Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Magneto Is Superhumanly Attractive

2024-May-22

Today I’m going to be talking about the X-Men. The animated X-Men ‘97 is the catalyst that stirred me to reach into the deeper mythos of the X-Men franchise. I can already tell this will be a multi-part blog entry so let's get down to brass tacks about The Uncanny X-Men before we talk about how amazing another season to a show I watched twenty four years ago could be so good.

If you have been a fan of the Fredlambuth.com blog enough to have read about ten posts back, you’d know who the ‘creators’ of the Marvel Comics characters are. Especially their spate of original characters in the Silver Age of the 1960s. The original #1 issue in the X-Men monthly series is credited to Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, and one among their many lucrative creations from that era. Fine enough job they did, I would not credit them with being the X-Men that I had to come to know and love. That would belong to one writer and a handful of artists that contributed to the series throughout 1975-1993ish.

That run is arguably the creche from where the uber-popular X-Men- as I and most people my age came to know them- emerged from. Between 1963 and 1975 the X-Men were not the sales darling of the Marvel publishing company pantheon of monthly titles. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (et al) were striking gold right away with other titles in this Silver Age of American comics, but that was not the case right away with sales for the adventures of Charles Xavier commanding a ragtag group of outsiders against Magneto.

The X-Men as they’re known to me, with a Wolverine taking most of the attention but not being the leader, began with Giant Size X-Men #1, when Chris Claremont took over the writing direction and John Byrne provided the artwork. I’m not here to give a history lesson on what the creative teams were behind what plotline or what character. The gist of this change starting in ‘75 was that Chris Claremont would be calling the shots for decades to come and he introduced all the institutions that hold together the X-Men mythos that lasted.

Although I had not read any of the issues of X-Men from before this era, I am willing to bet the writers at the time did not know how to push the more provocative ideas the X-Men can offer as outcast superheroes, even though most of Marvel’s stable of characters are themselves marginal type figures. Or at least, more marginal than the gleaming paragons of upright virtue that are the DC Comics characters. The X-Men were the mutants in the Marvel Universe, which is essentially a subhuman caste even in the world of superpowers. People ‘born’ with their powers.

Claremont really injected the young-adult soap opera melodrama that I sometimes found to be overbearing as a kid but is suited for making compelling monthly reading about teenage outcasts learning to use the superpowers that make them outsiders to mainstream society. To be honest, as a kid I was pulled into the X-Men comic book hype because of the art. To this day Marvel offered several other character that I find more interesting, but the X-Men in the early 90s was the art factory for the coolest looking stuff.

Any appreciation I have come to find for the verbose dialogue Claremont insisted came into my adult years of appreciating comic books. In the flush of youth when the X-Men stories I read were new, I was a little put off by just how much of each page was filled with text boxes. Later I could tell they were there to give dramatic gravity between action scenes. Subtext like that is lost when I was seven years old looking for dramatic shots of Wolverine cutting somebody.

Jim Lee was in charge of pencils for Uncanny X-Men in the late 80s until the super sales explosion that was the newly numbered X-Men (no Uncanny) brought him over, lasting until he departed that title in 1992 to co-create Image Comics. Jim Lee’s work had me buy issue after issue -where I saw one-without any thought to reading the actual text bubbles well after I absorbed just how awesome he could draw fight scenes. Marc Silvestri, who began with Uncanny X-Men in the mid80s, took over the Uncanny series, and started to match the overproduced style of Jim Lee, with a bit more old-fashioned illustrator quality. Both artists on both titles were also using more dynamic panel styling, with ‘splash pages’ of action that were not held back by anything except page size.

A few of the X-titles from Marvel at the time were also putting out artwork that matched the overdetailed style that Jim Lee pioneered in Uncanny X-Men. None could compete, even if so many titles were trying new things in their visual design that X-Men already had done for years. DC especially looked limited by a larger editorial decision to keep the illustrations clean by textbook standards compared to the rule breaking and somewhat amateurish Jim Lee imitators that went with style over clarity.

I had mentioned that this section of the multi-part X-Men blog is about X-Men ‘97. A continuation to a Saturday morning cartoon series running from 1992-1996. A television series that was likely more responsible for making the ‘X-Men’ franchise a name among children at the time and prime spending aged millennials in 2024 than the actual comic books that inspired the animated series.

What I found to be incredible in this new X-Men animated production was the dedication by the creative staff. Every episode is pouring out at the scenes with minor characters that existed in the actual pages of X-Men in their legendary run. Far more stylish critique can be found about how well plotted out the animated series delivered the stories that originated in Chris Claremont’s words. I give the series kudos for using them efficiently into ten episodes. My expectations are met just by their existence in the script and their competent placement.

During the mid90s I was somewhat the de facto ‘expert’ of what happened to the X-Men in the original comics when other kids at school asked me about what went on last Saturday ‘previously on X-Men’. What I would report to them was the show got the essentials close enough. However there were so many missed opportunities! So many cameos or minor appearances that teased but did not budge the story.

In retrospect I can see the creative staff to the 92-96 series was not put together with Marvel True Believers. Rather, it was made by a production company skilled at taking existing properties and assembling a competent animated feature for a kid audience. Bit characters were just that, bit characters. Nobody on that staff was going to bleed resources to have a costumed petty thug match up with a less than famous X-Men villain. Shared history was ignored or erased between on-screen characters for the sake of production expedience.

Once again, this new series is incredible because there are no missed opportunities. Of course the stories from decades of comic books issues cannot be grafted into thirty minute episodes without fudging the input and output to those story arcs. To argue for comic book authenticity would be absolutely nerd foppery. What I saw were ten episodes with every single rendered scene and figure that was rarely happenstance. Visual design for everything on screen was mined from pages of X-Men comics, especially in the late 80s/early 90s era that made the X-Men just so cool!

The mid 90s was the last era before the internet. To be a fan of the X-Men at that time meant finding their mercurial stories hidden behind several 22-page installments from a friend or through a comic book shop. The X-Men were a phenomena kids would pass around by word of mouth or trading the issues themselves. Finding information about them was hard to come by other than that. It was practically the same method for acquiring punk rock CDs.

Marvel Comics, and its stable of A-list characters, was somewhat famous among adults in the 90s, but the X-Men were not usually in that list. Today, in 2024, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and The Hulk may be more famous than the X-Men as media properties now in the mid 2020s, but in the early 90s they were bygone figures that had yet to have a successful film to cement them into popular culture’s A-list. The sales list for Marvel Comics itself in the 90s was X-Men, Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, and The Punisher. The Avengers were quaint.

Not the X-Men. The X-Men were the coolest shit you could find for an American boy looking for a media property in 1992, and the animated series that came about in that year is a decent enough product that spawned from the uber-cool X-Men. And parents did not really know them. They knew about the Marvel A-list, but these X-Men were unfamiliar and alien, much like other media directed toward children.

Twenty four years later is about enough time for a new generation of animation creatives to come to bear. I imagine the crew who made X-Men’ 97 and the executives who ok’d it were fans of the original show, and likely the source material books. Perhaps that is something that could still wow me in comic book adaptations. Uncanny fan service.

Splendid as it is that The Avengers and almost all of their members have had billion dollar movies that have made them cultural touchstones that the medium of comic books could never have delivered. I am still bored with the idea of a movie of the same quality as those twenty or so MCU movies I watched between 2008-2018. What could be an interesting deviation is plumbing the depth of comic book authenticity! The stuff that was only in the comics but the 92-96 series merely teased at!

Other than that, the only way out for making comic book movies interesting again for me, the spending prime aged millennial, is to find some other new take for delivering Marvel stories. Maybe a faithful sub-universe of Ghost Rider stories for TV? Anyway, that’s just spitballing more early 90s Marvel hits. Tune in next blog post this month for more words commiserating on a more nerdy scale of the X-Men: the ‘outback’ era of The Uncanny X-Men.