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The metaphor of the X-Men often breaks apart, but a lot of the time, the comics don't worry so much about keeping things in realistic terms. The adventures get very wacky very often. There are a lot of sectarian conflicts though. Magneto has led a bunch of different factions over time with fairly varied schemes throughout, with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the Mutates, and the Acolytes (as well as his stint running the Young Mutants). His plans bounced between world domination, creating a new race from scratch, trying to just create a separate haven for mutantkind apart from the rest of the world, trying to fulfill Xavier's wishes, using terrorism to threaten the world into meeting his demands, and using a special high-tech anti-racism helmet to brainwash out bigotry. Then you have Mystique's Brotherhood of Mutants, who sometimes are just a merry band of outlaws, but they had a fairly long period when they were working for the US government as some kind of mercenary group, and their service kept them from being persecuted (although it's also keeping them from being prosecuted for the actual crimes they did). That kind of dynamic was done a lot stronger with the mutant slaves of Genosha, the Press Gang or in the Days of Future Past, the Hounds, and even Canada had its own special government-sanctioned group Apha Flight that used mutants for their service (Marvel comics Canada is weirdly fascist for some reason). The original X-Factor who had a weird scheme where they used the cover identity of the "X-Terminators" as a task force for controlling mutant threats, and that covered for them getting mutants away to safety. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the Hellfire Club, who are a fancy schmancy group of rich people trying to dominate the world in their own ways, and incorporating mutant powers was just another tool for them. Emma Frost's Hellions were a parallel to Professor X's school. And there's a lot of evil mutant groups out there with plans of varying quality from world domination like the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, or Mr. Sinister's weird genetics pervert plans. The villains often don't get thought through that much in depth, the Marauders are just a group who sure likes killing all the time and that's their whole story. And there's constantly a push and pull about the idea of how much groups should step up to help others as opposed to just sticking to their own poo poo, later versions of X-Factor tended to be more small-scale so they didn't deal with world threats, so was eXcalibur. The X-Men themselves constantly schism over whether they should be teaching kids, whether they should be helping mutantkind in general rather than focus on the youth, or whether they should go on wild and wacky adventures without a care to broader themes (I think the pinnacle of that might've been when the entire team faked their deaths to go off to an isolated compound in Australia).
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Feb 23, 2024 03:11
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I think sometimes Weapon X has the go ahead from the Canadian government, but they're kinda recursively mysterious so everything about them constantly shifts. Sometimes they're in a separate dimension? There's a French Weapon X guy who I think isn't French Canadian. Comicbooks get very complicated and silly.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:35
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I feel like that's been a problem that classic comics had for a while where they didn't really seem to be drawing young people to look young even though older comics often were more patronizing to the designated young characters. I've heard that Rogue in the comics had the extra complication of originally being intended to be a much older character, which was why she had Reed Richards hair. In the comics, Carol Danvers wasn't left comatose by Rogue stealing her powers, and she was more angry about the Avengers allowing her to be extradimensionally mind-raped. She hung out with the X-Men for a while until she got angry about them giving Rogue a separate chance and ran off to have Binary space adventures. That also made the latent Carol Danvers persona inside of Rogue more problematic, because the physically real Carol Danvers was still around and fine, but Rogue's Carol Danvers would still be trying to get out and sporadically taking over Rogue's body. I guess there was no comic storyline of Rogue and Carol Danvers reconciling to draw off of, and the show didn't really want to dig into non-mutant superheroes, so implying Carol Danvers was getting better and leaving it at that might've been for the best.
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Mar 18, 2024 02:34
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Air Skwirl posted:Wait, what?  Comics are silly.
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Mar 18, 2024 03:06
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Gambit's one of those weird characters who has just kinda been hanging around forever, being kinda mysterious, but attempts to develop more backstory for him don't so much add depth as they just make him into more of a weird creep.
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Mar 21, 2024 04:02
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I'm not really sure how much that is the case. Like I think probably by 2000 realistic guns were probably banned, but X-Men comics in the 90s didn't really have realistic guns either despite 90s Marvel comics being incredibly unrestrained otherwise. Mostly they had just gotten addicted to absurdly tech-y looking stuff and also the marvel artists didn't want to try to draw from reference.   The world of the X-Men had always been pretty wild and zany and detatched from realism, and they had been pushing the amount of technology with excuses about Shiar tech or Mojo being up to poo poo or here's Warlock, he's a living pile of tech garbage, or Forge's superpower is making extra techy stuff, or I guess Genosha is extra advanced because that's what they developed with their turbo apartheid, but by the 90s it had just metastasized and it was everywhere. The Leinfeld style which was a big hit at the time was all about stuffing in extra details regardless of whether they made any sense. The cartoon I don't think was otherwise very subtle. They had a recurring fictional gang of neonazis with their symbol being combination of an iron cross and that nazi bird.  Days of Future Past also had its original holocaust imagery largely intact. Even this guy showed up briefly in the Age of Apocalypse episode.  I think they just sincerely thought it was simpler and more straightforward to depict Magneto as the survivor of some nonspecific war rather than from the Holocaust. Xavier even explains it that way in his flashback. At the very least, animated Magneto wasn't born in Germany since where he lived was invaded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSntlWeEDAM That clip also shows the flashback people with passably realistic guns, while the guards at Beast's prison aren't even trying to look like any kind of real soldier in their weird red armor suits.
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Mar 21, 2024 21:52
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Psylocke's costume was definitely not child-appropriate. Her big character story of being brainwashed and race-swapped by Mojo to help The Mandarin take over the Hong Kong underworld is not really anyone-appropriate, and the big storyline I remember her having beforehand was about her losing her eyes sand then Mojo implanted eye replacements to help him broadcast X-Men adventures, it's all pretty nasty and you'd either need to do a lot of weird rewriting or reinvent her from scratch to make her work. And then her whole thing of stabbing people with psychic knives is weird, and do you really need three psychics in the show anyways? She was in the X-Men Cartoon Maker computer program though, so I wonder if there were earlier proposals to leave her in.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:34
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I think the ability to change into other people to be sneaky should be good enough, and not every character should have to have their powers constantly amped up to be competitive in straight out fights like it's Dragonball Z. The very silly Marvel anatomy book did give their take on her being able to move her organs.  X-Men Evolution had Apocalypse amp up Mystique's powers so that she could turn into animals like a bird as well. Larryb posted:Isn’t he kind of that way in the comics too? I always liked Cyclops. His whole thing where he constantly needs his glasses and visor to keep things under control resonates with me. For most of the comics, he is bouncing from one tragedy to the next, both a myriad of increasingly weird personal tragedies and being the guy who shoulders the responsibility for anything bad happening to the team as a whole. Cyclops may not be the best leader, but he's the often only one who's willing to step up and try to take that responsibility. The team and his legacy as Professor X's golden boy is his only solace from suffering. And he is also constantly contrasted with Wolverine, who is wildly popular, but Wolverine's whole thing is that he is constantly losing control. His mutation isn't crippling like Cyclops's is, he just can't be bothered to stay in line. He doesn't take responsibility, and he will always be the first to tell off Cyclops for when something goes bad, even if he never will bother to manage things himself, and he will be the first to step out of line and start making a plan go awry. Naturally this will fluctuate over time and from writer to writer; there was a fun time around 2010 when they kinda swapped places and Cyclops became a terrorist and Wolverine went back to start up the school again and became a soccer mom.
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Mar 22, 2024 19:45
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80s Marvel cartoons also had a couple crossovers, so there could be just a bit more of Australian Wolverine.RoboChrist 9000 posted:In some ways Spider-Man TAS was a lot more ambitious than X-Men TAS with its crossovers and whatnot. Which is weird since it always felt like it had less of a budget (the animation quality in X-Men, much like its writing, was uneven but generally at least on par for the time, and sometimes (and, no, not just Rogue's butt) great for the time) and definitely had more of a bat taken to it by the censors. 90s Spiderman definitely did much more complex plots, which necessitated Peter Parker constantly monologuing at length to keep things going. I kinda felt that he was always talking. The Electro story arc was pretty ridiculous how many twists and turns it tool. X-Men was more happy to just let the vibes of a scene speak for themselves, and I didn't always really understand what was going on, but it was cool. The animation looked worse in Spiderman, but then there isn't the same kind of big drop off in quality that X-Men had in its later seasons when it dramatically reduced its lighting effects, that makes it hard for me to watch the end. I don't really know the full story about censors, it definitely was afraid to be as explicit about bodily harm as X-Men, but the biggest thing was there was an episode that featured the Twin Towers that got an extreme hatchet job because 9/11 happened right when it was about to come out. Air Skwirl posted:I'd love that coming back too. Or either the Spider-Man show or a new Spider-Man show where he's not a loving high school student. Peter Parker did graduate high school in a reasonable amount of time, but even before the Ultimate universe, there were constantly a bunch of miniseries set back during Peter Parker's high school days, keeping the idea of teenage spiderman around.
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Mar 23, 2024 01:58
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I feel like I generally have a lower tolerance for teen angst shows, so while I wasn't as much of a hardline "only the show I watched first is valid X-Men", watching it was never really high priority for me, and I've never really gone back to watch it, even though I'll speak to its quality, and a lot of the big redesigns it did still hold up as really intersting characters in their own right even if they don't fit with the originals. It will definitely always stand as one of the boldest total redesigns of comic superheroes for the sake of a cartoon. It may have been taking a lot of cues from the movie, but it really went a long distance all on its own, especially with making them all high schoolers. I guess Batman Beyond and Spiderman unlimited came first, but Beyond is a more straightforward sequel while Unlimited was a bit of a mess and I couldn't really follow the plot. AlternateNu posted:I love the random giant dudes trying to spear Thing and Torch. Most of those villains showed up in the cartoon, although the Sleazoid episode was pretty lame. No discussion involving 90s Marvel cartoons and the Fantastic Four is complete without this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdW1vr5_Pcg
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Mar 24, 2024 03:45
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Magneto had the big M costume for the big "Trial of Magneto" cover, but it did suck. He also had a much classier outfit at around that time that he wore for his other trial.  NikkolasKing posted:Also I had a thought. You know how in the movies they have the simple black leather costumes. I remember somebody once told me they did it because they were almost too ashamed or scared of being flashy and cartoony. I can kinda see that - the original X-Men movie was coming off a lot of really, really bad comic book movie flops. So yeah, maybe no yellow spandex for Wolverine in a big budget Hollywood movie in 2000 or whatever. I think the marvel movies may still be afraid of looking too cartoony, although that may also be from the modern cinematography style of making all sets, props, and costumes fairly muted in colors in favor of reserving the general usage of colors for use in post editing color correction. They also seem terrified of the idea of spandex for some reason, movie superheroes still prefer leather and plastics over classic fabric, despite (or maybe because of?) leather's problems as a clothing material. Over time the X-Men (and their associated X-book teams) bounced around all over the place with their costumes, constantly torn between making big unified themes for uniforms and expressing individual identities for characters, sometimes even just wearing slightly elaborate street clothes for their iconic looks. Often new teams start out with all the same costume and only later assert their individuality, but the Giant Size X-Men reboot was a big exception to that. https://nerdist.com/article/dark-phoenix-evolution-x-men-costumes/ I'm pretty sure that the original costumes were meant to be black and yellow, but comicbook black often ends up blue, and a "blue and gold" dichotomy got integrated into the franchise when they wanted some kind of differentiation for running two "X-Men" comic titles concurrently.
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Mar 26, 2024 19:23
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Weird that they put Thunderbird in there to bulk out the villain side. I don't remember him ever showing up in the show. Larryb posted:I believe Cable also made an appearance in the original series but they weren’t explicit about his connection to Scott and Jean I believe that his origin ended up getting written after the cartoon had already been in production. He was kinda bouncing around between potential origins for a long while before they nailed him down to something. That's an intersting part about a lot of alternate media incarnations, sometimes they aren't purposefully choosing to be different, the comics just went a different direction later on. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 21:38
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The episode where Storm's godson is stuck in the astral plane and trying to get out of the wacky noneuclidian space as her voice just echoes again and again that he has to escape the astral plane before the rift reseals itself is seared into my mind.
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Mar 29, 2024 00:20
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The whole Goblin Queen thing in the comics sucked rear end. Total dogshit. Leading up to it, there were a lot of really weird and bad writing decisions, but tying them all together with a goofy crossover event like what would become the trend for modern comics really intensified everything because instead of one storyline that doesn't really make any sense, it's four.
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Mar 29, 2024 07:36
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The actual Spiderverse crossover event in the comics was kinda just obtuse trash aside from the excuse to play around with Spiderman variants (most of the important ones already existing beforehand). The movie basically conjured something really good almost entirely independently of the inspiring source material. It deserves as much celebration as possible for stepping out of the restrictions comic book movies normally get stuck in, and hitting it out of the park.I AM GRANDO posted:Greg Weisman has proven to be inconsistent when actually given a chance to continue years-old series of his cancelled prematurely. I really disliked Young Justice as it went on, but I wasn't much of a fan of its first season in the first place anyways; a lot of the overly-self-serious nature of it was baked in from the start. I think Spectacular Spiderman was set up more to counterbalance that tendency with some more baked-in silliness. I also just really liked the way that Spectacular successfully had a lot of character arcs going on in the background, not just Peter Parker's social circle, but the whole dynamically evolving crime world of NYC. Stylistically I also really like just the look of Spectacular compared to the 90s show, although there's less of a guarantee that look could be preserved. Unlimited might have it beat stylistically too, and if that somehow got revived that could be pretty wild just rebuilding it from scratch from the ground up. Pre-90s SpiderMan cartoons kinda lack enough defining features for a revival to be that meaningful. I guess the new Spidey and His Amazing Friends is kinda directly playing off of the 80s show but more thematically consistent. Worst possible option: MTV SpiderMan.
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Mar 30, 2024 05:55
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That's fair I guess. I didn't really watch much of MTV SpiderMan, the main thing I remember is just hating the way that it looked, since it was trying to do a very cheap yet also very early cel-shading.  I don't expect I would've liked the underlying substance much either since I was never an MTV kinda guy, but ugh that looked awful to me.
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Mar 31, 2024 01:17
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Reportedly MTV also left out Aunt May because they thought seeing old people would put off their audience.
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Mar 31, 2024 14:32
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What about 1966 Hulk.
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Apr 2, 2024 04:19
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Kitty Pryde I think was one of the most successful 'youth POV characters' in comics. When she got added, she helped the X-Men book get back towards its original idea of taking in and training the youth, and she spent a long time growing and maturing with the team. I think that also led to a lot of writers in the 2000s kinda getting waifu-y about her as they got the opportunity to write stories about the character they grew up reading, but it meant that she was one of the most recurring X-Men characters ever. Jubilee had a bit more messy of a time. She was introduced at a confusing time for the X-Men when a lot of their ongoing storylines had kinda been cut off, the team was in a very uncertain place, and the book even had a tendency of jumping its perspective around so you didn't really have any guarantee that you'll find out what happens to the characters of one issue in the next. The team had no pretense of returning to their roots as a school for her sake either. She was also introduced towards the end of Chris Claremont's long run on X-Men, and it's a lot harder to read X-Men in the 90s just from the booksplitting making things more confusing. She hadn't been around long when she got put into the cartoon. Eventually she got shunted off the 'main' team and put onto the new 'kids' team Generation X (a fate that Kitty had avoided with the New Mutants). For a lot of her teen years she was sort of a replacement for Kitty, and as an adult there were less writers who liked her when they were kids, so she got bounced around a lot of weird places. It was kinda neat that time she was a vampire.
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Apr 2, 2024 18:19
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Her character had been around for 16 years realtime at the point (on top of being originally introduced as a teen) and I think had even started her college degree at the time, as well as living on her own far away from her parents like an adult. Still creepy to have a self-insert do it, but not for age reasons. ImpAtom posted:I am pretty sure Clairmont was pretty vocally on the side of "Kitty likes the ladies" Nah, he wanted to pair her off with Colossus and got really angry when Secret Wars happened and Colossus fell in love with some random alien girl.
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Apr 2, 2024 20:39
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Better Mojo than Arcade.
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Apr 3, 2024 00:57
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MonsterEnvy posted:The defense also gets pretty silly. He was much classier at his other trial.   That one had a weird running plot of Magneto bringing out a special anti-racism helmet that may or may not have worked.
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Apr 14, 2024 03:51
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If you ever get a chance, the original space adventures in the comics were loving wild and worth reading. You'd also never in a million years guess how M'kraan Crystal is spelled. Of course, also a lot sloppier about starting stories, the original space mission in the comics where Jean Grey ends up turning into the Phoenix was some kind of trap by the the sentinels to bait the X-Men into a fight with robot copies of the original X-Men. One of my favorite adventures was is the sleazoid arc, which starts in medias res at a pretty crazy moment. One of the X-Men's last adventures before being discontinued in 1969 was the Z'nox invasion, which starts off with the professior randomly revealing that he had faked his death two years ago to prepare for this one story They fight off the invasion by Professor X and Jean harvesting the good will from the whole earth and channeling it into Havoc who channels it into Cyclops, who shoots a good vibes laser at the aliens while Iceman acts as a heatsink to keep Cyclops's head from melting and Beast and Angel fight off the other aliens. Good stuff.
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Apr 17, 2024 01:35
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B:TAS's weird period aesthetic was neat, the Superman series that followed had a similar thing going on, although it's a bit more subtle about it. Kind of retro-future, I guess also homaging a bit of a later decade than B:TAS. I think the thing that most stood out to me was the Daily Planet's desktop computers looking like old timey lamps. Most famously, most of Superman's villains used high-tech sci-fi weapons instead of something that would be more identifiable to a time period like the tommy gun, but I feel like most of that was for story reasons. There was sort of an overarching narrative of the series, the proliferation of high-tech weapons and the ordinary police being unable to deal with the new threats.
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Apr 19, 2024 00:43
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The whole fuzzy thing also came after he quit the X-Men to go off and do his own thing, and he developed a potion to enhance his mutation. He didn't intend for it to be permanent, but he missed the time limit so it stuck. After that he bummed around the places where Marvel throws characters it doesn't know what to do with, the Avengers and the Defenders. He didn't really get much development until the weird decision to reassemble the original X-Men into X-Factor, and at that point he could do the whole smartest guy in the room routine more regularly. The only story focusing on him I really remember is when the original comic was doing origin stories, and Beast's story was about playing football and having to fight a conquistador guy. Of course Cyclops's origin story at the same time where he was briefly adopted by a criminal with diamond hands is more fun.
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Apr 21, 2024 16:00
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iceyman posted:Jubilee was the totality of the "school" part. But no, they never had students in the traditional sense or anything like Evolution. The New Mutants had ran their course by the 90s, and Magneto quit running the X-Mansion towards the end and left them all in Cable's hands, and Cable didn't run no school and eventually shaped everyone who stuck with the team into a mercenary group he branded X-Force. The 90s did have Generation X, but they really didn't do the whole "school" concept well at all and were caught up in one of those edgey and complicated yet entirely forgettable plots that dominated 90s Marvel. The 2000s were probably the biggest time for the idea of the X-Mansion as a real proper school, because there was a whole thing with introducing a lot of student characters having actual high-school-type classes in the foreground. Later down the road after M-Day, the X-Men got increasingly militant and went off to San Francisco, and Wolverine broke with them and took the kids back to Westchester to be even more like a school. I don't know what they've been like since Wolverine died, probably a lot less school stuff from the things I've heard about where the X-Men have gone since. Before the 90s, the school stuff was also pretty sporadic. The first couple years of the X-Men comics played it up a bit, but when the X-Men got redesigned in 1975, all the new members were functionally adults until Kitty joined, and Kitty was often doing free study school work in the background and was the focus of a whole struggle with Emma Frost running her own evil school for mutants.
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Apr 26, 2024 00:06
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I don't think I've ever seen X-Men cards, but I think I did have a couple X-Men pogs.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:50
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Diabetic posted:I grew up reading X-Men cause I didn't have cable That's because he was in New Mutants and X-Force.
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May 1, 2024 20:00
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There does seem to generally be more of a need for supervillains in comics while with hero characters there's often a glut of more than the company really needs because a lot of characters can't really sustain their own books. Orphaned villains will often get picked up somwhere even if their hero isn't available. I know with Marvel's Darkseid ripoff they generally forget about his origins on Saturn's moon Titan and his weird rapey brother.
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May 2, 2024 22:07
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B:TAS was definitely headed towards somewhere focused on the artful and stylized side of things. I don't really know many of the details about the production teams. X-Men I know had some kind of deal where they lost their animation studio for the last season and got a low quality one to finish out the show. Maybe that reflects some broader instability of the production team behind the show so reverything kinda crumpled by the end to leave empty ground for animated Marvel to be reborn differently, while B:TAS gave way to the whole DCAU juggernaut that kept going and maintained thematic consistency for a very long while. Both shows reflect a rise in the standard of animation at the time. B:TAS being "artful" also meant that it was more intelligently designed for animation, they developed a whole new style and focused a lot on how things could move smoothly (and S:TAS refined that movement even more so Superman had some beautiful smearing across the screen). X-Men was just trying to straight-up copy a lot of the style of the comics, and left in way more little details that had to be painted in. Characters have much more defined muscles. In the first two seasons it was common for most characters to have basically 4 levels of lighting: base color, highlights to make it shiny, shadows, and then a thick inking effect that gives extra depth to the shadows. Sometimes there's even more lighting levels. Often there's a lot of more complicated VFX like transparent layers, airbrushed effects, whatever the hell Gambit's charging texture was. It seems kinda natural that the animation studio would burn out on all that effortful work. The DCAU seemed much more economical. Narratively, the difference between the DCAU and 90s animated Marvel seems pretty driven by the comics. The DCAU going for a retro aesthetic helped them play into the simpled episodic format with a new villain with a new scheme every episode. Marvel comics generally focused a lot more on the soap opera side of things and characters constantly getting wrapped up in their own deal rather than go out and find new evildoers.
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May 4, 2024 02:43
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