X-MEN VISIONARIES: JOE MADUREIRA

By: Jason Henderson
Date: Wednesday, November 08, 2000

There's something odd about Marvel's pumping out a collection like X-Men Visionaries: Joe Madureira. Here, Marvel urges the reader to simply enjoy the artwhich is remarkableand ignore the stories, which have great gaping holes struck through them. Why? Because the paperback reprints Uncanny X-Men issues #325-#326, #329-#330 and #341-#343. And this is Uncanny, which even in Scott Lobdell's capable hands had the unwieldy plotting of Days of our Lives on amphetamines. Over the course of two years, storylines rise and fall, characters return and disappear, and the best we can do is read the beginning of each issue for clues as to what on earth is going on and admire Madureira's art.

About Madureira's art: 'visionary' is a fair moniker. Joe Madureira completely re-imagines not just the X-Men, but the shape and flow of the world they inhabit. In a style people have called 'manga-inspired,' Madureira creates beefy, slick, gleam-toothed, eye-glowing characters whose hair twists and flows like that of the Bride with White Hair. Cyclops, Wolverine and Archangel all explode across panels and pages, and Madureira is always certain that few panels will be left unbroken. As a manga columnist I'm not completely certain I'd call this 'manga' style, although manga certainly plays an important role in Madureira's sensibilities.

In the strictest sense Madureira's style is 'vaguely disturbing cartooning,' given the absurdly deformed, asymmetrical and disproportionate way Madureira likes to draw his mutants, who are still all supposed to be human-like. Put it in shadow with lots of flashes of light and swirling fire, and it's still a cartoon. But 'manga-style' is what we have been calling it for the past few years, so it'll have to do.

Borrowing from the East is not a bad thingdespite many critics' insistence that the X-Men would never be a manga, the connection is fairly logical. We must look to anime and manga, and certainly not to American comics, for the closest reflections to X-Men's twisted continuity and soapy hand-wringing. The anime Yu Yu Hakusho, or Poltergeist Report, is a typical anime supernatural super-team, and they're X-Men all the way. Anime and manga strike me as the next logical step in American action (something that finally occurred to Hollywood over the last two years) and X-Men's borrowing of that sensibility can only be seen as logical.

Here's a fun idea: if I could suggest an interesting contrast, you might try reading this book alongside another trade paperback collection I read recently, X-Men: Mutant Massacre, which covered many of the events referenced in X-Men Visionaries: Joe Madureira. In the beginning of the Madureira collection, Lobdell has his X-Men teaming up with Callisto on the anniversary of the massacre of the Morlocks. The Massacre was a Marvel event that happened in 1986-87, when John Romita Jr. was still drawing the X-Men with laugh-lines and modern New Wave and 80's couture styles. (I still mourn Rogue's parka.)


It's fascinating to read the two together, and imagine that Lobdell and Madureira's X-Men are in the same universe as the calm, melancholy X-Men of Claremont and Romita. But of course they are, because Lobdell reminds us over and over again in arguments I was thrilled to read. Callisto is furious with Storm because Storm was the leader of the Morlocks when they were slaughtered. Had Storm's leadership of the band of underground mutants even been mentioned in recent continuity?

Looking across these two decades, you see a fundamental shift in the way American comic artat least mass-market Marvel artis presented. In the world of Madureira and similar manga-style artists, we've abandoned the notion that the X-Men live in something like our own world. The sun does not shine the same way, people are not shaped the same way and gravity does not work the same way. Oddly, this growth of dark cartooning as the prevailing comics style has happened at the same time that Alex Ross' absurdly real paintings of superheroes have grown in popularity.

Writing, meanwhile, has become better overallScott Lobdell, Grant Morrison or Kurt Busiek on their worst days can write rings around Roy Thomas, god love the old golden age fetishist, or even, dare I say it, visionary-in-his-own-right Chris Claremont. But art is all over the map. Wherever it lands, though, it's dark, even in background; when was the last time you saw more than two or three pages in a comic with white borders? Color and ambience provide the only light in comics these days, as coloring has gotten so sophisticated that we seem to have developed fear of white space. No wonder these people are depressed.

So what's going on? My theory is that the only people reading comics anymore are old fans, and we're so bored that anything different is fine. We might complain about the Beast looking roughly the size of a John Deere tractor in Madureira's work, but frankly, we've seen the classic way a thousand times. We've seen decades of clean, drab art, and yearn for anything out of the ordinary. So we get Alex Ross, because it's fun to see the wrinkles in Captain America's pants. And we get Madureira and Jai Lee, because the gigantism and hyper-kinetic flow of their art is eye-catching.

And you know what this really means? Something else will come along soon. Someone will draw just like Neal Adams-but-different, and neo-neo-classic art will become the rage. We'll moan and argue. And we'll spin ourselves into our graves, dancing in the dying light of disco long since abandoned by the rest of the world.

Trade Paperback from Marvel Comics. Written by Scott Lobdel. Art by Joe Madureira.