Ever since I was old enough to buy comics and other collectibles, so many trinkets have rotated off my walls and out of my long boxes. Yet one of the few pieces of my childhood I still have is a large black binder whose nearly rusted rings hold together dozens of Ultra-Pro pages protecting my entire set of Imperial X-Men series I cards. There’s always a gasp feeling whenever I see any bit of 90’s memorabilia featuring the X-Men’s blue or gold team. Perhaps nothing has a place in mutant fandom quite like the X-Men animated series that aired on Fox Kids in the 1990s’.
To honor the landmark in cartoons, Abrams book’s has enlisted original series producers to compile a behind the scenes history in X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series.
X-Men: The Art And Making Of The Animated Series
Authors: Eric Lewald, Julia Lewald
Published By: Abrams Books
Available: October 13, 2020.
X-Men The Animated series capitalized on the popularity of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s run on Marvel’s mutants when it broke and still holds the world’s record for most sales of any comic book. The show based on those comics, helmed by animation veteran Eric Lewald and produced by Julia Lewald is regarded highly in pop culture. So when the pair was asked to build a definitive history about their time with The X-Men, they dug deeper than any filmmaker could for a subject documentary. The result is 288 pages where no space is wasted and every piece of information is eyebrow-raising.
To understand the experience of the book you have to look at three things it does. On a surface level, the design of this 12×10 landscape style read is intuitive despite all the animators with a messy desk chaos going on. While it does footnote all of the illustrations you’ll see, at times it just lets readers gander and admire things such as storyboards, pre-animation, and x-sheets before you flip the page for the info. At other moments, pages are splashed by acid sheet animation cells that give the book a timeless animation feel.
There’s something about an art book that isn’t just pretty to look at but tells a story itself. Some of the great art books like The Art of The Last of Us do it purely visually while something like Spider-Man Art of The Game tells the story of a partnership. X-Men AAMOTAS does it by taking readers through something akin to a film documentary. This book doesn’t just glad-hand itself, we get to read about the failures X-Men as a property went through, a balancing act between studios on the other side of the globe in a time where the internet didn’t connect us at light speeds.
Not only is the book a crash course in older methods of creating animation but it gives a commentary on what was and might have been for every episode across its five-season run.
What X-Men AAMOTAS does more than most books in its category is reveal things we never knew about this series 20 years later. Some of it is possibly stories you’ve heard during panels about the show at conventions but there are visual pieces that even those audiences didn’t get to see. I personally never knew the late great Stan Lee wanted to narrate openings for the show as he did with old Spider-Man cartoons but this clashed with the more grounded vision producers had for the show. It makes readers ponder what might have been but at the same time supports the argument that it just would not have fit. Though you do get to see one conceptual bit Lee wrote for narration which is touching.
Abrams Books has published something that satisfies those looking for animation knowledge, art aficionados, and the most die-hard critical X-Men collectors. If Jim Lee is your X-Men artist or you still separate the blue and gold in your heart, X-Men: The Art And Making Of The Animated Series is an absolute must own.
