{"id":8539,"date":"2022-12-06T21:35:27","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T21:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8539"},"modified":"2022-12-06T21:35:27","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T21:35:27","slug":"x-men-92-house-of-xcii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8539","title":{"rendered":"X-Men ’92: House of XCII"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN ’92: HOUSE OF XCII #1-5<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Foxe<\/strong>
\nArtist: Salva Espin<\/strong>
\nColourist: Israel Silva<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am not the person you should be asking about this.<\/p>\n

X-Men: The Animated Series<\/em> ran from 1992 to 1997. It did air on British TV, as part of the Saturday morning children’s TV block, but I was in completely the wrong age group for that. Nor is the animated series all that similar to the actual comics from the era – it uses characters and costume designs from the period, but the tone is very different. It was aimed at a younger audience.<\/p>\n

Of course, since the 1990s are now over 25 years away, they have a substantial nostalgia audience of their own – and their memories of the 90s are based on children’s TV and magazines. But it’s not my nostalgia and I am not the target audience for this in the slightest.<\/p>\n

Given all that… this is quite fun. It’s a gimmick, of course, and you might wonder whether it’s really going to carry a five-issue miniseries, but it holds up surprisingly well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The joke, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is that this is the Hickman X-Men run, retold in the style of\u00a0X-Men: The Animated Series<\/em>, and using exclusively characters who were around at that time. Which means a lot of characters get subbed out with more\u00a0X:TAS<\/em>-appropriate characters, and other stories play out in wonky ways. If you do this wrong, it’s a parlour game and it’s not going to carry five issues. The key is to be creative about it.<\/p>\n

Well, that and to find a solution for the biggest problem: the Hickman run doesn’t have an ending, and that means you have to provide it.<\/p>\n

It is, at the end of the day, a reference fest. There’s no getting away from that, but it’s what people bought the comic for anyway, so it’s hardly a criticism. I’m told Steve Foxe’s script is a pretty good facsimile of the style of the show, though I wouldn’t be able to judge. \u00a0The basic structure of the Hickman run is preserved: the mutants set up their island nation and get the villains on their side, Orchis are set up as the bad guys (as an alliance of anti-mutant villains), and eventually posthumanity emerges as the real threat. “X of Swords” becomes an Arkon story, and\u00a0Asteroid M gets subbed in to replace Arakko. It’s a distillation of Hickman’s basic story in mash-up form.<\/p>\n

Salva Espin doesn’t exactly try to mimic the animation style, but the art sticks with clean lines, bright colouring, and conspicuously traditional panel layouts. None of it is remotely like the 90s comics, but it gets the idea of children’s animation. The Krakoan designs develop some large gaudy flowers, as well, which fits the look. “X of Swords” quite deliberately dumps all of its weirdness in favour of a conspicuously bloodless sword fight. Xavier is still in his blocky yellow floating wheelchair, wearing the traditional Cerebro helmet.<\/p>\n

There are some interesting calls that go beyond just making the necessary changes. Moira MacTaggert was around in the 90s and she did appear in the animated series, complete with her back story as Professor X’s old flame. But instead, Foxe makes the clever call to give her role to Jubilee – since, after all, doing it with Moira wouldn’t be a twist at all. That also allows for Wolverine to have a subplot looking for her. Since he’s a marginal character in Hickman’s run, that gives him something to do – and also gives the book a spine that isn’t\u00a0just<\/em> a reprise of Hickman’s story.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it works to the book’s advantage that Hickman never did a proper resolution. It leaves some genuine uncertainty about how all this is going to pay off – after all, it’s surely not going to blow the eventual plans for the main books. And it doesn’t, but the way out that it opts for feels satisfying enough.<\/p>\n

A curious little side project, but an enjoyable one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN ’92: HOUSE OF XCII #1-5 Writer: Steve Foxe Artist: Salva Espin Colourist: Israel Silva Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Jordan D White I am not the person you should be asking about this. X-Men: The Animated Series ran from 1992 to 1997. It did air on British TV, as part of the Saturday morning children’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8539"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8543,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8539\/revisions\/8543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}