Here's an X-Men comic I could really get behind.

[richardak]

In 2009, Marvel published with Del Rey a comic called X-Men: Misfits, reimagining the story in the style of a Japanese high-school soap-opera comic.  Even though I'm not a fan of the X-Men and never have been, I liked this comic, mostly because it took the idea of a school for mutants seriously, and the conflicts between different groups of mutants played out among factions of students and faculty at the school.  One of the (several) things I didn't like about the mainstream X titles was that, far too often, the interesting premise was just an excuse for conventional superhero action.  Unfortunately, it appears to be highly in doubt whether there will ever be a volume 2.  Oh well.  Anyway, here are some scans.  I've only done a handful out of the approximately 175 page first volume, so page limits shouldn't be an issue.  If there's interest, I'll post more.  Incidentally, this is not a Japanese comic.  The writers are American and the artist is Indonesian, but it has clearly been heavily influenced in both writing and art by a number of different Japanese comics.










When she arrives at school, Kitty is in for a bit of a surprise about the makeup of the student body....

To be blunt, it was an odd decision to make Kitty the only female student.  The purpose it serves in the story, so far as I can tell, is that it helps catapult Kitty quite quickly to the upper echelon of the school's social hierarchy, which is necessary for the direction the writers wanted to go to the story.  Putting Kitty in a privileged position within the school enables them to tell a certain kind of story.  Anyway, that's largely the subject of another post if people are interested.


One of the things I'm not sure how I feel about regarding this comic is the way they've introduced a family connection between Lensherr and the Prydes.  It's clearly implied that Kitty's grandfather saved Lensherr during the Holocaust, and the fact that the writers made Kitty the protagonist creates a pretty powerful subtext, hardly new to X-Men comics, but I've never really bought the metaphor.

Comments

[randyripoff]

Academy-X kind of started in a similar direction in that everything was happening at the school, they weren't going on missions, etc. They were dealing with the regular angst of being teens and interacting socially without much of the BIG MUTANT ANGST that was rife among X-titles at that point. Sadly, around issue 19 or so, it was back to business as usual.

[auggie18]

I was about to recommend Academy X. Loved that series. Just mutant kids being mutant kids.

[sevarem]

Eh... it mostly seems like a very stereotypical manga, right down to Kitty being a clumsy, yet kind hearted student who does terribly in school.

Bishounen Magneto ain't doing it for me either.

[nezchan]

I do like the "awesome champion of good" panel there.

[punishermax]

Holy fuck this art is nightmarish

[nezchan]

Welcome to Shoujo manga, where characters are stiff, inconsistent and usually very angular. I'd like the stuff better if the art wasn't typically so horrid, to say nothing of screen tone abuse.

[northstarfan]

I really didn't think this manga had that much to recommend it (except for some of the LOL!WHAT?! reimaginings of certain characters, and even then, it was the authors using a shoehorn to get most of them to fit into the usual shoujo roles). As above, I do think that the first dozen issues or so of New Mutants 2.0/Academy X/New X-Men were much better for that sort of thing.

[sinorhizobium]

MAG-NEATO. LOL

I also like the random sparkles that are appearing as he speaks dramatically about mutant rights. :D

[selke]

I wonder if they made Kitty the main character just to have an excuse to draw cat girls?

[icon_uk]

To be fair, Kitty was originally designed to be an audience identification character for the X-Men, something they hadn't had in years. A normal middle-class kid aside from her mutancy. Claremont and Byrne apparently clashed over Claremont's decision to make her a supergenius in the fields of physics and computer hardware from the outset as Byrne felt it made her less relatable and more un-normal.

Cypher served much the same role in the New Mutants, and he was only a "un-normal" in areas relating directly to his powers.

[q99]

I liked Misfits, my one complaint was they spent too much time on the mutant vs human politics later on and not enough on the shoujo awesomeness!

[ravenous_raven]

Hm, this is piquing my interest. On the one hand, there's too much of a shoujou influence to make me feel like it's really X-men. On the other, if taken as an alternate reality, I can accept the entirely different feel.

I do like the Kitty's thought process about Magneto's frequent speeches and it makes a lot of sense that Erik would be that kind of teacher if he was one.

[richardak]

I think it's pretty explicitly an alternate reality, if that helps.

[ar_feiniel]

I like the sequence of her falling through the wall while eavesdropping. Magneto is kinda freaking me out though.

[mullon]

This is inteesting.

[neev]

My issue with what I'm seeing of this is that it's directly grabbing shoujo tropes without any sense of awareness of those tropes. It seems very by the book and that's quite disappointing. I have no issue with shoujo style or even the use of manga-esque stylization in non-Japanese media, but to simply parrot it is dull and derivative.

[terrykun]

You left out manga!Hank/Professor Totoro? Fail!

:D I do like this series though.

[sandoz_iscariot]

Totoro!Hank was by far the best part of this book.

[sandoz_iscariot]

Eh, I thought "shojo X-Men" had potential but this was too bleh and cliche and bad fanficcy (like, it actually says "Kitty/Pyro = OTP!" on panel.) X-Men: Evolution is still my favorite portrayal of teenage X-Men in school.

And I hated that Kitty was the only girl at Xavier's. Yeah yeah, Fruits Basket, Ouran High School, etc., but one of the reasons I have always loved the X-Men franchise is that it has such a huge number of awesome female characters.

[quietprofanity]

And I hated that Kitty was the only girl at Xavier's. Yeah yeah, Fruits Basket, Ouran High School, etc., but one of the reasons I have always loved the X-Men franchise is that it has such a huge number of awesome female characters.

I have to admit that was the thing that made me go "PASS" without giving it a look. Jeez even Fruits Basket has female zodiac members

[hurricane-jam.livejournal.com]

And the universe weeps.

[punishermax]

Also why is literally every single fucking person blushing in this comic?

[akodo_rokku]

I have a better question: WHERE'S YOUR POST ON THE NEW ONE PIECE?

I mean c'mon, Usopp shoots murder plants!

[psychopathicus_rex]

I'm no authority on manga - I've barely read any of the stuff - but this doesn't strike me as too bad. The random blushing and sweating and fireworks and flowers and bubbles and confetti and I-don't-know-what-else in the background is a little annoying, and Kitty randomly turning into a, well, kitty for no apparent reason is a tad on the weird side, but, well, there's a reason I don't read manga that much - there are stylistic elements to it that don't really gel with me, and if they're intentionally trying to evoke that sort of atmosphere, then it's silly for me to complain about it.
On the other hand, I do like this version of Kitty. I'm not sure why exactly, but I like the added details of her being a middle child and working at the family restaurant. Also, her character seems... well, this may sound weird, but she seems like this particular version of Kitty Pryde would work much better in another medium. It's like all the weird 'I AM STARTLED SO I AM GOING TO TURN INTO A CAT WHILE THE WORLD EXPLODES AROUND ME' moments are just because it's a manga, and if she was in a different sort of comic, her character would be much more at home and relaxed. She may have been created as a manga character, but she doesn't FEEL like a manga character - she feels like she's been imported, like an exchange student or something, and is not quite fitting in with the native customs. I honestly don't know if that makes any sense, but those are my impressions about her.
(Also, I am AMAZED that it's taken this long for someone to come up with the 'Mag-Neato' gag. It's so OBVIOUS, and yet somehow I never thought of it before.)

[timgueugen]

I'd rather see a realistic style manga artist like Hiroaki Samura or Ryoichi Ikegami do the X Men. In fact Wolverine makes a cameo in a panel of Samura's Ohikkoshi as Akagi's uncle.

[neuhallidae]

::imagines X-Men done by Urasawa::

...

::dies of happy::

Though, really, if they have to do something shoujo-ish, why not use a style similar to, say the DOLLS series? It's very pretty, but fluid, and the artists can actually draw some damn scenery. The city scenes are really nice and the crime scenes appropriately creepy.

[blackruzsa]

I have this. Honestly, I never preferred it to ANY X-men trade, but I liked it, and wished it would continue :0

[tetradecimal]

I've read the first book of Misfits, and while I can say that the art isn't too egregious, the storyline definitely is.

Kitty enters her new high school and quickly becomes a kind of novelty item among her classmates because she's the only female student. In fact, the Hellfire Club (now a cadre of randomly selected, almost identical bishounen) almost immediately inducts her into their ranks because zomg girl.

She develops an insta-crush on a brooding, angsty bishounen Iceman, but ends up in a borderline-abusive relationship with vaguely terrifying, angsty bishounen Pyro for no particular reason. Many angsty bishounen are introduced, each with his own sparkly shoujo introduction panel, and distinguishable from each other only by their hairstyles, since they all have exactly the same builds. About half of the book it is either introducing another ~*really cute guy*~, or Kitty's reaction shots to said ~*really cute guy*~, only to toss him out of the story after a throwaway line or two for the next guy in line.

They do eventually shove in a disjointed throwaway scene about mutant rights, which is... really jarring since the rest of the book is about sparkly teen angst and boys. Which is sad, because this could have been a nice opportunity to explore the X-Universe from the standpoint of a teenage girl and flex some creative muscles in a new medium and try to incorporate some of the more serious themes from X-Men into a shoujo manga and for whatever reason, they just threw that all out in favor of, "What do girls like?" "...I KNOW BOYS."