Gordon is credited on Wolverine and the X-Men, a series that condenses decades of comic continuity into a serialised story with a fixed cast and a running plot. Work of that kind lives or dies on character design, because a large ensemble in costume has to stay individually readable in silhouette across many episodes and many hands.
He came up through traditional hand drawn American animation, working as an animator and designer before taking on design and direction duties on superhero series. That grounding in drawn animation, rather than in digital pipelines, is visible in his line: the designs are built to be reproduced by other artists at volume without losing their shape.
Recurring subjects: legibility in ensemble casts, faces that carry expression at television budgets, and costume design that reads as clothing on a body. His model sheets favour clear anatomy over stylisation, which lets action scenes stay coherent when the animation is outsourced. Long running comic characters arrive at him with fifty years of contradictory looks, and his job is to choose one and make it work on screen.
The superhero series he designed introduced a generation of viewers to characters they would later meet in film, and their visual solutions, simplified costumes and consistent proportions, fed back into how the characters are drawn elsewhere. Design credit rarely reaches the audience, and in serialised animation it determines more of the result than direction does.
For viewers who want superhero animation with a continuing plot rather than episodic adventures. Suitable for younger audiences. Suited to anyone interested in how character design holds a long production together.
