Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is Suicide Squad ISEKAI DC's Best Anime Adaptation to Date?
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 1101 Location: France |
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I don't know if i would considered it the best japanese DC anime so soon but after these 4 first episodes i certainly feel this "best of both worlds" vibes that most of the others were lacking and end up being simply another DC made by japanese studios ( like X-Men and the Avengers animes ) or the opposit, animes which happened to feature DC characters but without any DC vibes ( like Wolverine, Iron Man and Blade ), i hope they can continue this way without leaning too much on its japanese or DC side. This version of Harley Quiin is hands-down the best i've seen though.
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2613 Location: Germany |
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Studio 4°C animated Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, making it the best DC anime. It´s also 4°C´s best anime.
Lord Death Man is technically from a 1966 issue of Batman but the very first Far East collaboration, the so-called Bat-Manga!, is why Morrison brought him back a decade ago. The manga is confirmed to be canon, making it the most unique case of leaving it to Japan. 
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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Well it certainly looks better than Kill the Justice League. That low, low bar was the biggest hurdle to clear.
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 384 |
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I know I said it in the preview guide but I'll say it again: I am amazed at how much I'm liking this show. Much like Chris, I came into the show fully prepared to hate on it, but here I am, all in. Making Clayface the genre-aware character (and everyone hate him for it) is a pretty ingenious move since his whole comic backstory is being an actor, so of course he knows all about this stuff.
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King Chicken
 Posts: 140 |
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Comparing My Adventures with Superman to Suicide Squad Isekai feels like a Coughing Baby VS Hydrogen Bomb situation to me. MAWS feels like a relic of a bygone age that would have come out 10+ years ago back when comic companies were still desperately trying to find a way to compete with manga and anime and their only tactic was throwing in anime references and a vague art style to their properties while completely missing the point and treating it like a typical kids cartoon otherwise. In terms of those Teen Titans probably was the peak since it at least fully committed to the bit with getting Puffy to sing in Japanese for the opening and some insert songs. But even then I didn't care for that show much given how different it was to the comics. I always wondered why they didn't adapt the Young Justice comic that was heavily kid/manga focused at the same time. Ironically the Young Justice cartoon they did eventually make was so dreadfully serious and dull by comparison. Someone got their wires crossed with Teen Titans and Young Justice's cartoon adaptions.
I'm glad comic companies seemed to have embraced the "if you can't beat 'em, join em" thing with the various manga and anime adaptions. They started out very rough with only the X-Men anime of yesteryear standing out it seems like. Disk Wars was hilariously fun and the Superman food manga was probably the best the character has been in decades. Hearing the Deadpool manga was the best selling Marvel comic of the year when it came out was also nice. Suicide Squad Isekai is certainly the best the brand has ever been since DC began pushing them with the first movie and I agree with people saying Clayface is the best part of it. DC and Marvel IPs have a lot of potential in the right hands but it's always a matter of getting the right people to be in charge of them. |
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Fluwm
 Posts: 1056 |
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I think that era was closer to 20 years ago than 10, I'm sorry to say. I get where you're coming from with MAWS, but to my eyes it feels more like the product of artists who basically just... grew up with anime. They're telling the story they want, with the visuals they like, rather than being deliberately imitative of something else. Certainly, I think this is true of many modern comics, too, where you can frequently see more anime-styles, well, stylings, in days of yore. This is media created by a generation to who, all of these different styles are simply normal, as is playing around by mixing-and-matching elements of different styles. Professional artists of today who grew up browsing through vast troves of Internet fanart, when there was always just as much anime on TV as western animation (if not more). It's a completely different perspective fueling a completely different kind of media than what happened in the late 90s/early 00s. To me, a key element of that bygone era you're talking about -- not to disparage the old Teen Titans show or anything: I liked it, it was good -- was a general sort of lack of fluency. Those cartoons would mimic a lot of visual shorthand / design tropes popular to anime, but they very seldom used them correctly. Or, to put it a better way, their use seldom felt genuine. Things like cutting to chibi versions of characters, the large animated sweat drops, the blue foreheads, popping-vein-hashtags, etc., etc. That's kind of why that media still holds a peculiar charm today, right? Like those old western "How To Draw Anime" books very clearly drawn by artists with little to know experience or familiarity with the genre -- only a desire to capitalize on the (then) latest popular thing. |
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blooperboy
 Posts: 138 |
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While I agree with the title of the article, I'm a bit sad that it only touched on the more well known DC animes. 2010-2014 had a handful of adaptations (Iron Man, Wolverine, X-men, etc) and while they were absolutely terrible, it still would have been nice to have mentioned them since it's really jarring when you see not just where they did good and okay, but where they did BAD.
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malvarez1
Posts: 2145 |
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The ones you listed aren’t DC though, they’re all Marvel. |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 959 |
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I'm impressed how the current scale of Suicide Squad Isekai is actually pretty perfect.
Sure we have 6 episodes left and it can certainly escalate to end of the world nonsense, but the current conflict is the Squad helping an army fight another army by engaging in guerilla warfare. Which is exactly what they do in the comics or at least the good ones. They are supposed to engage in black ops military operations, being more of a mid-card scale which is the opposite of how the Ayer film and game tried to force them into end of the world scale threats, its unfitting to them. In the third episode spoiler[they are tasked with liberating a castle from an army of brainwashed wolfmen.] Very little would change if they were instead spoiler[liberating a military base from an army of brainwashed super soldiers.] Unlike the first movie and game, they've actually managed to capture this pretty decently. I'd argue its possibly the first attempt at the modern wacktastic Suicide Squad that really works. Its over the top while maintaining the character's villainy unlike the Ayer film, but its not mean-spirited like the game was. Its a fun ride which is the most you can ask from a show like this. I'm curious which of the Squaddies are going to start biting the bullet as it goes on and whether they'll start whittling down the cast. Hopefully the show maintains this general level of quality. If we do get more DC anime of this caliber, I'd like to finally get a Flash anime. Cause the director of Suicide Squad actually wanted to do a show for Flash but he was told to instead make the Squad show. Which hey since he successfully made them a Squad anime, the least they can do is let him make a Flash anime. 
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 384 |
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Yeah a lot of the older 2000s-era stuff like TT felt like they were using anime styles and cliches (to be clear, I'm not knocking it, I think they used them pretty well for the most part), but it did feel like the product of older dudes who grew up in the 70s/80s trying to grab on to a trend they didn't quite "get". MAWS and some of the newer DC stuff feel, for lack of a better term, genuine. They're not setting out to make an "anime-styled Superman", it's just the product of a bunch of writers/artists who grew up in the Toonami generation and anime influences just creep into their work naturally. ...I don't know, maybe I'm a little defensive because I follow a lot of the crew on Twitter and they seem like a really swell bunch
Huh, I never heard that story. I'd definitely be down for it. I'd be down for basically any superhero anime outside of Batman (I mean, I like Batman, but he is so overexposed and there are so many other characters out there in the world). |
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Nigel Planter
Posts: 111 Location: London, UK |
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Say what you want about Teen Titans but at least it was still recognizable as Teen Titans. I imagine DC has some kind of hard rule with Superman himself because he was the only normal character on that Superman cartoon I saw that looked normal. Characters like Lois, Jimmy, Livewire, and Heat Wave were completely unrecognizable from how they were usually portrayed in media in addition to not liking their designs at all. I ended up bowing out after an episode. Obviously not made for me. I have a feeling that show is going to go the way of Voltron: Legendary Defender and She-Ra: Princesses of Power and get memory holed after it ends and people aren't going to touch those versions of the characters ever again. Those were also two shows with heavy reimaginings I did not like. But that's not necessarily a bad thing depending on how you feel about Cartoon Network's obsession with Teen Titans Go. Or the modern version of Harley Quinn. But I think this version of Harley in the Suicide Squad anime is more fun than she has been in a long time as far as Modern Harley goes. |
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Nekbone
Posts: 51 |
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I think the show is so nice because the best way I've seen it put is a lot of Japanese adaptions of western media are made by Japanese guys who like western media and want to do it justice while a lot of western media itself is made by western guys who hate the IP they're working on which is why they try to change as much of it as possible and a lot of modern entries are very critical or self-hating. The people working on Suicide Squad ISEKAI are obviously having fun.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6356 |
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Hate to break this to you but this isn’t recent concept. Writers have been doing this or been accused of this for decades sometimes it is a problem other times fans get too in their feelings when complaining about this concept. |
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OpenYourEels4TheNextFeels
Posts: 141 |
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I'll give you Heatwave being unrecognizable, but I have no idea what you're talking about with Lois, Jimmy, & Livewire. Livewire's backstory may be different this time around, but her personality and story role of being a villain who will help out Superman & Friends from time to time (and may potentially end up as a hero some day) is pretty in-line with the comics (even the Young Justice Cartoon has/had her reformed and acting as a full-on hero, so this is nothing new in terms of adaptations). The only changes to Lois are more just updates to be "this is what Lois would be like in the modern day". And Jimmy is just a version of Jimmy whose been friends with Clark since college (and recently has become rich suddenly, but that is a storyline I could totally see happening in the comics). Maybe it's just me comparing him the Arrowverse version of Jimmy (who was basically a completely different character who was given the same name for brand recognition), but I have literally no idea what about MAWS Jimmy is "unrecognizable" beyond red hair & freckles.
You're right about VLD (though people memory holed it because it was bad, not because it was different), but you must be living under a rock if you don't think/know that SPOP is the dominant version of She-ra people think/talk about now. |
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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One big thing that seems to have changed is that there is no longer that feeling of “us vs. them”, that it felt permeated a lot of the older attempts in the early 2000s at taking anime tropes and putting them into Western stories. Japanese writers and artists want to do DC stories because the like the characters (as previously noted, the director of SS Isekai took the job because he wants to do a Flash anime) and viewers can mix both together without one feeling lesser for doing so.
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