Yes, you read the title correctly, prepare for Marvel's X-Men to enter the world of manga.
According to Newsarama, Marvel Comics and Del Rey Publishing are going to partner together on two manga titles that will feature X-Men and Wolverine. Like typical manga, they will be black and white, but instead of the traditional right-to-left manga format they have chosen to go with the left-to-right Western format (which I think is a bad idea). So far they plan to do of each of the two titles, and we should see them sometime in spring of 2009 - quite a while from now.
The talent creating these manga: X-Men - Written by Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman with art by the Indonesian artist, Anzu.
Wolverine - Antony Johnston was named as writer, with the artist to be named later.
What's the gyst of these? Newsarama says:
X-Men will be a shojo style manga, where the Xavier School is still a mutant academy, but it's a all-boys school – with Kitty Pryde, the heroine of the story is the only girl in the school. Kitty is torn between the popular Hellfire Club, led by Pyro, and the school misfits who she eventually bands together as the X-Men.
Wolverine will be produced in the shonen style. From a press release circulated by Del Rey, Wolverine is described as a breakout member of the X-men team both for his attitude and unbreakable adamantium claws.
The two titles will not exist within the same universe as each other or the regular (“616”) Marvel Universe. They will have elements that will be familiar to regular Marvel readers, but with very different takes on them - the phrase "radical new direction" was used to describe the manga takes.
It seems that they're attempting to get manga fans into superhero comics. Will this work? I'd be surprised because I just don't see manga fans getting into this. Would X-Men and Wolverine fans pick it up? Not too sure - from what I've seen in my store, most comic book readers don't really like, or at least won't try, manga.
For more information head over to the Newsarama article.
Update - Newsarama now has more details and sample art.
2 comments:
I think they did this before in a couple of one-shots across the marvel universe.
They have used manga art styles before, but I don't know if they've really taken the whole manga story concept of shojo and shonen styles plus the art and published it in a manga size book. It's one thing to use manga-esq art in comics from time to time, I think it's different to actually make it into manga books.
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