Book Review: X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series

Reading this book is like going down the lane of nostalgia.

X-Men: The Animated Series was one of my favourite animation when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the characters and the story surprised me weekly. I always looked forward to X-Men: TAS because it was almost thrilling or exciting to watch. I did not read the comics because I didn't have the money to buy them, but at least I still got to watch the cartoons on TV.

X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series is an excellent companion book for the popular animated series that debuted in 1992 on Fox Kids Network. This a huge 272-page hardcover covers the production process in detail and is packed with lots of artworks.

Fans of the animated series will no doubt enjoy this book. There is a lot to read. The text covers the history of how the animated series came to be, the challenges, such as how to market market the series to TV networks, the actual production process, story writing and characters. The book covers all five seasons. This book is quite comprehensive, and even includes the music sheet for the opening title which I'm pretty sure anyone can remember, forever. What's not included is the episode guide, the synopsis for each episode in each season, which could probably be compiled into a book on its own.

It's really fascinating to read about what goes behind the scenes, like how the first season has to be scripted and produced in just seven months, and there were people in the management who wanted to include more characters just to sell toys.

There's plenty of art to see: character designs, animation cells, background art, storyboards, stills from the animation, line art and more. All the artworks are caption with, again, lots to read. Even the cover art for the book looks great. On the front we have the X-Men and on the back all the bad guys.

Highly recommended to all fans of X-Men and the animated series.

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.