X-Men, Wolverine Mangas Announced

[GrnMarvl14]

Source.

Today at the New York Anime Festival, Marvel and Del Rey announced a joint project which will see their most popular properties produced as Original English Language manga, as X-Men and Wolverine: The Manga.

The deal, which will see two volumes of each produced in a traditional manga digest size, began when Marvel and Del Rey were in negotiations to publish the Iron Man movie adaptation, and grew to the final product. The digests will be printed left-to-right, in a Western style format, and publication will begin in spring of 2009.

Creators named for the titles are:

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.

Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh stressed that the titles will be looking to reach out to manga readers – clearly a different readership than the traditional X-Men fan, as such, the styles of the two series will be shojo (aimed at girls) and shonen (aimed at boys), respectively. That is:

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, will be 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 ad 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.

CB Cebulski and Mark Paniccia will edit on the Marvel side of the project, while Trisha Narwani will edit for Del Rey.

Speaking to Newsarama, Cebulski told Newsarama that this is Marvel's move to jump "whole heartedly" into manga, whereas past attempts have been more experiments in manga - such as Kia Asamiya on X-Men, etc. Continuing to differentiate, Cebulksi cited the Marvel Mangaverse, which he spearheaded, which was originally supposed to be written and illustrated by Japanese creators, but wound up using more Western creators writing and drawing in a manga or "mangafied" style. These two projects won't be like that, Cebulski explained.

Finally, I can now manipulate manga readers into reading comics.

 

[Habunake]

X-Men will be a shojo style manga

shojo style manga

shojo

This doesn't sound promising.

 

[Lil Brother]

I swear I remember there being some sort of X-Men manga released in Japan in the late ninties...

I'll probably check these out. *shrugs* The one staring Kitty actually sounds pretty cool.

 

[GrnMarvl14]

I swear I remember there being some sort of X-Men manga released in Japan in the late ninties...

I'll probably check these out. *shrugs* The one staring Kitty actually sounds pretty cool.

There was. But this is a manga made for Americans.

The Spider-Man manga is also get reproduced (on occasion) in the Spider-Man Family comic.

 

[MondoTR]

Wow, those titles were so original! *rolls eyes*

Is Kitty the only girl in the series or the only girl student? If she's the only girl in the entire story that'd be boring. And Wolverine's cool but way overrated. So I don't know if I'd read either of these.

Though comics in manga style should be interesting.

 

[Wonder Happiny]

I think it's an interesting and unique idea.

 

[GrnMarvl14]

More information including character sketches (Magneto, Mystique, Wolverine, and Jean Grey).

 

[Silverwynde]

Finally, I can now manipulate manga readers into reading comics.

You and Prime both. He's been trying to get me to read his comics for some time now. This might be the push I need. And after seeing the Wolverine artwork, I'm forced to admit my curiousity is piqued. I'll probably pick these up when they come out. Prime's jaw will drop if I do.