Hatred and fear. Themes that never pass their sell-by-date, especially if you read comics. If you're a comic fan, you're already an outcast, a geek, a mutie, but the X-Men are there, standing at your side, and even though their superhero fantasy world is nothing like ours, their emotions are universal; their pain, their joy, their mistakes can be shared by anyone.

Professor X, a headmaster with big ideas.

Wolverine, a dirty fighter with a wounded soul.

Cyclops, a reluctant leader, repressed, noble and brutally hard on himself.

And Phoenix, a hero who refuses to give into the darkness within.

The X-Men is a comic soap opera that has been running for almost 50 years, but one that didn't reach its full potential until writer Chris Claremont came on board. Together with artists John Byrne and the late Dave Cockrum, and later Paul Smith and Jim Lee to name but a few, he produced sexy, modern and intelligent comics - three adjectives you wouldn't normally associate with superheroes. His 17-year run on the Uncanny X-Men defined the genre for the Seventies and Eighties, more so than the dark realism of Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns. In 1991 he walked out on the team at the height of their popularity, quitting just as one of his books spectacularly broke the record for the biggest-selling comic. Now he is returning to finish the story the way he intended.

"There’s nothing wrong with grand opera if you do it right," says Claremont. "It's a way of giving a view of yourself through a heroic prism that sweeps you up and carries you along and makes you excited, but at bedrock remains totally relevant.

"When John Byrne and I were doing the X-Men we didn't want to be restricted by the rules of super heroism and superhero stories. What could we do that hadn't been done before? If we have this huge stage to play on, why restrict ourselves to Manhattan or the X Mansion? With comics you have five or six people, if you’re counting the editor and the letterer and the colourist, doing the visual work of a host of cinema technicians and actors and exploring a vaster array of visual possibilities. Why not explore space and time and literally make the sky the limit and then see how far we can go after? We tried as hard as possible to catch the readers off guard, to show them that they could never take anything about the series for granted other than it would be 22 pages every month."

If the situations the X-Men found themselves were fantastical, their characters were grounded in an all-too familiar reality. The original X-Men were five nice white kids from America's north east, poster children for preppiness even though they were supposed to be mutants and outcasts. Claremont's X-Men, however, were drawn from all over the world and looked as if they had suffered from the prejudice and paranoia of Nixon's divided America. "With the X-Men, my intent was to ground the characters in a world that the readers could recognise. Take Storm: her father’s an American journalist, her mother is African, they’re in Cairo, it’s the ’56 war, they’re killed and she grows up on the streets. Colossus is a Ukrainian who suddenly finds himself in the heart of the great Satan, it being the Seventies and the US being the Soviet Union’s antagonist. Nightcrawler came from a Germany that was split in half. I wanted to reflect the real world through these characters and show the readers the differences and the similarities of people around the world."

Like the new X-Men, Claremont's background is a mish-mash of different cultures. He was born in London in 1950, the son of two RAF officers, and although his family moved to the US when he was three, Britain still played an important part of his childhood. "My grandmother took out an annual subscription to Eagle all through my youth and I grew up reading Dan Dare. It was a total refuge for someone living in Long Island. The Superman and Batman stories that were running in the Fifties and very early Sixties were as antithetical to the Eagle as you can imagine. The Eagle was much more exciting. I still remember easily an episode where the Earth sailed through a space cloud. There's a shot of giant rectangular clouds sort of descending on London and from them springs this hoard of noxious bugs that start eating everything. Dan Dare mingled space adventure with some very real fiction and exploited the fact that with pictures you can do anything without having to pay a billion pounds in special effects.

"The one Eagle series that I enjoyed from a reader’s point of view was The Road of Courage - the life of Christ. It was drawn by Dan Dare's creator, Frank Hampson, and I didn’t realise at the time that Christ looked so much like Dan Dare. I remember reading an episode where Jesus was a young boy and a friend of his steps on a snake and is bitten. Rather than do anything appropriate to the time or anything magical, Jesus whips out a blade and very efficiently does a Boy Scout life-saving technique to open the wound and suck out the poison. Looking at it as a young Scout, it was cool. You would never imagine that the son of God could be just like a Scout."

For someone who would go on to have a huge imprint on comics, Claremont initially viewed the medium as unworthy of a career. His ambition was to become a director. "I started out in university as a political theorist but then Nixon got elected and it didn’t seem like fun anymore, so I moved to a shared major in political theory and acting. I guess I was precursing the shape of politics to come with Reagan. I was also writing novels at the time. I made my first professional sale with a prose story, not a comic book. A career in comics was never something I had looked at as a future because comics were dying. Readers were walking away, and with good reason because the material was simply not that interesting." When he took a job Marvel as an editorial gofer in 1969, it was so he "could build a nest egg and go out directing". Five years later he was writing his first Marvel comic - a kung-fu adventure starring Marvel's answer to Bruce Lee, Iron First - and he was hooked.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010