Do I go with the shrinking/toy joke, the mural joke, or the giants joke?
X-Men: The Manga #2
Marvel Comics (April, 1998)
WRITER/ARTIST: Hiroshi Higuchi
TRANSLATION: Mutsumi Masuda
RETOUCH/PRODUCTION: Dan Nakrosis
EDITOR: Glenn Greenberg
Part two of “Night Of The Sentinels” episode 1. Cyclops rescues Jubilee, who wakes up in the lab at the X-Men’s mansion headquarters. She has a rather rough introduction to Beast, Morph, and especially Wolverine (though she takes him down by catching him by surprise and I do love my Wolverine abuse). Worried about her parents, Jubilee sneaks out to go home while Professor X and his assistant Jean Grey explore the files of the damaged Sentinel robot and find her file, realizing that the “mutant control center” is actually hunting mutants. One of the Sentinels manages to capture Jubilee while the X-Men break into the control center to destroy their mutant files. The comic ends where the first episode ends, as Wolverine, Beast, Morph, and Storm are about to enter a room they don’t know is full of armed guards.
What they got right: I kind of like this interpretation of the episode. The characters aren’t so, for lack of a better term, stiff. Higuchi is having a little more fun with them, which totally works for me. Cyclops calling out “optic blast” like a shonen attack move I found amusing.
What they got wrong: I, however, am not your typical X-Men fan, and while I appreciate the show it didn’t grow on me the way it has other people. I can see this more lighthearted take on the show rubbing actual fans the wrong way, not to mention readers of X-Men comics in the 1990s who already had a more faithful adaptation of the series in X-Men Adventures. As mentioned last time, Jubilee loses a bit of her edge as she comes off more on the cute teen side than in the show.
What I think overall: Had the X-Men been more like this I might be more of a fan of the show and the US comic. However, it wasn’t so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t call out the adaptation errors with the change in tone.
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