I’d somehow missed this during my freshman and sophomore years of college¹ and for years, a certain subsect of comic fans have been telling me that the X-Men cartoon stood up to the Warner Brothers-produced Batman animated series that also aired on the FOX network, and I’d always quietly suspected that the haze of nerd nostalgia had prevented them from being objective about the matter. I’m sad to inform them after sampling a dozen episodes from the confusingly named “Marvel DVD Comic Book Collection” of the 90s X-Men cartoon, it’s all as bad as these clips would indicate and the series surely can’t hold a candle to its contemporary from another studio.

Where Batman was sleek and sharply written, effectively using decades of continuity and minimal, easily animated designs to get the most from a tight budget, the X-Men cartoon is a bloated mess that seems to revel in its fiscal and storytelling shortcomings. There’s overblown dialogue forced into the mouths of voice actors who seem more desperate than talented, animation that seems to be missing every other frame, and an intensely dispiriting take on the X-Men mythos that lacks any sort of joy, stripping away the themes of tolerance and education in exchange for hamfisted plotting and poorly done fight sequences. In a lot of ways, it’s emblematic of much of the comics being printed at the time, all cheap gloss with no substance and an ugly veneer that seems designed to attract teenage boys with more money than charisma.

There’s a reason that this cartoon has been buried in the past until Disney secured the rights to release it on DVD: if the Batman cartoon was frequently a night of passion with a fantastic partner, something you’d want to revisit again and again, X-Men is closer to ten minutes with a tube sock that you’d then bury in the laundry, hamfisted groping that is embarrassing after a certain age..

¹You can speculate why in the comments. I’ll tell you that it rhymed with “girls, music, and some more girls, almost like a Jeffrey Brown book.”

The second installment of Ed Piskor’s Wizzywig series of graphic novels, Hacker, is just as entertaining as the first volume. Piskor’s cartooning gets sharper every time I see it and he manages to ride a fine line with the script, giving readers enough information to understand the finer points of what his protagonist is doing without ever making the book feel like a series of lectures. In addition to the material itself, I quite like the formalist four-panel grid approach he’s taken in this work; it suits the faux-documentary style very well. As with the first book, Piskor provides an extended preview to get readers interested.

John Kerchbaum’s Petey & Pussy features a foul-mouthed dog and cat duo (you can probably figure who gets what moniker,) both of whom have heads belonging to middle-aged white men. No explanation is given for this, nor do you really need one, as it seems to perfectly fit the world they inhabit, where ZAP!-style grotesqueness collides with a polished, midcentury illustration style. Between snake attacks, a suicidal parrot, visits to the bar, bottles of “twat-ka,” and an argument over who gets a shit-covered cigar, there’s something for everyone in the family, sort of a Chuck Jones retelling of The Aristocrats.

Ed Brubaker seems to be on autopilot for a large part of Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand, a very by-the-numbers duo of parallel stories about one part of the multi-titled team in the wake of Messiah Complex‘s over-the-top crossover and subsequent disappearance of Charles Xavier’s gravely-wounded body. It’s mutant-suffering-as-comfort-food, with Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler getting captured in Russia while Cyclops and Emma Frost shake down some dirty hippies in San Francisco. The character work is strong, but it’s very much an extended version of those “vignette” issues that Claremont would do between storylines in which the sum totality of someone’s psychic powers would need to be used and there was a lot of fretting and angst. Mike Choi’s art may be one reason I’m a bit blase about this comic: it’s a touch too clean and when combined with computer coloring, it makes the entire affair look more like a model shoot than a comic where people, you know, get persecuted for their genetic code.

Setting aside the clunky title and a silly number of panels featuring people standing around an incapacitated Chuck X lying on a slab with big bullet hole in his forehead in the first two chapters of X-Men Legacy: Divided He Stands (oh, I get it, trust me,) there’s a few really nicely-handled bits here, mostly involving Professor X recovering from his wounds and beginning to deal with his legacy of being kind of a shithead to the people who looked up to him. Sure, it’s melodramatic and handles its themes will all the subtlety of an Axewulf solo, but X-Men comics have never been nuanced examinations of mutant versus mankind, no matter how many times really dodgy MLK vs Malcolm X metaphors tumbled out of characters’ mouths. The art’s a bit of a mixed bag: Scot Eaton handles the main story while the flashbacks are covered by Romita Jr, Greg Land, and others. Again, coloring plays heavily into my perception of the title, creating a too-rendered dullness makes the book’s “present day” look nearly exactly like Captain America and about a dozen other Marvel titles, all Vertigo browns and greens. Brandon Peterson did draw the heck out of a naked Jean Grey, but that goofy high was quickly destroyed thanks to the re-appearance of the Worst Character in Comics in the final chapter.

Spider-Man: A New Goblin collects five issues of what many fans consider to be “prime” Len Wein/Ross Andru material. The mystery’s about as obvious as they come and it’s positively drenched in melodrama, but it’s hard to deny the appeal if you have any fondness for the character. It’s archetypical Spider-Man, complete with Aunt May in the hospital and Mary Jane serving as a calculated combination of harridan and super-hot lust object for the fans.

Wait, no, those issues of Morrison’s New X-Men are still pretty damn weird to look at.

Anyway, points to Mike Carey for making me care about Rogue. Mystique’s integration into the group was actually compelling and had me hooked, even if I already know how that whole thing is going to end, which takes a deft hand.

X-Men: Blinded By The Light – Is not nearly as entertaining as Supernovas, even if it offers a few payoffs. After the previous installment’s successes, it seems like the blame would likely fall on Humberto Ramos. I would frequently look at pages and wonder what exactly the script was versus what was presented on the page, and the nuance the script called for in a few spots was lost completely by Ramos’s huge-eyed, gape-mouthed Bratz version of the X-Men.

Abandoned Cars – While Tim Lane is obviously influenced by Charles Burns (with a soupçon of Dan Clowes,) his narrative voice is so clear that comparisons would only come up short. There’s nothing truly groundbreaking here, but this is a book I’ve found myself flipping back through and rereading bits from over the last few days. It’s full of craft, particularly in the shorter vignettes that show the nastier end of noir with a straightforward yet chilling voice. The weakest here is still very readable and well-done, and the stronger pieces are among the best I’ve read this year.

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics – Paul Gravett is one of the best curators that genre comics has and this 25-story collection (along with the previous installments on war and horror books) serves as proof. The episodes collected here come from a wide away of American and European comics and include creators like Paul Grist, Simon and Kirby, Jacques Tardi, Bernie Krigstein, Alan Moore, Alex Toth, oh come on at this point you should have just ordered it.

Greg Gillis makes records under the pseudonym Girl Talk. What Gillis does is popularly known as a “mashup” but where many people are happy to take two or three songs, beatmatch them in Ableton, and create melodic tracks like the Kelly Clarkson/Depeche Mode mashup “Since You Been Gahan,” Gilis takes twenty or more to create a 4-minute survey of pop music, snatching bits from Queen, Tones on Tail, Paula Cole, and The Cure and creating something that’s not so much a whole as an amalgam of moments – bits of things that you know (and like, at least out of context) played in a very tight sequence. His music is schizophrenic and celebratory, occasionally recontextualizing material in surprising ways (the clipped strings and sped-up symphony of “Girl/Boy Song” by Aphex Twin under Rich Boy’s “Throw Some D’s,”) but it generally consisting of Ginnis putting something familiar with against something else the audience is likely to know to create a pleasing fifteen or twenty seconds of synchronicity, like the swingbeat smash “No Diggity” meeting Kanye’s “Flashing Lights” in “Still Here.” While I’ve been enjoying Girl Talk’s latest, Feed The Animals, quite a lot, it feels disposable in a way I was having trouble putting my finger on, until I was in the middle of the last trade of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.

What makes that title successful frequently transcends the (undeniable) craft applied to the material – it’s that sense of seeing something familiar treated slightly differently. Astonishing features a team that is very much “our” X-Men: Cyclops. Wolverine, Colossus, Beast, and Kitty Pryde along with Emma Frost go and have big loud adventures, exchange quips, and very rarely do something that’s a genuine surprise to the readers.  This is franchise superhero comics at their best.  Even the ending, which features an blatantly set-up solution to the whole “bad guys firing a fuck-off huge bullet at the planet” problem, manages to make one gape a bit, thanks to John Cassaday’s ability to render the most unbelievable moments in a down-to-earth fashion.  It’s well-done and a great example of the X-genre, but at the same time it feels hollow, especially when compared to another trade paperback release from this week, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s The Umbrella Academy.

It’s simultaneously difficult to understand and completely believable that The Umbrella Academy is  Gerard Way’s first major comics work.  Way’s comics-related output was limited to some material with Boneyard Press in his teens and some work for Cartoon Network prior to forming the hugely-popular My Chemical Romance, whose rapid rise to the top of the modern rock charts left little time for the medium. There’s a freshness to The Umbrella Academy that’s undeniable, even if one detects notes of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Bob Haney’s batshit scripting in this high-concept story of a tight-knit superpowered “family” who share a tragic past. It’s unclear if it’s unabashed enthusiasm combined with ideas that have been gestating in Way’s head for years or if the tone and world presented are calculatedly different from other takes on the superhero, but where Astonishing X-Men is a remixed and mashed-up take on what’s gone before, The Umbrella Academy is something set firmly in its own world.

While it’s clear why so many enjoy Astonishing X-Men and The Sinestro Corps War and All-Star Superman for their very nicely-done takes on corporate-owned characters, the experience can seem a bit hollow, particularly during times like the present, when every editorially-mandated event is hyped to the nth degree and things that should be straightforward, fun adventure comics become recycled 10 o’clock drama cliches with some spandex thrown in for variety.  Even at their most enthralling peaks, it’s blatantly clear that no permanent change will ever occur and that the status quo of seventy years of superhero storytelling and that the audience likes it that way.  They want new versions of things they’ve enjoyed in the past, mashed-up beats and hands-in-the-air moments, not original compositions that are unfamiliar and require something besides appreciation for what has happened before.