Tony Stark had it all. Born into wealth, he inherited Stark Industries at the age of 21 when his parents passed away, and he picked up right where they left off, manufacturing weapons to be used in war. It wasn’t until he was abducted by middle-eastern terrorists that he was forced to confront the truth... That his creations were being used on a large scale to eradicate millions of people. His eyes open, Tony shut down all previous operations of Stark Industries and chose to turn himself into a weapon... An all powerful weapon with a conscience, and one that couldn’t be bought. He became Ironman. However, after five years of fighting crime, Tony has become eager to hang up his suit, and he plans to use the opening of a massive Arc reactor in Japan to announce his retirement, and introduce a corps of Ironman robots to replace him as Earth’s wealthiest protector... But when an old ghost from his past joins force with a mysterious organization called The Zodiac, he’ll find that his career as a supersuited superhero will never truly be over.

Back in the late 2000s, Marvel decided to try and branch out into the overseas market, hoping to build a new fanbase out of the anime fandom. They sent over four of their biggest properties... Ironman, which was a recent smash at the box office and the herald of the MCU; Wolverine, their biggest cash cow at the time; X-Men, which makes sense, because there are a ton of anime out there where everybody has a unique superpower... And Blade, which may not have been relevant at the time, but hey, Japan loves vampires, I would have frankly bet on that title too. These anime released between the years of 2010 and 2012, with a couple of movie tie-ins in the following years, and while I haven’t seen much of them, if I’m being diplomatic, what I have seen looks pretty bad. If I’m being brutally honest, however, they look downright awful. I’ve only personally seen the Ironman anime all the way through, and I’ve seen a few episodes of X-Men, and they frankly make the dated animation in the early 90’s X-men cartoon look cool in comparison.

All four of these series were produced by Madhouse, and it’s pretty clear right from the get-go what a few of Ironman’s problems were. First off, they clearly poured a ton more money into CG animation than the traditional stuff, and they’re not the only anime in history that has done that, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a deal breaker... If you focus a lot of screen time on the CG so that the traditional animation is easy to see past, it can totally work... But in Ironman, the CG portion doesn’t even make up half the material, so while the fight scenes where Tony is in costume look smooth enough for the time, the rest of the series looks just as stiff and cheap as it very obviously was. What especially doesn’t help is the character design aesthetic, which is clearly trying to capture the realistic facial designs of a comic book, but I think they overestimated just how realistic those designs are. I can’t remember the last time I read a comic book whose characters had such overly-detailed faces, where every single feature from their cheekbones to their wrinkles and laugh lines were all given their own thick outlines. Studio Madhouse has done this before, but usually in cool gothic horror titles where it actually works. Here it is firmly on the wrong end of the uncanny valley.

The English dub isn’t very good either... The translation is incredibly inconsistent, with some scenes matching the dialogue of the sub script verbatim, while other times, entire episodes go by that are rewritten to the point that I’m honestly not sure those scripts were even available at the time. The dialogue in the sub is fairly bland and devoid of personality or charm, but it still works fine in terms of dramatic delivery and subtlety. For the dub, rewrites often add more flavor, but they also dumb things down and make them sound less personal and more generic. One particularly weird change they made was removing the ending narration from the post credits of each episode, just leaving clips of the next episode over generic music, for reasons I can’t figure out. Maybe they thought American audiences wouldn’t be used to that, but like, we’ve all seen DBZ, we all know what next episode previews are. A slightly less weird but equally concerning change was adding new lines to every other scene where nobody’s lip flaps are moving, IE extended news exposition over footage of crowds, and more dialogue from Tony when he’s in the Ironman suit, the kind of stuff you add when you're terrified of silence.

It also sounds for the most part like while they couldn’t decide how accurate they wanted to be with the script, they based their casting around the idea of finding actors that sound close to the Japanese actors. Tony’s voice actor is Adrian Pasdar, who in my opinion sounds a touch too nasally for the role. He spent decades playing live action TV roles before he started doing voice acting for Marvel, he’s basically their go-to Tony Stark for cartoons and video games, but this anime was one of his first turns as the character, and while it’s entirely possible he got better at it in future projects, he did nothing for me here. There are quite a few anime voice actors I would have recommended instead, like, Chuck Huber would go on to play Tony in a Death Battle episode a few years later, and he definitely could have breathed some life into this role. And don’t even get me started on how well Steve Blum would have worked. There are only a few anime voice actors in the cast, and they are generally the better performances on display... Laura Bailey, Kyle Hebert and Travis Willingham are amazing... Everyone else just kind of treads water. The only performance I actively disliked was from Eden Riegel, who plays this high-pitched, chirpy-voice reporter who already has way too much screen time for as little as she brings to the plot. Subtitles are honestly recommended for this series.

So, there seems to be this mantra going around that American comics are on the decline, and they’re being massively outsold by translated manga. You often hear this statistic brought up by people who are using it to whine about political correctness, like ‘The SJWs are ruining comics! Go woke go broke!” And all that alt-right drivel, and while I don’t know if it’s true that comics are really struggling financially... I have enough experience with RWBY to know that these particular people are always quick to say something’s failing when they want to spread a lack of faith in it... I have no problem imagining that manga is outselling American comic books, that honestly makes all the sense in the world to me, and not for any of the reasons I just described. I don’t mean to piss anyone off here, but I feel like it has to be said at some point... Comic books kind of suck. No, I don’t mean comics themselves suck, they’re a cornerstone of American pop culture, they’re the hottest thing at the box office, and they’re basically the new Greek mythologies... I mean the comic book market sucks as a medium.

First off, there’s not a whole lot of variety to it. Most American comics fit into one of four categories; There’s superhero comics, which are incredibly over-saturated and make up the sizable bulk of the market. There’s episodic slice-of-life comedy, which makes up more than 90 percent of the Newspaper funnies. There’s licensed tie-ins, comics that are based on whatever cartoon, video game or toy line is popular enough to deserve a limited print release. And there are the occasional darker, grittier adventure/horror comics, which you kind of have to go out of your way to find, unless they inspire a TV adaptation that’s popular enough to get the comic some mainstream attention. Yeah, there are deviations from these categories, but have any of them ever ascended beyond cult status? With manga, however, you can get basically anything you want. There’s a lot more manga aimed at the female demographic, with shojo manga galore waiting to be picked up, where we have what, Barbie and My Little Pony? Manga is also way more accessible and easy to get into, as volume one of any given series is rarely that difficult to find, whereas with comics you don’t even know if that elusive issue #1 even IS the best place to start. A lot of these comics have been running for longer than any of their readers have been alive.

Let’s say, for example, you were looking for a good detective comic. Well, there’s Batman, assuming you pick the right story. You could put some time and money into tracking down some obscure, out of print Dick Tracey collection, and... Are there any Sherlock Holmes comics? There have to be, right? He’s in the public domain, someone has to be exploiting that. Now, if you’re looking for a Detective manga, there’s so much more to choose from. Aside from the obvious choices of Death Note and Monster, There’s also Case Closed, Clamp School Detectives, MPD Psycho, Beautiful Bones, and so much more, including an actual Sherlock Holmes adaptation called Moriarty the Patriot. Or let’s go a bit lowbrow, and say you’re a teenager with strict parents, and you want to see some nudity. How many comics can you turn to, not counting porn? Well, there’s some indie graphic novels, I’m personally a fan of the psychological body horror Black Hole. DC occasionally lets Alan Moore get away with shit like that. Image comics has Sunstone, but... Is that porn? It’s an 18+ Erotica, but it looks legit enough that I don’t want to lump it in with something like Cherry Poptart. Manga, on the other hand, has titles like Inuyasha, Ranma 1/2, early Dragonball, Appleseed, etcetera... Pretty much anything by Ken Akamatsu if you like bare butts and you can not lie. Comic books rarely ever venture outside of a PG-13 rating, which isn’t great if you want to reach multiple demographics.

So yeah, the comic book market was never designed in such a way that it could stand up to the kind of competition that manga brings to the table. It can’t even compete with it’s own adaptations, as most people looking to break into them just turn to the cartoons or the movies for an easy introduction and a quick, easy fix. If comic books going woke and leaning into LGBT representation has anything to do with their decline, it’s not as a cause, but as a byproduct of their desperation to attract new readers in a market that has already largely shifted their demand elsewhere. It’s also worth noting that superheroes aren’t really a popular thing over in Japan? One Punch Man got big for it’s comedy and parody aspects just as much as it’s action. Tiger and Bunny was popular for about a year before the flash left its pan so hard that I didn’t even know it had a couple of movies until I looked up Eden Riegel’s resume for this review. She played Wild Tiger’s daughter, if you’re curious. And there’s obviously My Hero Academia, but let’s be real... That show isn’t JUST Naruto with a superhero coat of paint, but it definitely has that somewhere in it’s DNA. So for the most part, it's fair to say America has more use for manga than Japan has for comic books.

This might be why, whenever a western property gets an anime adaptation, the results are... Well, altogether, we’ll say ‘interesting.’ American titles that get adapted by Japan usually wind up being either batshit insane(see Powerpuff Girls Z and the Japanese Spiderman) or a cheap, boring, lifeless direct translation that loses nearly everything that made the original special(for the record, this is probably what’s going to happen with RWBY: Ice Queendom). There are a few exceptions to this... The Animatrix is still more hit than miss, and I still think Batman Gotham Knight holds up pretty well... But sadly, it looks like the four anime TV shows Marvel commissioned are planted firmly in that second category. Again, I haven’t seen all four, but the reviews I’ve seen for Wolverine and Blade do not look much more promising than what I’ve seen from Ironman and X-Men. They don’t really do anything outside of what you would have expected them to do in their main canon, which is not great, because in a lot of ways, shonen action anime do not work the same way superhero comics do.

In most shonen action anime, the hero is constantly growing and evolving, striving to reach some peak or goal that always seems to elude them. Villains they overcome either fuck off, die, or switch alignment and join his side. This normally leads up to a definitive ending. Comic book heroes are more cyclical... One of the biggest differences between American and Japanese media is that while eastern entertainment is always looking for new titles to replace the ones that finished, western entertainment has a heavy focus on long term profitable franchises. That’s not to say a superhero story doesn’t change or evolve, but it normally only happens to update the material or draw readers into some major event. They almost never go away, and neither do the villains that just keep popping up, unless DC decides to bring them back after decades of radio silence just to kill them off to add bodies to a story. Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but DC really likes doing that, retired and irrelevant characters are basically red-shirts to them. My point is, superheroes are not written the way anime protagonists are written... And Ironman is still a special case even among his own peers.

Any successful hero has to have some kind of synergy with their rogues gallery. Normally, the villains elevate the hero... We all love Batman, the brooding and tortured dark knight, but his villains are just as gritty as he is, and more than a few of them have some kind of sympathetic backstory. Spiderman isn’t quite as deep as that, but he's based on a ridiculous concept involving a silly costume, so his enemies are of course just as ridiculous and silly as he is. Superman would just be a boring, invincible boy scout if he wasn’t facing enemies that, through brain or brawn, are legitimate world-ending threats who present unique challenges to him. Ironman is unique because he’s one of the only superheroes who, himself, has a strong enough personality to elevate his enemies. I think it’s fair to say that most of his famous archenemies would be forgotten by time just like KGBeast and Orca if they fought Batman. Hell, outside of the movies, can you name a single Ironman enemy besides The Mandarin? And yet, because Tony is the main attraction, he’s earning them their own relevance.

Tony isn’t even your typical hero. Yeah his parents died, and it does affect him on a deep and psychological level, but that tragedy didn’t make him a hero. He didn’t take on the suit for revenge. He wasn’t bullied or socially awkward, either. He is, objectively, the kind of character you’d expect most heroes to fight... A smug, rich, entitled asshole who never had to struggle for anything. He became a hero because he wanted to take personal responsibility for the effect that his wealth has on the world, which is an intriguing concept, but I honestly don’t think it would have worked if he didn’t have the kind of electrifying personality that he does. He’s charming, he has a snarky sense of humor that never gets too mean spirited unless he’s talking to someone who damn well deserves it. He's a lady's man, but he's not a creep. He’s smart, he’s witty, there isn’t an ounce of greed in him, and he’s genuinely motivated to do the right thing, and the kind of moral quandaries he faces are so complex and murky that he kind of works as the Marvel version of Superman, which is crazy for a character who has no actual superpowers. The harshest decision Batman normally faces is whether or not to kill The Joker.

The anime does not capture ANY of that. Don’t get me wrong, the dub writers tried to give Tony and the material more personality, but they wound up over-writing everything and making it feel more generic instead of less. A different lead actor could have improved things, like I said before, but let’s be honest, that’s a moot point... I don’t think the anime medium is used to writing billionaire philanthropists as ass-kicking action heroes. Characters occupying Tony’s station in life are usually either smarmy villains, insane anti-heroes or foppish fuckboys. They couldn’t have possibly known what to do with him, any more than we knew what to do with Major Kusanagi. The only exception I can think of is Roger Smith, but again, The Big O was WAY more popular in the US than it was in its home country. It’s a shame, because the set-up was actually kind of promising. Unlike the other Marvel anime that just made up shallow excuses to get characters overseas, Tony had an intriguing reason for being there, and while the main villain is kind of a let-down, the sub-villain is actually a pretty bold choice drawing from his lore. Sadly, when the series isn’t boring, it’s dumb, and on the rare occasion it does anything unexpected... Like Tony adopting a runaway child... It gets pretty terrible pretty fast. Also Wolverine has a really forgettable cameo. Because of course he does.

Ironman the anime is out of print, but it’s pretty easy to find on DVD. The same can be said of the other three Marvel anime, or you can find them in a decently priced four-pack. A theatrical sequel called Rise of Technovores is also pretty easy to find online, and through many of the same resources.

I wanted to like this anime. I really did. Ironman is one of my favorite comic book characters of all time, even outside of the superhero genre, so I was really hoping to enjoy this series, even if I did have to turn my brain off for it, but having my brain surgically removed wouldn’t have made this series any more entertaining. The typical comic book formula doesn’t work very well in anime, not even with the unique spin Tony put on it, and they don’t really do anything to take advantage of either the setting or the medium. Tony is not portrayed in an interesting way, which is unfortunate, because the villains aren’t interesting either. They’re based on the Zodiac... Not the Chinese one, surprisingly... But any kind of Zodiac is the laziest design motif since the seven deadly sins. I liked Chika, his love interest in the story, but she wasn’t enough to make up for how annoying, forgettable, and/or pointless the rest of the cast was. I don’t think it would be impossible to make a Marvel-based anime work, but this one just doesn’t add anything to the character that you couldn’t find about a million times better in other titles. It’s not outright terrible, but I don’t see any reason to recommend it.

I give Marvel’s Ironman a 4/10.