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.

JULY 2025 - THE MARVEL ANIMATED UNIVERSE PART 1

Marvel cartoons have existed practically since the dawn of the Marvel Universe in the 1960s, when Grantray-Lawrence Animation produced THE MARVEL SUPER HEROES and THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, while Hanna-Barbera gave us THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Over the decades, many more series followed. I have particularly warm and fuzzy memories of watching SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS and THE INCREDIBLE HULK on NBC Saturday morning in the early eighties, catching the "Pryde of the X-Men" pilot episode for an unproduced X-MEN cartoon later in the decade, and then eventually, in the 1990s, watching a semblance of a united Marvel animated universe (if only by dint of the various shows using all the same voice actors for episodes with guest appearances) with X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN on Fox, FANTASTIC FOUR and IRON MAN in syndication, and THE INCREDIBLE HULK on UPN.

And there have been many, many more Marvel shows since then, including the unparalleled and cancelled-far-too-soon AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, whose first season I wrote about here years ago, during the height of COVID lockdown time.

I think after EMH ended, Marvel dabbled with what you might call a shared universe again, with shows like ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, MARVEL'S AVENGERS, HULK AND THE AGENTS OF S.M.A.S.H., and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY all having some degree of crossover. But Marvel has never done -- and, as you'll soon see, likely never will do -- a shared animated universe in the way I'd like to see it done. I've written about this concept before, in comments on posts over at Gentlemen of Leisure, but I decided I should consolidate my thoughts and post them here, if for no other reason than posterity. So what you're about to read are some of those afore-mentioned comments, expanded and updated.

Again, it's unlikely to ever happen exactly this way, but my dream will always be to someday see animated versions of the Marvel characters that adhere to the established comic book continuities of their early years. Now, I'm not saying I want straight page-to-screen translations of every issue from the 60s; but more like picking and choosing the things that worked best and making them into a pre-planned, cohesive story, while respecting the general original chronology laid out by Kirby, Ditko, Lee, Romita, and the rest.

Now, I know I'm already dating myself with this, but let's say Marvel/Disney is going to produce a Spider-Man cartoon using the long-established "magic number" of 65 episodes -- in this case, a pre-planned five-season series of thirteen episodes per season. The show would start with Spider-Man established; no need to revisit his origin. Peter Parker is, say, a high school junior with maybe a year of adventuring and fighting common criminals under his belt. Our first season would basically adapt the first half of Steve Ditko's run. Again, there's no need to cover every single issue; just hit the major highlights -- the first appearances of the Chameleon, Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, the Enforcers, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, and Kraven would be sufficient, with Ditko's sub-plots threading through all the episodes in a serialized fashion. Perhaps the season ends with the Sinister Six story from the first Spidey Annual.

The first thing to note is that certain characters should be introduced in our series sooner than in the comics. For example, there's no reason not to have Robbie Robertson working at the Daily Bugle from the first episode. Norman Osborn could start to show up earlier than in the comics as well, in order to better plant the seed that he will eventually be revealed as the Green Goblin. But the flip side of this is that we don't want to mess with the continuity too much. Peter Parker absolutely did not go to high school with Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn, and it drives me nuts every time adaptations in various media have them at Midtown High with him. We'll get to them eventually; no need to shoehorn them in too soon.

And the main way our series would be different from a lot of cartoons would be that it passes in real time, with each seasona accounting for a school year in Spidey's life. So season 2 would pick up a few months after the end of season 1, with Peter starting his senior year in high school. This season would continue to adapt Ditko stories, but with more of an organized crime bent, featuring the story of the Big Man and the Crimemaster, more of the Enforcers, the Green Goblin trying to take over New York's gangs, and perhaps some foreshadowing of the Kingpin. Plus the debuts of a couple new villains like Scorpion and the Spider-Slayers, as well as return engagements from the major villains -- Kraven, Sandman, etc. -- and it would all culminate with a 2-part season finale featuring Doc Ock, adapting the classic "Master Planner" story.

At this point, the series moves in a new direction. When season 3 opens, another summer has passed and Peter is starting college at Empire State University. Certain high school cast members are gone (Liz Allen, Sally Avril), replaced by the afore-mentioned Harry, Mary Jane, and of course Gwen Stacy. This season opens with the transition from Steve Ditko to John Romita -- a 2-parter featuring the unmasking of the Green Goblin. From there, the remaining 11 episodes of the season adapt the early John Romita material; the Rhino, the Shocker, the "death" of the Vulture, and the returns of stalwarts like the Lizard and Kraven. The season likely ends with another classic, "Spider-Man No More!", showing us the Kingpin in full for the first time, after we've heard thorughout the season that someone has been villing the mob boss void left by Crime-Master and the Big Man, as well as the disappearance of the Green Goblin following the season premiere.

By now, you know the drill. Another summer time-jump and we reach season 4, in which we adapt more John Romita stories. This is a Kingpin-heavy year, as were the comics around this time. The Kingpin appears in, or has his hands in, nearly every episode. But there's still time for appearances by Doc Ock, the Vulture, and Mysterio. I imagine the season might end with a Green Goblin return, adapted from the story in SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN Magazine #2.

And that brings us to the fifth and final season, which spends nearly its entire run-time on the classic "Petrified Tablet" story, featuring a gang-war between the Kingpin and Silvermane, and ending with Silvermane's death.

Now -- this isn't perfect; it's really me coming up with all of this off the cuff while looking at AMAZING SPIDER-MAN covers for inspiration. But you get the idea. Five seasons, following Peter from the midpoint of high school to the end of hus junior year of college (and if the series is successful enough, maybe we get picked up for another 65 to cover his senior year and a few years of graduate school). The show would stick to adapting the Silver Age stories as best it could, with certain modifications to allow for better pacing, foreshadowing, and so forth. And -- this is a big one -- I would actually set the series in the sixties, when the comics were published! Or, at least, in a pre-digital world. I find that as I get older, I feel everything is better if it's set in the era when it was created. I read someplaced that the current PEANUTS cartoons produced for Apple TV have a mandate not to use any technology created after the 1970s. I think that's a great rule of thumb for everyting, everywhere, all the time, but for now we'll just apply it to these fictional Marvel shows!

(Yes, I said "these" -- I'm not done yet! Next time, I'll talk about my hypothetical X-MEN series!)

Anyway, like I said up top, there's no way this actually happens. It's not commercially viable enough. It's too niche. Audiences nowadays want their Miles and their Venom and their Spider-Gwen and their Silk and so on and so forth. And setting in the sixties probably loses a lot of the young viewers such a show would need in order to survive. So this concept will always remain nothing more than a pipe dream for me! (At least until the day A.I. can create bespoke content on demand with no regard for corporate ownership.)

This post went pretty long, so I won't bore you with any other content, other than to note that I'm still reading the newspaper strip adventures of Rip Kirby! But I think I went pretty in-depth on what I liked about that last time, so I won't go into it again. Maybe next month I'll have moved along to something different?!

MUSINGS ON MASTERS

Ever since I spent a few months writing about MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE last fall, I've found myself thinking about the property -- the toys, the cartoons, the comics, everything. As I noted once or twice at the time, I love the series' mythology. When I was a child, Filmation's cartoon was the end-all, be-all for me, and any other versions of the continuity were "wrong" in my head -- but as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate those other tellings of He-Man's story.

One of the cool things about the MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE CLASSICS toyline that Mattel conceived in 2008, was it's "everything counts" philosophy. Through the figures' cardback bios, Mattel weaved a MASTERS tapestry that found ways to legitimize some of the extraneous continuities alongside the familiar setup presented by Filmation. Suddenly, thanks to some finagling, the earliest minicomics by Don Glut and Alfredo Alcala could have happened, in some way or another, in the same universe as many of He-Man's cartoon adventures.

In part this was accomplished by Mattel declaring that the Sword of Power, originally known as the Sword of He, was passed down through the ages, through a series of guardians -- with each one taking on the title of "He-Man". Prince Adam retained his special destiny, however, as being a direct descendant of the sword's first user, King Grayskull, and therefore being the first protector of the sword who was able to tap into its magic and transform himself with it. Thus, the "He-Man" in those early minicomics is actually Oo-Larr, who watched over the sword before Adam -- and who even had a few encounters with Skeletor himself during Adam's lifetime.

X-FACTOR BY JOHN BYRNE

Image borrowed from
Marvel Comics of the 1980s

Having covered FANTASTIC FOUR #286 and the return of Jean Grey this past week, I find myself thinking, as I occasionally do, about one of the best comic book runs the world never saw: John Byrne's X-FACTOR.

As I understand it, Marvel decided that the X-Men were such a phenomenal hit that they needed a second spinoff after NEW MUTANTS, and X-FACTOR was born, conceived by editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and writer Bob Layton without consulting with the X-Men's editorial office or that title's writer, Chris Claremont. The goal was originally to reunite the four surviving members of the original X-Men -- Cyclops, Beast, Angel, and Iceman -- with Dazzler filling the role of the distaff fifth member. But John Byrne and Roger Stern -- and, more importantly, Kurt Busiek -- got wind of this plan and Busiek pitched his idea for a way to bring Jean back into the picture, which Stern and Byrne ran with in AVENGERS and FANTASTIC FOUR. Thus the stage was set for all five original X-Men to return to action in X-FACTOR.

The title stumbled along initially with some woefully regressive Silver Age-style stories by Layton and penciler Jackson Guice, until the wife-and-husband team of Louise and Walter Simonson took over and invigorated things with issues 6 (Louise as writer) and 10 (Walter as penciler).

INTRODUCTION SPECULATION

The following began as a footnote to last week's UNCANNY X-MEN OMNIBUS volume 3 review, but grew so long I decided to turn it into its own post:

As I've noted before, whenever Marvel puts out a Silver or Bronze Age Omnibus, they include the introductions from prior Marvel Masterworks volumes which collected the same material. In the case of UNCANNY X-MEN, when Marvel started the line in the late eighties, most of their volumes featured intros from Stan Lee. Somehow, the first UNCANNY Masterworks had an intro from Lee but also one from Chris Claremont, possibly depending on the edition (I know mine had one by Lee, but the UNCANNY OMNIBUS volume 1 features the Claremont one, which I assume was produced for the very first printing in 1989).

Moving on, when the Masterworks program was revived in the mid-00s, volumes 4 and 5 featured intros from Claremont, 6 had one from inker Terry Austin, and then editor Louise Simonson arrived for volume 7 and the subsequent 8 and 9. I have no objections to Simonson; I'm quite happy she penned at least one introduction. My point, really, is -- why not spread the introduction love? If Chris Claremont is currently unwilling or unable to do them, what about others who worked on the series? Sadly, penciler Dave Cockrum passed away before Marvel got around to reprinting his second run in 2008 -- but what about his successor, Paul Smith? Or even longtime letter Tom Orzechowski and colorist Glynis Oliver -- were either of them approached to write an intro? They got the inker to do one, for Pete's sake (for a volume in which he worked on three out of ten collected issues)!

HOW TO DO A TRANSFORMERS COMIC RIGHT

So we're done with Dreamwave's TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION ONE comics. I still maintain that James McDonough and Adam Patyk have come the closest to a perfect translation of the Transformers to the printed media, but they still had some misses in the process. To varying extents, Sunbow Animation, Marvel Comics, and IDW Comics have pulled it off as well, but the perfect TRANSFORMERS series would be a mix of elements from all these various continuities.

Several years ago, around the time IDW's comics started to lose me, I wrote the below, detailing just what I think the ideal TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION ONE comic book franchise would be. I had no blog back then, of course; this was something for my own entertainment, to get it out of my head.

But now, since I just wrapped up my reviews of the closest-to-ideal G1 comic book continuity I've seen, I figure I'll present the following, with minor edits since I first wrote it in 2011, for your pleasure:

WHY ISN'T THERE A SHE-HULK TV SERIES?

As the new television season gears up, I find myself wondering about this. It's a weirdly specific question, maybe, but I think it's a reasonable thing to consider. Most iterations of SHE-HULK are tailor-made for TV.

First off, I should say that NetFlix's DAREDEVIL proved to me something I had long suspected: Unencumbered by dumb network "input", a television series really is the best way to do superheroes. I love Marvel's movies, but they're really just snapshots in the characters' lives once every few years. A serialized, episodic TV series is much more in keeping with the nature of superhero comics as they have existed for decades, and that concept really serves the characters best.

But we live in a world where the A-list Marvel heroes will always be on the big screen, leaving TV for the lesser known or more obscure characters -- and I submit that, perhaps after the already announced stable of NetFlix characters -- Daredevil, Power Man, Iron Fist, and Jessica Jones -- no Marvel character is a better fit for TV than She-Hulk. I'll even take that a step further and declare that no Marvel character is a better fit specifically for network TV than She-Hulk.

Yes, I just noted above that networks are dumb, and I believe that they frequently devolve TV series far below their potential with stupid, borderline insulting pandering to the broadest possible audience. But -- She-Hulk's premise is practically cast from the network mold: Jennifer Walters is a prosecuting attorney by day, party girl by night, involved in all manner of interpersonal conflicts both in and out of her workplace. The only thing that separates this from a dozen other legal "dramedies" is that the protagonist in this case happens to be six feet tall and green. She's not a superhero by trade, but of course does occasionally get into situations where she must exercise her strength. But at its core, this should be a funny, sexy, primetime TV soap opera which takes place in the Marvel Universe.

STARTING MARVEL OVER

So it seems that following this year's "Secret Wars" event, the Marvel Universe is going to be somewhat rebooted, with the Ultimate continuity integrating into the existing Marvel backstory. I don't know how they're going to do it and really, I'm not all that interested. But the idea got me thinking, as I'm sure we all have from time to time, about what I would do if I had complete control over the Marvel Universe. If I could just blow everything up and start it all over again, what would the landscape look like? What titles would be published and which would get the axe?

Now remember, this is my fantasy; a magical world where profits, sales quotas, and corporate overlords don't matter. It is, simply, my idea of an ideal Marvel publishing schedule for me, and it's naturally based strongly on my own nostalgia, which is a weird mish-mash of eighties and nineties Marvel with some minor aspects of the sixties, seventies, and modern day.

If I rebooted the Marvel Universe, my premise would be fairly simple: the Silver Age and much of the Bronze Age happened pretty much exactly as we all remember. It is now, in Marvel Time, about eight to ten years since the first superheroes, the Fantastic Four, debuted.

HOBGOBLIN LIVES, REVISITED

I think I've established over the past few days that, despite my love for HOBGOBLIN LIVES, it could've been better. My chief issue with the story is that it feels rushed, like there's just too much to it to cram into three issues. Now, I fully accept that three issues may have been the length Roger Stern wanted, and is probably what he pitched to Marvel. And I understand that Marvel was in some choppy financial straits at the time, so three issues was probably all they were willing to budget for this niche vanity project anyway. So I won't second-guess anyone's thinking with regards to what we ultimately received. As I've said, I like the finished product. I still enjoy reading it from time to time, sixteen years later. But that doesn't stop me from speculating on another format and other ideas to beef it up, to make it feel like the true "event" it should have been.

A little more than a year ago, when Not Blog X reviewed HOBGOBLIN LIVES, I suggested in a comment that the series could have been better served as a twelve-issue maxi-series. Specifically, I was thinking of BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN, which launched, over at DC, around the same time as HOBGOBLIN LIVES. LONG HALLOWEEN is a thirteen-issue murder mystery set over the course of one year in Batman's life. But while the series' killings occur regularly, one on a holiday in every installment, they are not always the main plot of a given issue. Readers might see Batman tangling with the Joker or the Mad Hatter even as the "Holiday Killer" is busy in the background. I propose that this format would have served HOBGOBLIN LIVES tremendously well.

(NOT) COMING THIS WINTER FROM MARVEL COMICS?

I made a joke about this in my review of SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #48, then I decided I might as well get it out of my system. My most profound and profuse apologies to Ron Frenz and Marie Severin, whose artwork I shamelessly traced, and doubtlessly brutalized, in the process.