“Wolverine and the X-men” marks Marvel’s fourth try at creating a cartoon based off of everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-men. The show is left with an extremely daunting task: make hard core fans of the previous cartoons happy and at the same time introduce the X-men to a new fresh-faced generation of cereal eating kids who wake up early on Saturday mornings. Does it complete this task? Well to be honest, it doesn’t.

Where “Wolverine and the X-men” fails is in its job is that it doesn’t to cater to new fans that are interested in the X-men (or at least a shiny new cartoon to watch). The first episode never explains who the X-men are, what a mutant is or why this Prof. X character is so important to everybody. If kids haven’t seen the movies before watching the show then they will be instantly lost and might not have the patience to stick around for more episodes to figure out what’s happening. This episode serves more as a sequel to the movies than a new beginning for the X-men, except that the characters that died in the 3rd movie are alive and well. Kids may get excited when Wolverine finally puts on his costume and cuts through some bad guys but the problem is that they are never told who Wolverine really is. At least the animation was clearly designed for the new audience, the X-men wear bright spandex and character designs are heavily anime-influenced (imagine a less-exaggerated Humberto Ramos comic).

DWS was 2 issues of short stories by various creative teams detailing the lives of various X-men after Cyclops disbanded them. It’s not entirely fair to judge these issues as a whole so I will go through the 10 (sigh) stories and give each an overall grade.

Danger Room was about Cannonball and Husk and was written by Mike Carey and penciled by Brandon Peterson. After seeing his sister Husk again Cannonball gets into a random bar fight back home in Kentucky because he fears he is losing is edge. Cannonball is one of my all-time favorite X-men and I felt this story did not capture him that well. He came off way too angsty and whiney for his own good. The script was pretty weak and the art made everyone (especially Husk) look 30 years older.

Grade: C-

For some strange reason Marvel Comic’s new shipping plan involves mostly every X-book released in one week, with the next issues of Uncanny X-men, X-men Legacy, X-Factor, Young X-men, X-Force, Wolverine: Origins and X-men: Kingbreaker all being released next Wednesday. This puts Marvel in a strange position, with a hell of a lot of X-books next week, how are they going to please X-fans this week? Their answer is by releasing only one mainstream X-book, a Nightcrawler one-shot that was solicited as “the departure of Nightcrawler from the X-men…forever!”

When “X-men Quitting Time” (what this issue was originally named) was solicited I was upset because Kurt has always been one of my favorite X-men of all time mostly due to my first exposure to the X-men was by playing as Nightcrawler on one of those old coin-op X-men arcade games based on the old cartoon (good times). But I decided to reserve judgment on the decision until I read the issue. I was divided, from a story standpoint Kurt shouldn’t quit the X-men because the mutant race needs the X-men now more than ever especially with many major villains returning in X-force (including Kurt’s half-brother Graydon Creed) and facing certain extinction. But on the other hand Nightcrawler arguably hasn’t been through any interesting stories since Warren Ellis’ Excalibur run in the mid-90’s. Between the Kurt’s priesthood that led to my least favorite X-men story of all time (Chuck Austen’s “Holy War”) the true identity of Kurt’s father in my second least favorite X-men story (“The Draco”…yeah, not a Chuck Austen fan) and an ongoing that didn’t move the character in any visible direction this past decade has not been too kind to Kurt. Ultimately I believed that there is no such thing as uninteresting characters only uninteresting writers, I was in the “don’t quit” boat. Fanboy rant aside, how was the issue itself.