Greetings once again friends and posters of comments. This article is a response to a recent one by a member called Scourge, in his article he attacks Marvel for a lack of quality animated features. However he only made 3 mentions of shows, yet none of his three examples were totally or thoroughly talked about how or why they were bad. Regardless of his view, I respect his opinion, yet his article holds no merit, simply hating a few animated shows just because they aren't artistically well done comes off as childish and snobbish. So this article is to not only defend Marvel Animation but also talk about how animation with the comic book genre is a touchy area. With that lets begin.
First off animation is broken down into two fields: Substance and Style. Substance is what the show has in it; typically its all the set pieces and characters, heroes, villains, and not interacted characters. Style is how the show is interpreted through the animated style or what design the shows tone will have. These are the key components for any show, live action or animated. For every decade up til the 90s these animated shows were created they had to do what they could with the tools at their disposal. The animation back then was for at its time the best at what they could do and as it aged you can see how primitive it was, but we can't attack them for just having what they were restricted to. So for those shows, the substance outweighed the style, they kept as true to the characters as possible with only a few minor alterations(I seen a Doctor Doom mouth flap over the metal mask).
Once the 90s hit we began to see a new evolution in animation quality and we began to see substance and style being mixed in greater detail. The best known example of combining substance and style was the X-men animated series, that had some of the best style any animated show, it looked much like the x-men comics of that time and had a great amount of characters and set pieces that any show could have. We saw the same thing occur with the 90s Spider-man series, which despite having lasers instead of bullets(but that was due to Saban) had a lot of great elements that kept true to the comics, even though it wasn't true to the comic book art of the time, it had the comic book style of artwork and all the characters felt true to the material. Over the course of the 90s we saw Iron Man(Good), Hulk(Not bad), Fantastic 4(well done), Silver Surfer(not seen), Spider-man: Unlimited(Odd), and Avengers(sucked).
Once the 90s ended we sadly saw a decline in animation from Marvel animated series and that was when they had rough times due to risking bankruptcy, along with selling their franchises to prevent that we saw only a small amount of shows. We got a revamped look and feel to the band of Marvel mutants with X-men: Evolution, which was the 3rd best X-men series made, which mostly reinvented all the characters by placing them in High School(Wolverine was still the same). We saw a brief series with Spider-man on MTV and was using CGI that was pretty bad but had a small fan following but was not up to par.
Soon Marvel began to aim into a new market, Straight to DVD. This allowed Marvel to release animated ideas but not risking an entire production it takes to bring a 13 episode series and risking cancellation. We got the Ultimate Avengers, which were adapted from the Ultimates but toned down for children, and were not bad but had some problems with them. Then came Invincible Iron man, Dr. Strange, Hulk VS, Next Avengers, and recently Planet Hulk. Along with the Upcoming Thor: Son of Asgard, Marvel has yet to really mainstream the process and release more per quarter.
In between those DVD productions we began to see a small resurgence with the animated shows. We got Wolverine and the X-men(awesome, but canceled), Spectacular Spider-man(Well done, but canceled), Fantastic 4: Worlds Greatest Heroes(Meh, canceled), Iron man: Armored Adventures(Not seen), Super Hero Squad Show(not my cup of tea, still on), and the recent Avengers: Earths Mightiest Heroes(AWESOME). These shows that I have mentioned above hold up to combine both the substance of the material and bringing different and unique style to each show be it hand drawn or CGI. Now I haven't currently seen the Iron man anime and there are more upcoming ones I personally am interested in how the Japanese animation aesthetic is properly applied and handled with our Marvel favorites. We have an upcoming Ultimate Spider-man cartoon in the works which has a strong team behind it, along with a proposed Thor animated series as well, which hopefully keeps 100% true to the characters and world of Thor.
So where is Marvel animation gonna go next? Well as animation techniques improve we may get to see more streamlined shows that can get released faster and we could see episodes released daily, rather than weekly. Could we see huge crossovers that combine both substance and style from various art studios. Animation is always evolving and a great area to experiment with, I always look forward to seeing what can they draw next. Now as I draw this article to a close, I hope I broaden some of your opinions about animation and how they are used when bringing our characters to animated life. Catch you all later, ComicCritic87 OUT!!!