{"id":24091,"date":"2024-12-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-15T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=24091"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:40:48","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:40:48","slug":"umtu-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/12\/15\/umtu-11\/","title":{"rendered":"UMTU 11"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After the rather absurd label of \u201cmanga-influenced\u201d was applied to not very manga-looking superhero art in the mid-to-late 90s, Americans (& Canadians) doing actual manga-influenced art gained steam. People like Adam Warren, Rick Mays and this month\u2019s artist, Chynna Clugston-Major had a higher profile. Warren had been doing his version of manga for a while already, and American faux-manga goes back much further than that, but it was never mainstream enough to appear in the sister title to Marvel\u2019s biggest success in a decade. It was usually in weird fringe stuff, like Ninja High School. Dark Horse managed to get Adam Warren a chance to do official American comics about anime legends the Dirty Pair, and that was about as high profile as \u201cAmerican manga\u201d had gotten before now. Something about this sort of thing always felt kind of wrong to me. I\u2019m sure the problem is entirely in my head. But in the same way that, say, Reb Brown doing a shameless and not-as-good impression of Todd McFarlane in 1994 felt lazy and gross, so too does just copying manga. It\u2019s not the same\u2026 Manga isn\u2019t a monolith, there\u2019s plenty of different styles within the industry\u2026 but still, there\u2019s no question that these people were watching anime or reading manga and going \u201cI could do that!\u201d and that just feels kinda lazy, at best. Paul Pope famously went to Japan and worked at Kondasha, and his art certainly has obvious manga influences, but it\u2019s still his own. His manga background is obvious in his pacing, page construction and supple ink work, not in just drawing people with stereotypical anime faces. But, like I said, could just be me overthinking, as I am wont to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aaaaaat any rate, this month, Ultimate Spider-Man meets the Ultimate X-Men, which means Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Storm and Wolverine. Colossus and Iceman were on the team, as I recall, not sure why they\u2019re not here. Nightcrawler joined in the back half of the first year. Transparency Digital colors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This obviously takes place before Peter was grounded, but it also features Gwen, so I had no idea what to do with it. And it doesn\u2019t even read like Manga. It\u2019s American page construction and pacing. Just with Sailor Moon faces. I feel like I\u2019m being harsh, but it just doesn\u2019t feel good to me. Well, as the gang speeds into the city, they remind each other of all the things they could do on their skip day, only to wind up at the mall, that bastion of teenage boredom. Or, it was. Do kids still go to the mall? Are there many malls left? I know I spent much of my teens at malls, usually wishing I wasn\u2019t, but that\u2019s where we could go. They all bemoan how boring and uncreative their choice was, with Kong saying it\u2019s a mall, but not their mall, and that makes it exciting, but no one\u2019s buying it. They split up to get food. MJ asks Peter if he wants to ditch the others later, because today would be the perfect day for something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Clugston-Major has been filling the book with references to bands, but Beast\u2019s Gorillaz shirt is the first one that doesn\u2019t feel dated. Insane how this comic has almost zero backgrounds. Just figure son blank panels, they could be anywhere. As the X-Men continue to recreate the Spider-Gang\u2019s intro to the mall, Wolverine notices Spider-Man by scent, if not by sight, and asks the others if they want to have some fun. Peter & MJ are convincing the others to go to the the MOMA after this when Wolverine grabs him by the shoulder and asks what\u2019s shakin\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kong\u2019s genuine hurt is pretty funny. Ultimate Wolverine was always a weird situation. They seemed to want to present him as younger than the regulation version. They were only just now revealing his incredibly underwhelming origin in the main continuity out of fear that the 2nd X-Men movie would beat them to it if they didn\u2019t (And then it didn\u2019t even cover anything that hadn\u2019t been in the comics, and Wolverine got stuck with a really awful backstory after decades of being mysterious, 0\/10), but it had been clear he was way, way older than he looks for a long time. They seemed to want you to think this Logan was young. Maybe even a kid like the others. But I think that only lasted for, like, 5 minutes, and soon he was more or less the regular Wolverine, just frequently drawn with even sillier facial hair. At any rate, Liz takes a long look at Logan and his friends and asks if they\u2019re mutants. After an awkward pause, Cyclops says yes, and Liz literally bolts. She\u2019s got issues. The others are duly embarrassed, and the X-Men try to leave, but Gwen wants to ask them something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On the one hand, not what you\u2019d call a titanic team-up. On the other hand, almost certainly more interesting than a rushed story maneuvering Spider-Man and the X-Men into a place where they could start and win a fight in just 22 pages. This had a lot of character, and that\u2019s better than pointless punching, in my book. You can tell Bendis and presumably editorial are feeling emboldened to go for character over heroics. Spider-Man\u2019s meeting with Wolverine was almost nothing but pointless fighting, but 10 issues later, a book without superheroes at all. And people were totally ok with that as long as they got an engaging read. The industry was changing pretty quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The back of this month\u2019s books is full of in-house marketing, hocking the upcoming, previously discussed The Ultimates, Bruce Jones\u2019 Hulk, also previously mentioned, the wrongheaded \u201cCaptain America Vs Terrorism\u201d story I think I ALSO mentioned already, and an Iron Man run by writer Mike Grell that I recently read Bill Jemas personally torpedoed for no good reason. But the thing I wanna talk about is a 2-page spread about \u201cThe Marvel Mangaverse.\u201d Manga had begun to eclipse American comics among American teens by this point, a trend that would only continue until no kids in the US care about comics, but manga and anime are ubiquitous. And seeing this happening, Marvel had a solution: We do manga versions of our characters. Without a single person who\u2019s worked in manga involved. They got Ben Dunn, who\u2019d been doing American knockoffs of manga for decades by then with his aforementioned \u201cNinja High School\u201d and \u201cWarrior Nun Areala\u201d and things of that nature. They got Adam Warren to write, but not draw, one of the books. UDON, a studio that made their name shamelessly ripping off the style of the Street Fighter games (and were eventually rewarded with actual work from Capcom), are there. And while all those people are only tangentially related to manga, everyone else involved is just an American comics person. The books looked terrible, and by all accounts, were terrible. I sure didn\u2019t buy them. When this nonsense didn\u2019t set the world on fire, Marvel started courting actual manga artists, with things like the 3-issue Wolverine: Snikt! By Tsutomu Nihei, or Kia Asamiya\u2019s somewhat embattled and brief stint drawing Uncanny X-Men. These things didn\u2019t really change anything, either. The greatest heroes in the world couldn\u2019t stop the advance of time, and comics really became the realm of the 30, 40, 50-something who got used to buying them as kids, while the current kids read manga. There was also material during this panicked attempt to attract manga fans by a Japanese writer called Akira Yoshida. Except, that turned out to just be a weaboo named CB Cebulski, who happened to be a Marvel editor, pretending to be a Japanese guy to get work. But don\u2019t worry, when it came out, he was duly punished by continuing to serve as an editor at the company and eventually Editor-In-Chief. Comics is a truly insane business. Maybe manga deserved to supplant it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the rather absurd label of \u201cmanga-influenced\u201d was applied to not very manga-looking superhero art in the mid-to-late 90s, Americans (& Canadians) doing actual manga-influenced art gained steam. People like Adam Warren,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[35,136,1922,1998,77,16,78,1925,172,21,2,138,1956,1928,300,75],"class_list":["post-24091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-aunt-may","tag-beast","tag-brian-michael-bendis","tag-chynna-clugston-major","tag-cyclops","tag-gwen-stacy","tag-jean-grey","tag-kong","tag-liz-allen","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-spider-man","tag-storm","tag-transparency-digital","tag-ultimate-marvel-team-up","tag-wolverine","tag-x-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24091"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24300,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24091\/revisions\/24300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}