internet on your own forums."

I had no idea staying here in my own Forum, posting nowhere else, had "ruined" the internet. Now THAT's power!!!

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It sometimes amazes me that there are still corners of fandom -- and large corners, it would seem! -- where the origin of "Days of Future Past" is still unknown. It's not like I've been shy about discussing how the story came to be!

It began with the Sentinels, as many of you know. Chris didn't want to do a Sentinel story. He said "Sentinels are lame!" No, said I, you just WRITE them lame! So I plotted a tale in which the Sentinels were not only anything but "lame," they actually took over the world!

As it turned out, I would realize later that I had inadvertently lifted certain elements of my story from other sources, most specifically the "Day of the Daleks" story on DOCTOR WHO, which essentially provided the spine of "Days of Future Past," plus some visual elements from the novelization of THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION, which I'd read not long before working on "Days." Chris was familiar with neither of these stories, at the time, so obviously elements that came from them could not have been his idea.

Using Kitty as the maguffin of the story, with the "mental time travel" aspect was mine, and I'd come up with it as a way of ensuring the X-Men got a clear win out of this story, and did not merely create yet another "alternate timeline." I even convinced Captain Omniverse himself, Mark Gruenwald, that because "Kate" had journeyed back thru her own mind's timeline, there was no point at which a divergence could occur. (No small victory, that!) Of course Chris, in scripting the issues, slipped in an "alternate timeline" reference, and the notorious "incestuous lesbian kiss" moment (not in the pictures!) and thus gutted my story -- while providing himself and later writers acres of material to be forever strip-mined. Once again, the X-Men didn't really WIN.

<<It began with the Sentinels, as many of you know. Chris didn't want to do a Sentinel story. He said "Sentinels are lame!" No, said I, you just WRITE them lame! So I plotted a tale in which the Sentinels were not only anything but "lame," they actually took over the world!>>

It's interesting how things can change over time!  In February, I went to Wizard World New Orleans.  Chris Claremont was the featured subject of one of the panels.  As the subject turned to his early days on the X-Men, he said (and this is admittedly a paraphrase based on my memory), "One of the first things Dave Cockrum and I tried to do, when starting on the X-Men, was to give them some good villains.  At that time, the Sentinels were the only decent villains they had."

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I've seen it, and it's not. (it IS a Claremont specific doc after all) but JB is mentioned quite a few times by pretty much everyone in the doc and only with respect.

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Like Jack Kirby, Chris deserves every iota of the credit that is rightfully his -- I have often said, only half kidding, that based on the success of the book AFTER I left, it seems pretty obvious I was holding him back. However, also like Kirby, Chris is NOT entitled to any credit that belongs to others, whoever those others might be!

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Them -- and that small but vocal contingent who seem to want to erase my contributions to the industry retroactively. "His old stuff was better -- and, you know, even THAT wasn't any good!!"