The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

X-Men: The Manga: Remastered

What's It About? 

Jubilation Lee is a teenager with a secret: she's a mutant, the next level of human evolution, and has fantastic powers. All she wants is a normal life with trips to the mall to get away from her parents, but when the mutant-hunting robots known as Sentinels come after her, that normal life is pushed out of her reach! Discover the X-Men—mutant heroes hated and feared by a world they're sworn to protect—alongside Jubilee in this classic manga series!

X-Men: The Manga: Remastered has a story and art by Hiroshi Higuchi, Kōji Yasue, Miyako Cojima, Reiji Hagiwara, Rei Nakahara, & Hirofumi Ichikawa, with English translation by Mutsumi Masuda, David Evelyn. This volume was retouched and lettered by Dan Nakrosis, Rob Kuzmiak, and Brandon Bovia. Published by Viz Media (November 12, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Hey kids, do you like the X-Men? Did you grow up with the nineties X-Men animated series like I did and now have the theme song as a permanent part of your brain chemistry? Then you'll probably like X-Men: The Manga which is basically just a manga retelling of that original animated series with a few slight differences. But now since the series doesn't need to worry about nineties TV broadcast censorship, we're allowed to have the characters swear and even have Wolverine smoke a cigar! Outside of that though, its faithfulness to the original animated series acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it could be a fresh and new way of digesting the original series if you don't feel like watching the show, which hasn't aged the best in a lot of places. But on the flipside, if you're already familiar with the original animated series, then reading this could come off as derivative as I don't think there are enough differences here to warrant a deep dive.

You could make an argument that the artwork also sells the material and to be honest, many of the characters do translate to a more old-school manga art style fairly well with Wolverine and Gambit being noticeable standouts. Others, however, are more difficult to appreciate. Personally, I'm not a fan of Jubilee looking so stylistically different from everybody else and the overall rounded edges of all the characters can make the artwork feel a bit messy when we get to action scenes. I would've appreciated bigger panel layouts to help the art breathe a little bit more. But as it stands, everything feels a bit cramped for my liking.

Outside of that though, the story and tribulations of the X-Men is something that still has relevance even to this day. The conversations of prejudice that take place in Marvel's world of mutants contain many parallels to situations that were very indicative of the time as well as situations that are still persisting to this day. I'm of the opinion that everyone should consume at least a little bit of X-Men media at some point in their lives and the franchise will never really lose steam. I would say if you haven't watched the original animated series then this is a fine alternative but if you're already familiar with what the X-Men are about, then you could probably skip this for something a little bit different.

If, like me, you were a child in the 90s, you might feel more than a slight twinge of familiarity upon reading through this ample tome. Marvel's 76-episode X-Men – The Animated Series was, for many fans, their first exposure to the mutant superhero team. They were first created by Stan Lee in the 1960s, immortalized by writer Chris Claremont's 15-year Uncanny X-Men run, starting in 1975. X-Men – The Animated Series was an international hit, adapting multiple of Claremont's landmark story arcs -like Days of Future Past, and The Dark Phoenix Saga. I recall watching the show religiously on the UK Saturday morning kids' TV, cursing each cliffhanger ending.

This collection is something of an oddity – a manga adaptation of a US animated adaptation of a comic. It's hard to know if any of the multiple creators credited here found an opportunity to read any of the source comics. Each of the seven chapters corresponds to a single TV episode, hewing extremely close to the show, replicating it beat-for-beat, line-for-line. Six different artists bring their personal touches to some now-iconic superheroes, and in general, they do a decent job. Hiroshi Higuchi's first chapter looks incredibly cutesy compared to the U.S. X-Men comics, introducing a wide-eyed, almost Tezuka-esque version of Jubilation Lee. Oddly, he incorrectly depicts Storm as white, whereas later chapters and other artists correctly portray her black African ethnicity, so important to her character's identity (she's the daughter of a tribal chief).

Other characters fare better, with a cigar-chomping (and grumpy!) Wolverine steals many scenes, facing off against a feral Sabretooth, and vying for Jean Grey's attention with the accurately stuffy Cyclops. This volume is mostly fun as a historical curiosity – this is a much simpler version of the X-Men than you'll find in their current Marvel Comics incarnation. As an introduction to the characters it works well but then so did the animated series it's based on. Only the first half of the original season is adapted here – volume two adapts the remaining six episodes. This might work well as a gift for a younger relative who likes both manga and superheroes but other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't see many readers over the age of twelve making time to engage with this incarnation of the X-Men.

Right on the heels of the massive success that was X-Men '97, Viz brings us a remaster of the 1990s X-Men manga. Turns out, the mutants were just as popular in Japan as they were in the U.S. when the old cartoon was running (hence “cry for the moon~”). And they even made a manga adaptation out of it all, how nice!

If you're going into this expecting weird Japanese divergences like Wolverine being chibi or a Japan-only character: that's not here. This manga is a straight adaptation of the old X-Men cartoon. Not having seen the original cartoon, I hesitate to make any claim as to how well the manga adapts those plotlines—but the storylines are genuinely engaging, and the plight of a band of misunderstood youths rebelling against a world that hates them will always capture the imagination of readers. X-Men: The Manga is frank about the hypocrisy of discrimination (like with The Beast's kangaroo court case) or the mortality of its heroes.

I think the real issue will be the art. The manga takes a “round-robin” approach to the art, with every chapter drawn by a different artist. Some artists are better than others, be it with actually drawing the X-Men in backgrounds and not just white voids, but some are also way better at keeping the X-Men on-model. Some reoccurring villains also look completely different between the two appearances. Two of the earlier chapters don't even give Storm any skin pigment when she's famously a black woman (later chapters are much better about this). Oh, and a shout-out to that one chapter where the role of Magneto is played by Yoshikage Kira.

It's a rare gift for X-Men: The Manga to be republished in the US, but I'll take it. This is a treat for X-Men fans and manga fans alike—and it's probably even a great place for kids to get into X-Men. Strongly recommended.