Spoiler Filled Thoughts on X-Men 97

I wasn't going to watch X-Men 97 on Disney Plus, or not quite yet, for a number of reasons. The big one was that I didn't want to get sucked into a new TV show, and I reasoned that I needed to watch the previous five seasons before I tackled this new one. I get my Disney Plus from a friend and Disney is getting ready to crack down on password sharing, so I didn't want to find myself cut off mid-season (this is why, when I heard about the imminent crackdown, I binged Daredevil and The Punisher on Disney, and series 1 of Line of Duty and Modok and Justified: City Primeval on Hulu).

The other, slightly more fundamental reason, is that I don't actually have that much regard for the X-Men animated show. It came out at about the right time for me to appreciate it, when I was at the height of my first obsession with the X-Men, but I seem to remember being put off that it played fast and loose with the lore (this was important to me when I was 13), and it didn't have a lot of my favorite characters. The animation style wasn't that great either, as I recalled - it looked and sounded cheap, like the worst of the Ninja Turtles show or other contemporary cartoons, whereas something like Batman: The Animated Series might have variable-quality animation, but it looked interestingly stylized.

What happened, as ever, is that my social media feeds exploded with X-Men 97, and the YouTube algorithm, in its wisdom, also knew that I'd want to see a bunch of videos related to it. So I got served up a bunch of this stuff, and then, on Friday night, I cracked and watched the first episode.

Well, it was a lot better than I expected, in various ways. First off, the animation is miles ahead of the original show. I know, because immediately after watching the first new episode, I watched the first episode from way back in 1992 (this is the exciting life I lead on Friday nights). I'd gotten an inkling of this in some video clips I'd seen, but it was confirmed in the entire first episode. Standout scenes are Jubilee dancing in the nightclub when the X-Men go looking for Sunspot, and then the bit where Cyclops uses his optic blast to cushion his fall.

The sound was cleaned up nicely, too. Some cartoons from the 80s and 90s had this weird distortion, which I always associated with VHS tapes, but it was present in the first couple episodes of X-92, whereas X-97 was free of such artifacts. The voice acting was also generally better, though a couple of voices (mostly Rogue) sounded a little more aged than the characters warrant, though as one YouTuber put it, that's what happens when you hire the original cast 30 years later.

As far as the X-lore, there were some super interesting Easter eggs and teasers here. I don't know all the internal lore of X-92 because I don't think I watched anything beyond the first season, but the stuff I saw that was intriguing was a series of storylines and deep cuts from the books, specifically the 80s and early 90s era that I know best. The Trial of Magneto, in the second episode, was extremely well done, both in terms of visuals (the bit where he rips whole chunks of the UN building and flies them into space) and storytelling (specifically the X-Cutioner, who's presented as the reason Storm loses her powers here, as she did in the 80s). 

The second episode also ends with a great cliffhanger, as Jean Grey has just given birth to her and Cyclops's son, but there's a knock at the door and when they open up it's another Jean. Everyone looks surprised, but Jean (the one in the house) looks aggrieved. I guess this is them setting up Madelyne Prior, but I wonder how the Phoenix arc from previous X-92 seasons will be involved.

There's also all the cultural baggage to contend with, because of course there is. First off is the supposed wokeness, which many, many, many commentators have noted is the EXACT FUCKING POINT of the X-Men. Of course Gambit's going to dress... not entirely straight, and folks are going to drool in unseemly ways over the shipping potential of various characters whose sexualities in the comics have always been subject to discussion. If you're not prepared for someone to float the idea of a Magneto/Gambit/Rogue throuple, then I hate to be a gatekeeper, but wtf are you even doing watching X-Men?

The stupidest cultural baggage is the thing where some dummy got mad that they made Rogue's ass smaller because of "wokeness", because this is the darkest timeline and somehow people take you seriously when you argue that libs hate women with hourglass figures. This is just another manifestation of the alt-right mind virus that spilled a lot of ink when Sydney Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and rightwing idiots made this argument that by having a figure she was triggering us. It's a different kind of triggering, I guess? By which I mean, appreciating Sweeney's acting chops and work ethic, because showbiz is harsh, y'all.

More serious is the firing, on the eve of the premiere, of X-97 show runner Beau de Mayo. When last I checked neither party had given a reason, so I won't speculate, but I'm curious what it will mean for any subsequent seasons. De Mayo is credited as the writer for both episodes so far, and he hasn't turned X-97 as fucky as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with Riverdale, but, y'know, he might have if given the chance. I don't know if I'd like to see X-Men turn into a big gay melodrama like Riverdale, but I also hope that this firing isn't the result of some weird struggle for control that sees Marvel water the show down and make it less interesting.

Though for the record, turning X-Men into a big gay melodrama a la Riverdale would at least honor the source material from Chris Claremont, and it would be my second most desired treatment. My absolute greatest wish would be for someone to turn Patrick Willems' video of "What if Wes Anderson Directed the X-Men" into an actual movie, but again, darkest timeline.

Anyway. My verdict on X-97 is "cautiously optimistic", as well as "resigned to eventually having to add another damn streaming subscription". They've teased Jean's Clone Saga, Storm's search for herself post losing powers (and presumably hanging out in a hot tub with Callisto), and Morph's weird situationship with Mr Sinister. We've also seen cameos from some favorites like Colossus and Psylocke (though both were played by Morph). I'm hoping de Mayo worked in some references to Grant Morrison's run and the recent Krakoan Age, but we'll see. At any rate, it's a fun show and better than I was expecting.

And yes, it still has the absolutely iconic theme song. Go watch it.

All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk

I've written a fair amount here about Marvel Unlimited and the sheer amount of Marvel stories that have been suddenly at my fingertips since I signed up for it in November. I'm still focusing mostly on X-Men books, but I've been considering what else I might go deep on when I finish with those books.

And then I discovered a copy of All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk, at my local bookstore. He read pretty much the whole corpus of Marvel books published between 1961 (the debut of the Fantastic Four) and 2019 or so, for a grand total of about 27,000 comic books. In the book he lists his criteria for including a book (e.g. whether it can reasonably feature an appearance from the "main timeline" version of Spider-Man), and having done so, considers the story that emerges from what he calls the longest-lasting continually evolving ongoing story in... well, ever.

As someone who adores going to the root of a thing and exploring it from start to finish, with as many weird and unexpected digressions as possible, this premise was absolute catnip to me. It didn't hurt that I was embarking on my own version of the project - when I said I was considering what else to read after the X-universe, my list consisted of, conservatively:

• Spider-Man and his other related books, but not necessarily the Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, Spider-Gwen or Venom/Carnage stuff
• The Avengers, plus certain important individual members' books, specifically Captain America and the Armor Wars storyline of Iron Man
• The Fantastic Four
• Daredevil
• Important runs of books that I otherwise don't care about, like Walt Simonson's Thor and Peter David's Hulk

Wolk's book is a good guide for navigating this idea, even if he doesn't cover all of these. Hulk and Daredevil don't get the in-depth treatment, and his chapter on the Avengers focuses on the deconstruction job that Jonathan Hickman performed in 2014-15 or so. For the characters and books he does cover, he gives a survey of notable issues, but instead of just presenting them in order and without context, he places them squarely in the context of the story of their individual characters.

For example, Spider-Man's publishing history is examined in terms of great cycles in the character's life, with each main era representing a stage in his growth as a man. There are discussions of his search for a father-figure, with his rogue's gallery representing a succession of potential father figures who represent different ways for him to go astray (Doctor Octopus is one, but Kraven the Hunter represents a sort of inverse father, who's physical rather than brainy, like most Spider-baddies).

The X-Men, meanwhile, are examined through the lenses of their two greatest stories: The Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. Wolk argues that every major X-event since then has been a response to or an inversion of one or both of those stories (which, it should be noted, took place very close to one another in publishing time, with Phoenix ending in issue #137 and Future Past coming in #141-142). Even Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which I considered to be the first significant step past Chris Claremont's legacy on the title, ends with a storyline that takes on both at once. And every big X-moment since then has also reckoned with them, to varying degrees of success.

The meat of the book is examining these books or runs for themes and how they play out throughout the life of a book or in subsequent creators' runs. Wolk then uses these insights to tease out what the Marvel books say about either the overall Marvel story or about real-world events. His chapter on Dark Reign says that story, where Norman Osborn (the former Green Goblin) effectively becomes the most important man in the world, is Marvel's reckoning with life under a very Trump-like regime, though interestingly it runs through 2009, long before Trump came anywhere near the presidency.

This is all interesting enough on its own, but the other thing I want to highlight in discussing this book is how it fits into the wider scene of cultural criticism that looks at American superhero comics. Wolk refers to The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, which argues that the visions of mutants and "others" and how Marvel invites us to treat difference form an important part of radical politics now. Wolk himself also fits into a constellation of commentators on comics who tackle the topic seriously and interestingly, such as Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (a podcast I started listening to when I started my big X-read).

I find this fascinating, because when I started reading Marvel comics in 1991, there was no cultural discussion of them. Maybe there was in certain academic journals or circles that I didn't have access to as a 12-year-old middle schooler, but in my daily life the idea that you could pick out cultural themes or messages from superhero comics would have been laughable, and I was encouraged to keep my interest in the books to myself (and to a small group of friends who also cared about what these books had to tell us).

More than 30 years on, I have a better frame of reference to tell how much of what I was reading back then was immature crap and what was interesting or worthwhile. I also have access to the internet, so I can see what other people are saying about Marvel books (or DC's superhero books, though Wolk dismisses the idea of doing a similar version for their superhero universe). Some of them are kinda big deal people - on his old podcast, Wolk had as a guest none other than Jeet Heer, a literary critic and journalist who I'm only now learning has also spent a large part of his career discussing comics.

This maturing of the discourse around comics (I had the misfortune of discovering them right at the dawn of the speculative boom of the 90s) has come because a lot of serious people started writing them around the 1970s and 80s, to appeal to other serious people, many of whom in turn started writing comics themselves. Wolk also describes how Marvel, and comics in general, has reckoned with the fact of most of its early creators were white men, and how this reckoning has let the company cater to demographics beyond that very narrow one. That widening is a big part of why serious people can talk about comics seriously, even despite the backdrop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe effectively eating all of pop culture for the past decade and a half.

All of the Marvels is a fun tour through the story of the Marvel Universe, both in-universe and as a discussion of how it was created. I appreciate that it uses certain notable issues and storylines as entry points to consider what such a long-running single piece of fiction (as Wolk treats it) reveals about what our culture thinks is important. He doesn't uncritically enjoy it all - the Punisher is clearly not a favorite character of his - but he's able to tease out something interesting about a great many parts of it, including certain stories that I hadn't considered before, notably Master of Kung Fu and the Black Panther books that started with Christopher Priest's take in the late 90s.

It's a good book for making sense of the meta-story, and it makes me wish there was something similar for DC Comics, or even just parts of Marvel like the X-Men (I could have read a whole book-length treatment of them in this vein). It came out in 2021 but effectively ends in 2019, so certain aspects feel a tiny bit dated, just because publishing thousands of pages of content every year means the story evolves fast. But of course, that's the point, isn't it?

In Praise of Batman: the Brave and the Bold

Just finished Batman: the Brave and the Bold yesterday, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on how it took me a while to warm to the show, but as I did, it also got more interesting. It's not part of the wonderful DCAU that started with Batman: The Animated Series, but it shares a lot of similarities, even though it's consciously aimed at a different aesthetic.

The first thing to say is that it took me a long time to finish the show. I first discovered it when I was poking around Netflix after finishing Justice League Unlimited, and at first glance it seemed aimed at a much younger audience than the DCAU shows. It mined both classic DC characters, which I knew well, but also newer versions of them (like the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle), which I didn't know, so it was hard to get a sense at first of whether I liked it. That said, whenever I'd go down some Wikipedia rabbit hole about an obscure DC character (something that happens quite often, I'll admit), more often than not I'd see that the character had appeared in BTBATB. Not only that, but it also implied some relatively more mature storylines than I'd seen in the few episodes I'd watched.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we're in the pandemic. I'm at my then-girlfriend's house, we've merged our streaming apps, and there's nothing to do but watch TV with all our free time. So I started BTBATB again on her version of HBO Max, watching bits here and there during my lunch breaks from work or when she was doing something else.

Then we broke up, and I had to get access to HBO Max (subsequently Max) on my own. Somewhere in that time I got into the habit of watching cartoons while eating lunch on Saturdays, so I started splitting my Saturday lunchtimes between Gravity Falls on Disney Plus and BTBATB. This meant that I was watching one episode a week, so it took a while - indeed, I finally finished the first season in January of 2023. Between holidays and Saturdays when I wasn't home to watch my usual shows, it's taken me this long to finish up the rest of the show.

By this time, I was pretty onboard with the substance of the show. Like the comic book series it's named after, BTBATB featured different team-ups every week, sometimes doing different ones in the cold open than in the episode's main story. Where Batman TAS started off as an homage to 1930s serials, this show was more indebted to the Silver Age of 1950s and 60s comics, where Batman was more of an adventurer with gadgets than the brooding crimefighter we normally associate him with, and the guest stars reflected this. There were a lot of guest appearances from Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (an old Jack Kirby feature from the time in the 70s when he was feuding with Marvel), as well as from Blue Beetle, Aquaman Green Arrow and others.

The interesting thing was that it had few other trappings of Batman that we commonly think of. There wasn't any reference to Bruce Wayne until the second season (we didn't even see Batman out of costume until then). We also didn't see the Joker for the entire first half of the first season, and his first appearance was as an alternate-universe hero version, the Red Hood; even then, we didn't hear the name Joker for a while. The show's creators were similarly reticent about big-name guest stars: we don't see Superman or Wonder Woman until the third season, and other big names were replaced by Golden Age versions or other alternates - for example, Guy Gardner was the main Green Lantern in this show.

For the guests they did have, they typically went very deep. The episode featuring the Doom Patrol has Batman teaming up with the original 1960s version, but there are references in the background to Grant Morrison's seminal run on the team, such as Dorothy Spinner and the Russian doll motif that dominated Morrison's issues. There's even a poster of Shasta, the Living Mountain, a throwaway character from Doom Force, the parody of X-Force/Rob Liefeld/90s mutant books that capped off Morrison's run. Talk about your deep cuts.

Another similarity with TAS is that it benefited from some great voice talent, in part because both shows had the voice director Andrea Romano casting them. Diedrich Bader is maybe not as iconic a Batman as Kevin Conroy, but he did a good job with the less brooding version of the character; also Conroy appeared a few times as an alternate Batman (in an episode that also brought back Dana Delany as a version of Lois Lane) and as the Phantom Stranger. Joe Dimaggio had a recurring role as Aquaman, but a version that was gleefully oblivious and loudmouthed. And Peter Reubens played Bat-Mite a few times, always in episodes that wreaked meta-havoc on the show's continuity.

The best example of the show's devotion to deep cuts, clever casting and meta commentary is the final episode, Mitefall, where Bat-Mite decides to shake up the show to get it cancelled and bring back the brooding version of Batman. He adds in merchandising tie-in vehicles and costumes, gives Batman a wife and daughter, and recasts Aquaman as Ted McGinley, all in an attempt to make the show jump the shark (listing off all the elements that make shows jump the shark, he lists casting Ted McGinley as one of the important factors in any show's cancellation).

Opposing him is Ambush Bug, the Keith Giffen creation who essentially played that same meta-role in a couple of mini-series in the 80s, generally making fun of the weird and forgettable characters that popped up in the less-known corners of the DC Universe in the 60s. The best part is that Ambush Bug is voiced by the man who gave us the phrase "jumping the shark", Henry Winkler.

Not that the silly, meta stories were the only ones with relatively sophisticated storytelling. Chill of the Night featured a retelling of the Batman origin (and featured Adam West as Batman's father), while the Doom Patrol episode had the team giving their lives to save an island of hostages from the Brotherhood of Evil. B'Wana Beast also died heroically in an episode after having been mocked for being a Z-list character. In its way, this show had more death and heartbreak than the mainline DCAU shows, like JLU.

It took me a while to warm to, as I mentioned, but once I did, I was all-in. I don't really miss the 60s Batman, which was generally silly and unsophisticated, but BTBATB was a good, modern way of tackling it, making the references smarter for adults and long-time fans, while also being suitable for kids. It stands alone in its corner of DC's universe of animated shows, but in the end, it's a worthy addition and well-worth watching.