X-Men ’92: House of XCII
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 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.
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.
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.
The joke, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is that this is the Hickman X-Men run, retold in the style of X-Men: The Animated Series, and using exclusively characters who were around at that time. Which means a lot of characters get subbed out with more X:TAS-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.
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.
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. The 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 Asteroid M gets subbed in to replace Arakko. It’s a distillation of Hickman’s basic story in mash-up form.
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.
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 just a reprise of Hickman’s story.
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.
A curious little side project, but an enjoyable one.
I quite liked the “data pages”, full of overlapping 90s triangles and words like “RADICAL!” bursting out everywhere. I also liked that Forearm’s upgrade was to have six arms. That was cute.
And of course Beast came back as AoA Beast, which surely means that isn’t what’s happened in X-Force
I had no idea what this was supposed to be. I assumed it was just a continuation of the Chris Sims series from a few years back, thankfully without Chris Sims. This premise actually sounds really fun.
I think the style here may actually be closer to what we’re going to get from the X-Men ’97 animated continuation of the original series, coming up on Disney+, if the early concept art is much to go by. Something evocative of the 90s animated series but obviously updated, cleaner lines, clearer resolution and coloring, sticking mostly to the old designs but with some slight modernizations, etc.
I watched the 90s show – it was my way into the X-Men – and the one thing that this book gets wrong is the violence. It’s bloodless, sure, and with resurrections it’s mostly consequence-free, but still. People get beheaded here. That would never happen in the cartoon.
(Although it did feature Cameron Hodge’s head on a Phalanx technobody. Without mentioning how it got there. It was also Hodge’s first and only appearance in the show, because its continuity was rather wonky.)
Being someone who was too young to ever see it when it was on and also someone who thought it looked like shit when I saw re-runs of it on the Disney Channel or whatever, I always feel pretty cynical about these sorts of series. Say what you will about how Hickman’s series turned out (not even a fan of his work generally) but it was probably the biggest shake-up since Morrison’s run, so it feels so…I dunno, cheap? To do that premise with “here’s the 90’s guys you remember!” I’m sure it’s fine for what it is but I’m definitely not the target audience.
Like Paul, I was not the target audience for the cartoon. I’ve seen maybe 5 episodes. I also enjoyed this comic quite a bit. I found myself chuckling at the way Krakoa-era plot lines were reinterpreted, and the data pages were inspired. Foxe & Espin made it clever enough to keep my interest.
After flipping through it, it just made me appreciate the BTAS comics even more.
I was 8 years old when the animated series debuted, and thus was very much in the target audience. Unlike Batman: TAS, which had excellent animation and voice acting, X-Men TAS doesn’t hold up very well without nostalgia factor, especially the later seasons. Nostalgia wasn’t enough to get me to case about the Secret Wars X-Men 92 comic. But this I read and found pretty enjoyable. It’s a fun take on Krakoa, and restricting the series to characters who had already appeared on the show was a smart move, necessitating some of those creative decisions. For instance, the identity of the Five. Fun stuff for a mini.
I binge watched the series during the lockdown winter and actually found it held up better than I expected. It’s ridiculous in a 90s kids’ show kind of way, which may be what Joseph S. meant by the nostalgia factor, but I thought it was amusing. The inconsistent animation really let it down, as did Disney+’s strange insistence on showing the episodes out of order, but it was fun.
I haven’t read this yet but I love the original cartoon as it was my entry point to the X-Books.
IT’s adaptation of the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix story is pretty good overall.
One thing I found interesting about this is that it feels like how this story might’ve been done 40 years ago when storytelling was more compressed. In much the way that the original DoFP was only two issues that have since been turned into dozens, you could imagine a 1980 (though maybe not 1992) version of the Krakoa story that takes 4-5 issues and then gets revisited over and over and over.
I’m surprised people would say the cartoon differed a lot in tone from the contemporary comics. My impression is that aside from toning down the more violent elements, it was a pretty strong match in that department.
This mini reminded me of the Amalgam books, in that the real entertainment was seeing how they worked in and adapted the references and riffs, more so than the actual story itself. Unfortunately, it also goes to show why the Amalgam stories were wise to confine themselves to one-shots. I’d have to disagree that they successfully carried the gimmick across five issues.
“(Although it did feature Cameron Hodge’s head on a Phalanx technobody. Without mentioning how it got there. It was also Hodge’s first and only appearance in the show, because its continuity was rather wonky.)”
Cameron Hodge was in the Genosha episode in season 1. He got wrecked by a busted dam while fighting one of the two or three versions of Cable.
Surprisingly the ending here got used in the main books…..years after! Talk about role reversal