X-Men '97 and the Superhero Soap Opera

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we’re talking about the smash hit X-Men revival, X-Men ‘97. Before that, though, here’s some news from the anime and manga world.

News

• GKIDS announced that they secured the rights to the 4K restoration of Angel’s Egg, Mamoru Oshii’s deeply weird and infamous film made together with Yoshitaka Amano. They’ll be bringing it to both theaters and home video. Exciting stuff!
• There’s a new Ghost in the Shell coming from Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! studio Science Saru. That’s a big deal, but I’m nervous that the studio is already moving so far from its roots in weird original films. (In related news, the studio was recently acquired by TOHO.) At least the studio’s upcoming The Colors Within looks excellent.
• Housenka is an upcoming film featuring Baku Kinoshita and Kadzuya Konomoto, the director and scriptwriter of ODDTAXI. That series was one of the best original series of the past several years, so I’m excited to see how this turns out.
• Penguin Random House is now selling and distributing the catalog of manga publisher TokyoPop. This is deeply strange news considering how infamous TokyoPop used to be back in the day. Hopefully with Stu Levy out of the picture, things will only improve…?
• Kinema Citrus announced two exciting original series, Goodbye Lara and Ninja Skooler. More on these soon!

Bookmarks

• For Anime News Network, Miles Thomas analyzed Netflix’s anime viewership data.
• Dave Cabera wrote about Metallic Rouge, a series that is faithful to the 2000s classics up to and including a disappointing ending.
• For Anime Feminist, Cy Catwell wrote about Nagata Kabi and chronic illness.
• Also for Anime Feminist, Kennedy dug into the fraught “Terrace House” riff in Oshi no Ko to figure out whether or not it works as intended.
• Turn A Gundam historian and scholar Feez wrote a piece in honor of the show’s 25th anniversary.

What I Wrote

• I finished the second part of my feature on Webtoon artist Lee Yone at Comics Beat, this time focusing on what she produced under the name Gaje at Lezhin Comics.
• Also for Comics Beat, I interviewed Jean-Ken Johnny from the popular Japanese rock band/wolf pack MAN WITH A MISSION.
• At Crunchyroll News, I interviewed Hirotaka Mori, the director of last year's post-apocalyptic anime Heavenly Delusion.
• For start menu, I wrote about a recent remake of the hugely influential RPG Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
• Over on Unpacking the Shelf, I made my friend Alex watch three episodes of the long-running Japanese superhero franchise Ultraman. It gets weird!

AMV of the Week

Here's "Attack on (Some) Titans - Part 1," by Davis 51.

Chris Claremont wrote the comic Uncanny X-Men from 1975 to 1991. He’s responsible for classic story arcs like “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” “Days of Future Past” and “God Loves, Man Kills.” He also collaborated with many of the best writers and artists of his time, including Louise Simonson, Alan Davis, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Adapting the appeal of these works to the screen is tougher than you might think. X-Men doesn’t have a “main character” like Spider-Man or other popular Marvel comics. Issues end on cliffhangers that tease future earth-shattering developments. Some of the most critically acclaimed X-Men stories have scenes that are just baffling, like a sequence in the otherwise beloved "Demon Bear Saga" where two side characters are transformed into Native Americans.

Take “The Dark Phoenix Saga” as an example. Team psychic Jean Grey is possessed by a cosmic entity known as Phoenix. She becomes incredibly powerful, but is corrupted by that power and commits planetary genocide. The X-Men rush to stop her before she gets into any more trouble. While they restore her mind, she ultimately sacrifices herself to save her friends. It’s a dramatic storyline that has been adapted twice to film.

Unfortunately, both adaptations were failures. Jean’s turn towards evil doesn’t land unless the viewer knows just how out of character it is for her. Her transformation into the Phoenix is just one part of a life that also includes her relationship with fellow X-Man Scott Summers (Cyclops) and her clone (long story!) Madelyne Pryor. Leaving the other parts out flattens her character into somebody she’s not.

That is because, in the words of the podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Claremont wrote “superhero soap operas.” His characters are the sum of all their past decisions and future mistakes. You don’t have to know everything about them to appreciate each twist and turn in the plot. But Claremont’s comics only improve if you are familiar with every character’s baggage. That is why X-Men lends itself better to serialized television than films, despite having been made into eleven films over the years. (Deadpool doesn’t count.)

The animated TV series X-Men ‘97 aired this year from March 20 to May 15th. It’s a spiritual successor to the original X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran through the 1990s. Plenty of folks are nostalgic for that show. I never bothered with it. Batman: The Animated Series was more than enough for me. When it was announced that X-Men ‘97 would be made in the image of its low-budget predecessor, I lost all interest.

But then X-Men ‘97 became a critical success. It’s Marvel’s first big win since Endgame blew the roof off the franchise. How could this have happened? A friend of mine credits Beau DeMayo, the showrunner who was mysteriously booted from the project just shortly before the premiere. Others praise Studio Mir, the animation production studio that handled the series and likely punched up the fight scenes. (Mir is best known for Avatar: The Last Airbender, still the standard by which all anime-inspired serials are judged.)

Myself, I would point to a scene in its second episode. Jean Grey has just had her baby. Scott Summers stands over her bedside. Between the two of them, we see Logan (Wolverine) at the door. As Scott leans in to kiss Jean, his body blots out Logan. Then the “camera” cuts to outside the room, revealing that the side of the door is torn by Logan’s adamantium claws.

The drama in this scene! It was Logan who drove Jean to the hospital when she was having contractions. It was Scott who chose to go to work that day rather than stay home with the love of his life. Yet Scott reaps the rewards, while Logan slinks into the shadows. Yet is there a true “winner” here? Scott will always struggle to balance his loyalty to the X-Men with his love for Jean. Jean loses the baby in the very next episode. Logan respects both Scott and Jean and wants them to be happy.

At the end of the episode, Scott and Jean announce that they are leaving the X-Men to raise their child. The crisis has been averted, everybody is happy. Suddenly there is a knock at their door. Another woman stumbles over the threshold. Everybody yells: “Jean?!” It was at that moment that I realized X-Men ‘97 was a superhero soap opera.

Every character begins and ends the series in motion. Cyclops is thinking about leaving the X-Men until circumstance spoils his chance. Storm is an all-powerful weather goddess until she loses her powers and then finds them again. My favorite though is Magneto, the grim mutant extremist who constantly steals the show. He is a villain, reluctant hero, natural disaster and trauma victim depending on the episode in question.

The X-Men are constantly referencing earlier events, like: “this jaunt reminds me of the time that we fought the Kree on Saturn to prevent the Brood from fusing with Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton!” Somehow this never falls into the trap of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where every off-handed reference to other material becomes homework. My guess is that because the series is written as a soap opera, continuity is really just a luxury. Something will always be happening in the world of the X-Men. The choices the characters make in the moment are what matter.

I also like that the X-Men’s composition changes all the way through ‘97. Some of them die, others skip town. You mourn the departures, and anticipate their return after they are presumed dead. But you learn to appreciate new faces like the fuzzy swashbuckler Nightcrawler. This has always been a specialty of the X-Men comics, and ‘97 follows suit.

There’s one big problem that I have with the series, though, and that’s the length. At just 10 episodes, X-Men ‘97 only has so much time to waste. Characters like Storm are given just an episode to work through their respective arcs. Big crossover storylines like "Inferno" are simplified to fit within the constraints of the runtime. That isn’t always a bad thing; X-Men can be hit or miss, and adapting the material for the medium is the right call. But the series lives or dies by its characters. If the staff have to shortchange those characters for the purposes of the greater narrative, that’s a failure.

I can’t help but think about how much more faithful anime adaptations are these days. My Hero Academia has been running for seven seasons and sticks very closely to the source material. If you watch that series, you know the source material, in a way that you don’t get by watching any of the X-Men films or even X-Men ‘97. That’s not to say that approach is always the best way. My Hero Academia’s greatest weakness as an adaptation is that it is too faithful. X-Men benefits by revision. But how to do that while maintaining the sprawl?

The days of long-running narrative television in the United States are long gone. Most shows are lucky to run for just one or two seasons. X-Men ‘97 is harmed by those limitations. If only it could run for dozens of episodes, becoming a tangled mess of characters and choices, like Claremont’s did! But every iteration of the X-Men is imperfect, from the comics to the films and television shows. It’s baked into the concept. In that respect at least, X-Men ‘97 too is a faithful adaptation.