After gaining popularity—and making a bundle of money—Marvel, publisher of “X-Men,” “Spider-Man” and the like, are conquering TV land.

Again.

I’m sure many cartoon-ized superhero fans remember the mind-bogglingly great “X-Men: The Animated Series,” the good “Spider-Man” series and the atrocious “Fantastic Four,” “Iron Man” and “Incredible Hulk” shows. Well, it looks like Marvel is trying to penetrate the youth market even more.

There are currently three Marvel shows on the air: “Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes,” “The Spectacular Spider-Man” and “Wolverine and the X-Men.” There is also an Avengers cartoon planned to be released when the film is due out in 2011.

When I first heard about the Fantastic Four show, I didn’t care because the old show sucked and they’re overrated.

When the Spider-Man show came out, I didn’t care because I only liked, not looooved, the show. That and it was the third incarnation of the wall-crawler since the ’94 series.

When the new X-Men show was announced, I went ape bananas. I thought it was blasphemous to the extreme and I was starting to get a little tired of Wolverine overshadowing the X-Men—he’s still the greatest “hero,” by the way.

Then I watched the premiere episode, and it was surprisingly good. The animation wasn’t cartoonish like “X-Men: Evolution,” and it was intense. It involved Professor Xavier being abducted, the X-Men disbanding and Wolverine having to find the Professor.

Trust me, it’s not as corny as it sounds.

This incarnation is going to be the darkest and most intense version of any Marvel show whose target audience is children.

It also gets major bonus points because, after Wolverine pretends to be a guard and transports Beast to a security facility to break out some mutants, Wolverine calls Beast Chewie.

I’m still waiting for Marvel to transpose some of the intensity and grit in some of its comics to an animated show that will please older fans. I want to see an animated Wolverine go to town on someone—with his claws—that has a soul, albeit a cartoon one.

Until then, “Wolverine and the X-Men” should be able to hold me off.

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