News about an upcoming Shoujo Manga-style X-Men comic have been making the rounds lately to varied reactions.
Dick McVengeance of the Japanator is cautiously optimistic:
But wait, this could be good. I have to hope. There have been plenty of series reboots in comics that turn out well. So, I’m willing to hold back my Internet venom and give the series a shot. I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be a horrible fanfiction. I guess this is just more proof of how popular manga has become — once again, an American company is trying to take hold of the style to market to a new area.
Captain JLS is skeptical:
I’ll probably buy the upcoming books — heaven knows I bought all this other stuff — but I’d be much more interested if this was actually all coming from Japanese talent. Again, much like the Mangaverse project, when you have American fans of the material working on such things, they feel more like pastiche than anything else — as Paul O’Brien said in his review of X-Men: Ronin, it becomes a parlor game: “How can we take manga tropes and weld them to the X-Men?” Even if that’s basically what the Japanese creators wind up doing, it feels less tacky when it’s coming straight from the home of those tropes, you know?
Andy Miller is less than impressed:
Hear that sound? That’s me, dying a little inside. Dear god, did they just all sit in a circle and think, “What’s the stupidest thing we can do?” And once it came to them, they decided to go with it! And what’s the saddest thing? They can do their little “shojo” girl’s comic, but it will still be read primarily by 40 year old men, just like everything else with the X-Men label on it. It’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to bring in a whole new audience.
So what do you think?
December 15th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I’d be similarly worried if it wasn’t being helmed by Dave & Raina. With them on board, I’m definitely looking forward to this.
I just hope the art steps up from the pre-concept ‘concept art.’
December 15th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
i wish they’d do a manga from actual japanese talent. i think that would be interetsing. but maybe they’re worried that letting japanese creators on the project might make the x-men too racy. or worst, draw away readers from the main books if its really good.
December 15th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
X-Men shoujo style?
…don’t we call that “the Claremont run”?
(I’m not actually kidding.)
December 16th, 2007 at 12:23 am
“i wish they’d do a manga from actual japanese talent.”
They have done that, they just haven’t done a very good job at releasing it in the west. The Spider-man and X-men series were chopped up and heavily edited for monthly releases rather than going the trade route, Spider-Man J is presently buried in the pages of Spider-Man Family, and The Hulk series seems to have been largely forgotten.
Which is a shame as I’d really like the chance to buy most of those in manga-format.