According to ANN, Del Rey and Marvel announced this weekend that they'll be collaborating on manga projects featuring Wolverine and the X-Men. The X-Men project is reportedly a shojo title wherein Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is an all-boys school with Kitty Pryde as the sole female student. Interesting creative decision; I'd think they'd at least have Jean around to be with Scott, but maybe they're working off of an X-Men movie model where Scott, Jean, and some of the others are graduates working in a teaching capacity.
I also wonder if Kitty will hang out with Wolverine and become a ninja in this version. Sure, it's a bit far-fetched for this particular manga genre, but you never know.
Manga and the X-Men are old friends at this point; even discounting the manga and anime-flavored art of Joe Madureira that graced Uncanny X-Men from 1994-1996, there was the manga adaptation of the early 1990's cartoon show, released in the U.S. alongside Ryoichi Ikegami's Spider-Man manga in the late '90s. Each episode was adapted, over the course of two issues' worth of material, by a different artist, making it an interesting survey of then-modern Japanese art styles at the very least.
In 2003, manga artist Kia Asamiya joined worst X-Men writer ever Chuck Austen on Uncanny X-Men for a six-issue stint which, at the very least, was very attractively designed and drawn. I really do like some of those costume designs Asamiya came up with, even the ridiculously over-the-top Archangel costume that fed into Austen's bizarre preoccupation with bitterly anti-Christian mythic storylines about angel mutants and demon mutants and what-have-you. I sold off all my Austen issues, but bought the collection of those issues, even if it does contain the story where Wolverine gets Martian Manhuntered by a pack of werewolves. (Does Austen not understand the whole "best there is at what he does" thing?)
Around the same time, Marvel published a mini-series called X-Men: Ronin, based on their "Mangaverse" versions of the X-Men. The Mangaverse was a 2002 attempt by Marvel to grab themselves some manga money by creating anime/manga-style pastiches of all their top-tier characters. It sank like a brick because, frankly, the only people such a thing would appeal to would be people like me who have a foot in both worlds, and personally if I wanted to read anime/manga pastiche material, I'm sure Ben Dunn (and those that followed in his footsteps) has hit each and every manga & anime pastiche note over the past few hundred issues of Ninja High School.
Anyway, about a year or so later, J. Torres and artist Makoto Nakatsuka -- a relatively unknown Japanese artist that former Fanboy Entertainment president and Marvel's Man in Japan C.B. Cebulski signed up while looking for Japanese talent to add to the Mighty Marvel Talent Roster -- did a mini-series about the manga-influenced X-Men team. The series is actually some pretty good, straightforward action/adventure comics -- a riff on the whole Massachusetts Academy/Hellfire Club Vs. Xavier's School recruiting young mutants rivalry, except with more hitting and explosions -- but again, mostly I bought it for the art. The designs would make for a hell of a cartoon show, too; it could air after Naruto or Bleach on Cartoon Network.
I expect that there will be a lot less hitting in the shojo X-Men book. But then again, I seem to recall there being plenty of action in Yuu Watase's mid-90's hit Fushigi Yugi, which featured one girl surrounded by a host of hot heroic guys, so who knows?
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the last time Wolverine was mangafied, the pointless but pretty mini-series Wolverine: Snikt by BLAME! writer/artist Tsutomu Nihei. I think this was 2003 as well. Basically, it was the story of Wolverine entering a world not unlike that of the artist's other major work, running around, and cutting stuff up. Pure action with no plot. I expect that the upcoming Del Rey manga project -- which has no artist attached yet -- will be a little less pointless.
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?
The new manga X-stuff is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2009. I suppose that's just about when the Wolverine solo movie is scheduled for, hm?
2 comments:
i a sham
You say Snikt! has no plot? O_o
What are ya smokin? It may be very cutting edge and roughly written but I think you're jumping the gun a bit. It's very much like BLAME! I agree. However note how well BLAME! was written and how those two worlds parallel so indepthly.
Case in point you shouldn't dismiss other renditions of wolverine just because it isn't your "cup of tea".
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