THE MARVEL ANIMATED UNIVERSE PART 2 - THE X-MEN

Well! It was last July that I wrote a fairly long post about my dream Spider-Man cartoon series, an adaptation of the Silver Age comics by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, and John Romita; a series that would have been set in the sixties (or at least in a pre-digital world). At the time, I said it was part one of a two-part series, and the second installment would cover my ideal X-Men animation. But, while I thought about it quite a bit in the subsequent nine months, I never got around to putting fingers to keyboard to write about it... until now.

Look, I loved the X-MEN cartoon in the 1990s. It was my companion through middle school and high school. And I really enjoyed its continuation, X-MEN 97, on Disney Plus. (Though that series is perfect encapsulation of why I loathe the current streaming model for TV series -- we had a ten episode season one in 2024 and we are still waiting for season two, two years later!! It's idiotic.) The X-Men series, at least for it's first season, took one of the most appealing aspects of the comics of the era -- namely, serialization -- and translated it to the small screen. To a kid who had never watched the likes of ROBOTECH, this was groundbreaking.

But X-MEN wasn't perfect; far from it, in fact. Even as a teen, I found it odd that the group was made up of a bunch of then-popular characters like Gambit, Rogue, and Jubilee, waltzing around like they'd always been there. Later in the series, this premise was walked back and it was established that there had been at least one prior iteration of the X-Men -- but at least early on, we were meant to believe that Wolverine and Gambit were among the first X-Men, fighting alongside Cyclops and Jean Grey against Magneto. It was weird.

And as with Spider-Man, I've long wished for an X-Men series that hewed more closely to the original comics. However, where the Spider-Man show I ruminated on last year was a somewhat straight adaptation -- not issue-to-issue, but simply in terms of the major storytelling beats -- this hypothetical X-Men cartoon would take a different route, at least at first. We would begin with the same basic premise as Spider-Man; a 65-episode series comprised of five 13-episode seasons. The first two seasons would focus on the original X-Men, and the final three would cover the era of the "new" X-Men.

ON THE PASSING OF GERRY CONWAY

It was announced last week that legendary comic book writer Gerry Conway has passed away at age 73. I posted something resembling the following in a thread on the subject at the MARVEL MASTERWORKS MESSAGE BOARD, where I do most of my comic book opining these days under the name "MCRE" -- but I wanted to publish my brief (yet ever so slightly expanded) thoughts here as well for posterity, because while I've frankly read relatively little of Conway's massive comic book output over the decades, what I did read left a big impression on me. Obviously there was his BATMAN/DETECTIVE COMICS run, which I wrote about in-depth here as my last major project before going into semi-retirement. I think anyone who read those posts would come to the conclusion that, while there may have been bits and pieces I didn't love, overall, I found it an exceptional stretch of Bat-stories.

But a few decades before I read those Batman comics (yet a few years after they were originally published), there was another Conway run that made a massive impression on me. If you were to ask me what formed the foundation for what I think Spider-Man is "supposed to be" when I was a child, I'd easily rattle off Roger Stern's Hobgoblin stories from 1983 (which were some of the earliest comics I owned as a child when I could barely read), the Lee/Romita newspaper strips I had via the 1986 BEST OF SPIDER-MAN book I mentioned numerous times when I looked at the strips years ago, the Lee/Romita AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues circa the "Petrified Tablet Saga" (issues 68 - 75) which I owned via digest reprints circa 1987-88, and Gerry Conway's WEB and SPECTACULAR from 1988 - 1990, which I was reading as it came out.

I was around 10-12 years old when that combined WEB/SPECTACULAR run was published, and having returned to it some years ago as an adult, I think it remains a high watermark for Spider-Man (and is my number one vote every year in the "Most Wanted Omnibus" polls). When discussing that run with Tom DeFalco for the COMICS CREATORS ON SPIDER-MAN book, Conway said that his editor allowed him to write the books as a soap opera about Peter Parker and his supporting cast. In other words, per Conway, he came up with all the sub-plots first, then wrote the superhero stuff around them. As far as I'm aware, this was a pretty novel way to write a superhero comic at the time (though perhaps Chris Claremont had beaten Conway to it by a few years), and it's really the best way to write a series like Spider-Man, in my opinion. And that isn't to say the superhero stuff was an afterthought in those issues! To this day, because of their influence on me when I was a child, the sagas of Tombstone (in SPECTACULAR) and the Lobo brothers (in WEB) remain "iconic" Spider-Man storylines in my mind.

So I'm pretty bummed about this, but nonetheless thankful for all the joy Conway gave me over the years.