The X-Blog

So, here’s a question: what’s your take on this whole motion comics business? Does it assist or take away from the comic business? Why not just make a cartoon? Is there even a point? Should all comics be like this? What’s your opinion on this?

Here’s what I’ve gotten so far from these “motion comics”. My stint with them began with the five part story in the new series Spider-Woman, which follows Jessica Drew in the aftermath of the Skrull Invasion–I’ll just sum it up, she’s pretty messed up. Anywho, being primarily an X-Men fan, I was skeptical to begin with–not only do I find Spiderman annoying, but here is this woman who cannot even be original enough to make her own unique superhero name, but anyway, I digress. So going into this with my skeptic beams on high, I was surprisingly wrong by the quality of the motion comic. While my question is why isn’t just called a cartoon, I can say that I support this motion comic nonsense, as long as it doesn’t take away from comic sales.

But with the five episode stint of Spider-Woman over, Marvel has moved over to Joss Whedon’s tenure run of Astonishing X-Men. This run of the X-Men was sort of the series that resembled my love for X-Men after my three year hiatus from the comic book scene, not only that this series was a fresh new start to the cluttered and chaotic storyline that ran through Uncanny, and it also put new spins on old characters and also reintroduced everyone’s favorite Russian, Colossus. While this storyline is rock solid, the lack of dialogue and Whedon’s witty writing style, I feel, is going to be difficult to pull off through this medium. Inside your own imagination Whedon’s style of writing really flurishes and offers the reader a lot of self interpretation, while in the motion comic the voice acting will set everything into stone and lock characters into one interpretation. This will truly have negative impacts on Emma, since Astonishing is really where we begin to watch Emma grow as a character and we find that she is not only truly in love with Scott, but also a staple to what the X-Men stand for.

So far with the first four episodes out, I have little to complain about other then the rather ridiculous looking fight scenes, but that’s part of the bargain you have to go along with–what can you expect for a $1.99? Besides Emma’s portrayal I have little to complain about, other then the choppy fighting scenes, the story is pretty much held intact and it’s nice to see this story again, it’s been a while since I’ve revisted it.

Also, I love in episode 4, the segment with Ord, Armor, and Wing, where Ord plans on attacking the X-Men himself but they are not there. Priceless.