Joss Whedon

X-Men, Buffy, and more.

June 18, 2004 - Long, long ago, in other words, a few years ago back in the 20th century, it was relatively easy to break into writing for comics. There was a continual demand for fill-in stories or for short stories for books like Marvel Comics Presents. High school students who got intern jobs at Marvel, if they did well, might get jobs as assistant editors, and once you were "in," you had the opportunity to pitch stories. Actually, every friend I had who wanted to get into comics eventually did. (Mind you, I have a talented group of friends.) People would ask me why I didn’t write comics stories. I would explain that my talents lie in a different area: I don’t write comics stories, I write about them. They would have none of this: you’re here, you should be writing stories!

After becoming established in comics, some writers tried to move on to careers in writing television or movies, In his article in Back Issue #2 concerning the "DC Implosion" of 1978, Mike W. Barr states that "Virtually all the freelancers - and most of the DC staffers - claimed that comics were a way station in their careers." (Considering how little comics paid back then, that was understandable.) Barr recalls having a conversation with writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman: "’Oh, we’re not going to be in comics much longer,’ Len replied. ’No, we’re going to move to Hollywood and write The Love Boat,’ said Marvin." (As you may know, Chris Claremont first got to write X-Men when Wein, who co-created the "new" X-Men team in Giant-Size X-Men #1, found his schedule was too full, and turned the assignment over to his fellow staffer, who proved to have a revolutionary new vision for the superhero genre.)

But comics writers who went to Hollywood met with radically different degrees of success. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon mention in their recent biography of Stan Lee (see Comics in Context #15 and #16), even Stan himself tried to break into screenwriting without success. There have been some success stories more recently, like those of Mark Verheiden and Jeph Loeb, who work on Smallville, a comics-inspired television series.

And Loeb has worked with the man who is this week’s subject, Joss Whedon, creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and co-creator of Angel. (They collaborated on a proposed Buffy the Animated Series, and just what is wrong with the Cartoon Network and various other networks that none of them were interested in picking it up? Whedon has been a subject of this column before, in the 2003 San Diego Con report in Comics in Context #9).

Lately Whedon has started writing comics himself, the latest being Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men #1, the start of a new X-Men series. It is so good that you might wonder why Whedon didn’t start writing comics years ago.

But now we’re in the 21st century, and the onset of Bizarro World rules in the comics industry. I was recently informed that an editor at a major comics company told a friend of mine who had submitted a series proposal that the company was only interested in projects by Somebody Famous.

So here’s the path that Whedon took to get to Marvel: he helped write screenplays for blockbuster films (Speed, Toy Story), and then created three TV shows, one of which, Buffy, has become a cultural icon, and even wrote a revision of the screenplay for the first X-Men movie, which is not used. (Although, reading Astonishing X-Men #1, I again wonder why. It’s got better dialogue than anything in the first film.) And now he’s starting to direct his first feature film, Serenity, based on his Firefly series. Only now, after Whedon reaches this extraordinary pinnacle of success, does he get to write an X-Men comic book! Isn’t this doing it all backwards?

But maybe in this case I should just sit back and enjoy this new phenomenon. Here I am arguing every week in this column that the best comics should be taken seriously as literature. Wein and Wolfman used to say that writers should work their way up to scripting a top title like Spider-Man, although they were talking about writing fill-ins and lower tier comics first. So I should take pleasure in the idea that the X-Men are such a great concept, such a monument in American popular culture, that even someone as successful in other media as Joss Whedon could still aspire to write these characters.

In a news article in The Hollywood Reporter some months ago Whedon explained that he did indeed aspire to writing the X-Men.

"’There are three reasons why I’m doing this,’ Whedon said. ’One, I get to write The X-Men, a comic I grew up reading. It’s probably the biggest influence on my work there is. Two, I want to personalize things and figure who these characters are to me now. And three, the character Kitty Pryde. She was not a small influence on Buffy. I get to use her, and that sealed the deal.’"

In doing my characteristic close reading of Astonishing X-Men #1, I will time and again be showing how Whedon’s work with the X-Men reminds me of characters, situations and themes from his past work. This is not meant as an accusation that he is repeating himself. Rather, I am showing how indeed The X-Men influenced Buffy and other Whedon work, and demonstrating a thematic continuity between his "Buffyverse" work and his new X-Men story. Moreover, comparing the Buffyverse and X-Men characters provides some surprising insights into how some of them are founded on the same archetypes.

Astonishing #1 opens with an eerie sequence of a person being menaced by a monster, superbly illustrated by Astonishing artist John Cassaday, who, presumably following Whedon’s staging directions, creates a ghastly mood through understated means: the spattered blood, the creature’s large, inhuman teeth, and the human image somehow reflected in them. It’s a reminder that Whedon is best known for working in the horror genre; this is the sort of sequence one would not expect from traditional superhero writers.

It’s also a reminder that Whedon not only writes for the movie and television screen, but directs for it as well. This is a cinematic montage of extreme close-ups. This and the next page also comprise a teaser for the main story: were this a TV series, it would appear before the opening credit sequence.

And then there are the words of the narrator, who appears to be a child, who finds her mother’s screams "yummy." The juxtaposition of horror and ironic humor is a Whedon trademark. But I also find myself wondering if this may be a subtle bit of homage to longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont, who also likes to use the word "yummy" or just "yum" in contexts ranging from a villain’s macabre lusts to a hero’s expression of sexual attraction.

On the second page a child, Tildie, wakes up screaming. The first page sequence was apparently her dream. Or was it her memory? Or was it actually happening before the lights turned on? Just who is this enshadowed figure watching through presumably one-way glass?

And who was the "monster"? Is it possible that it is the child herself? Is she a shapeshifting mutant?

This scene has a primal resonance: perhaps all our terrors are extensions of a child’s fear of monsters in the dark.

It also ties in with a scene at the end of this issue, although I didn’t pick up on that until my second reading of the story.

Following the title, "Gifted" (an allusion to the previous name of the X-Men’s home base, "Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters," i.e., young super-powered mutants), the main narrative opens with a close-up on Kitty Pryde, whom Whedon singled out in the Hollywood Reporter piece as a particularly important character to him.

She is returning to Xavier’s school, where she first learned to use her mutant powers, after a sojourn in college in Illinois (as seen in Chris Claremont’s recent Mechanix limited series). Apparently Astonishing #1 takes place before Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men #444, which came out weeks before, and in which Kitty and Wolverine had already returned to the Xavier Institute.

Kitty’s return to her old school, where she spent her high school years, may remind readers of Buffy’s return to Sunnydale High in Season 7 of her television series. Like Sunnydale High, Xavier’s school was also destroyed and recently rebuilt. Each of them thus returned to a place, a school, at which defining events in their lives took place. For that matter, Season 1 began with Buffy arriving at a new high school, and Season 4 with her arrival at college. And Kitty’s return to Xavier’s, bearing luggage, recalls the very first time she arrived at the mansion, back in Uncanny X-Men #138 (October, 1980).

And, one might add, Whedon, who grew up reading X-Men and identifies it as a defining influence on his work, is likewise returning to Xavier’s school. It’s the place where he too spent his formative years.

Kitty’s first words are "Nothing has changed." There’s that Thomas Wolfe quotation about not being able to go home again. Still, I’ve had times when I’ve revisited places from my childhood and adolescence and am taken back to see that outwardly, at least, they appear to be the same, as if caught in a time warp: it seems at once reassuring and strange. I have changed; why haven’t they?

Now, over the decades many writers, readers and comics executives have insisted that characters and situations in comics change. How often have they tried to sell new issues by claiming that "This issue will change the Marvel Universe" - or a specific character in it - "forever!"

But there’s a contrary point of view: Stan Lee himself spoke of the "illusion of change," whereby surface aspects of a series may alter, but the essence of the characters and the series remain unaltered.

Whedon may be siding with Stan Lee’s side of the issue here. By "Nothing has changed," perhaps he is asserting that there is a consistency to the X-Men series, and that it really hasn’t changed since he himself was a fan reading it.

Kitty continues, "The place was destroyed and now it looks like nothing happened. No time has passed." On a literal level of meaning, Kitty is referring to the fact that the mansion was demolished towards the end of Grant Morrison’s tenure on New X-Men; following the departures of previous X-Men creative teams, the mansion was rebuilt as if overnight. (The short time it took is even less credible when one considers how slowly "Marvel-time" elapses compared to real time.) Yet the school is an essential element of the series, and Xavier’s mansion an important visual icon. Why the editors let the mansion be destroyed when they must have known or should have foreseen that the next writers would want it back is beyond me. The rapid rebuilding not only weakens credibility but even in retrospect undercuts the dramatic impact of the demolition.

Kitty now experiences memories of her life in the mansion, which take the form of ghostly images enacting scenes from her past. This reminds me of the final scene of Upstairs, Downstairs, with Rose the maid wandering through the mansion, hearing snatches of conversations from past episodes; the ghostly images here make the device work in a visual medium with no sound track. The "ghost" motif has psychological resonance: our past is long gone, "dead," and yet continues to haunt us. (The issue in which Kitty first joined the X-Men, Uncanny #138, was itself a "memory" issue filled with flashbacks to past X-Men stories.)

"Of course the Professor would have it rebuilt this way. Give everyone a sense of stability, continuity," Kitty tells herself. "Continuity" has a double meaning in the context of comics: it’s also a reference to the history of the X-Men and the consistency with which they and their world are portrayed. Whedon’s own goal may be to create "a sense of stability," to adhere to the traditions of the series and recapture its traditional essence. In writing the X-Men, perhaps he seeks to return to a fictional world that he will find reassuringly familiar, as will other longtime readers. This may be his version of what John Byrne calls his own ""Back to the Basics" method when taking over a longrunning series.

The next "ghost" Kitty sees is of her own younger self, shouting, "Professor Xavier is a Jerk!" from the story of the same title (Uncanny X-Men #168, cover-dated April, 1983). Cassaday even recaptures the look of artist Paul Smith in this image.

This is also Whedon’s tribute to the X-Men’s past. Here I’m aware of a slight generational shift. I’m so used to seeing pros do homages to the comics of the 1960s, and the work of creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, that they loved as kids. But here Joss Whedon, from the tail end of the Baby Boom, is paying tribute to the X-Men comics that he read as a kid, the ones that Chris Claremont wrote in the 1980s. Indeed, Kitty is the creation of John Byrne and Claremont, who further defined her as a character after Byrne left the series. (And, of course, Claremont is still very much active, writing two other X-Books, dealing with the same milieu and some of the same characters that Whedon is now handling. See Comics in Context #37 and #39.)

Kitty tells us that "Nothing has changed. Not even me," as she passes through a wall: this is a clever, surprising way of establishing her mutant power for Buffy fans who may have followed Whedon to the X-Men without prior knowledge of the series.

By saying she hasn’t changed, Kitty means, as she goes on to say, "I’m a kid again, out of my depth, completely overwhelmed by everything here. . . ." Kitty’s following the Joseph Campbell scenario, starting this new hero’s journey from a lowly position.

Of course, all of us change as we grow older, and Kitty has, too: as we shall see, she is returning not as a student or as an inexperienced X-Man in training, but to be a teacher and a full-fledged member of the team.

Perhaps, though, Whedon is signaling that he’s going to treat Kitty as younger than other writers might, in contrast with, say, Warren Ellis, who, when he was writing the original Excalibur series would have had us believe Kitty was having an affair with an adult, Peter Wisdom (not a good choice). Whedon’s Kitty, though older than the other current students at Xavier’s, is still probably a teen.

Here I want to commend John Cassaday for the marvelous way he depicts the mansion’s interior in this sequence. It would seem such an obvious thing to do, but very few comics artists bother to give the interior of Xavier’s mansion a distinctive look. In contrast, Cassaday gives us a real sense of place: the rug with its distinctive pattern, the fine wood paneling, the specific location of the staircase with regard to the front door, the feel of a grand Victorian home (even if it has been demolished and rebuilt umpteen times).

Kitty tells us that what "overwhelms" and surrounds her are "the smaller pieces. The shards of me." The "shards" are her memories of her past self. The "ghosts" are also like reflections of herself in a mirror. The word "shards" suggests that she feels her self has been shattered, although Kitty seems untroubled for the rest of the issue. Presumably her effort to live on her own, in college, did not work out (Mechanix did not continue). Perhaps she has returned to her home and surrogate family of the past in order to rediscover a sense of self. Whedon said that he wants to "figure" what the X-Men mean to him now. Perhaps Kitty wants to do the same. Perhaps this even suggests that the superhero genre is rich enough to be able to assist a reader’s different psychological needs at different stages of his or her life.

Now Kitty sees another familiar Claremont scene: the "ghost" of her younger self holding mistletoe over the teammate she then loved, Colossus. Whedon does not tell us this, but many readers will know that Colossus is now dead. The camera shifts to a close-up of Kitty, who smiles at the memory. But it is a quiet, understated smile. It’s not the big, childlike grin that artists John Byrne and Terry Austin gave her when she first arrived at Xavier’s doorstep in Uncanny X-Men #138.

So Kitty has changed, and there’s a certain melancholy about her mood. There’s an interesting duality about Whedon’s depiction of Kitty. In the nearly twenty-five years since her debut, she has aged very little in Marvel-time: she is presumably still a teenager, still a "kid." But she’s also lived through a quarter century of X-Men stories, people she cared for have died (like Colossus), and she herself has been through horrific events (see, for example, Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series). Here she is somberly reminiscing about a past that seems long gone, as a middle-aged adult (like Whedon) might, or a fan (also like Whedon) looking back on his favorite comics stories from his youth. Kitty is simultaneously young and old beyond her years.

The sequence ends with the silent panels of Kitty’s face in extreme close-up, looking contentedly at the "ghosts," and then walking across the rug. So many writers today give us dialogue-heavy talking heads books. Whedon, a director, does it right; he’s sparing of dialogue when he can communicate his idea and mood visually, and he and Cassaday bring this sequence to a close that is both dramatic and cinematic.

On the following page, with Kitty’s entrance into the school meeting, we move from nostalgic evocations of Claremont’s work to full-out Whedon. The mood abruptly shifts from the private and wistful to the public and comedic. Emma Frost, the White Queen, who stands at the podium, immediately chooses to berate Kitty for her lateness in front of the students. Considering the fact that Kitty is to be one of their teachers, this is particularly nasty. Kitty’s retort to Emma is an example of pointed, deadpan irony, a Whedonian trademark; you wouldn’t find this in most other superhero writers’ work.

Kitty’s rejoinder ("I’m sorry. I was busy remembering to put on all my clothes.") also points to the absurdity of the White Queen’s costume. Even considering that so many superheroes wear skin-tight costumes, just what is Frost thinking when she appears before her young students in another of her Victoria’s Secret-style ensembles?

Again, Cassaday provides a good sense of place: what the school auditorium looks like, with several senior X-Men on the platform: Scott Summers (Cyclops), the Beast, Kitty and Frost. I expect that over the next year I’ll gain a much clearer sense of what the Xavier mansion is like from Cassaday’s work than I ever had before.

Frost announces that Kitty will be teaching computer science (Hey, so did Willow after Jenny Calendar’s death on Buffy!) and will act as a liaison to the administrative staff and as a student advisor (And that was Buffy’s job at Sunnydale High in Season 7!).

In contrast to her frosty welcome from Emma, Kitty, Scott, and the Beast immediately engage in friendly banter. The warm rapport among them is clear. It’s like when one reunites with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years, and the two of them pick up from where they left off as if no time has passed.

"Did I miss the Sorting Hat?" asks Kitty. That’s a reference to the opening day of school at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, in which the teachers likewise sit up on a platform facing the students in the meeting hall. Whedon here may well be pointing to the similarity between X-Men and Harry Potter, both of which are founded on the same concept of a school where super-powered young people are trained to use their abilities. And, of course, Buffy is based in this archetype, too: not only her own training by Giles, but the seventh season School for Slayers, in which Buffy, fellow Slayer Faith, and her friends start teaching new recruits themselves.

The Beast’s traditional, rather intellectual wit proves a good fit for Whedon. But then consider Whedon’s treatment of Scott, who, in other hands (like, say, the makers of the X-Men movies) often seems dull and wooden. The Beast alludes to this when he makes a dryly ironic reference to "Scott’s scintillating introductory speech." But then Scott surprisingly comments, "Even I was bored. . . .".

In other words, this Scott is no longer truly a stiff. There’s a parallel in Giles, who likewise has a certain with a certain ironic self-awareness about his own tendency to be stuffy and bookish. And we shall see still further changes in the depiction of Scott as this story proceeds.

Has nothing truly changed at Xavier’s school? Well. consider this: traditionally, the characters X-Men focuses on have been Xavier’s students. But now Xavier is absent (off on the island of Genosha in Excalibur), and (following the lead of the X-Men movies), the X-Men are now the teachers. The students in this issue are anonymous, presented as a mass, not as individuals. The characters we follow and are to identify with are the teachers.

I recall, back in the day, when Marvel editors argued that Peter Parker should remain a student (albeit a graduate student, which you can be forever, as well I know) because the kids who make up the bulk of the readership won’t identify with a teacher. They’d see a teacher as One of Them, not One of Us. But now Peter Parker is a teacher in the Spider-Man titles that follow classic continuity, and the X-Men are teachers as well. The identification figures for the readers are all decidedly adults. (Perhaps demonstrating a certain schizoid attitude on the subject, Spidey and the X-Men are still students in the continuity of Marvel’s Ultimate line, or, as I will start calling it, Marvel-Earth-2.)

What does this mean? After I reviewed Claremont’s Excalibur #1 I worried afterwards whether I made it sound as if it wouldn’t appeal to the young (though I think it will), since it’s about a middle-aged man. But Astonishing X-Men is likewise about adults. These books aren’t about coming of age; their heroes have already gotten there. Does this mean that the bulk of the comics readership really is now made up of adults, not children and teenagers? Or are today’s comics editors and writers miscalculating who their audience really is?

So here the parallel is less with the early seasons of Buffy, in which the identification characters were students, than with the final season, in which Buffy has fully taken on the role of authority figure.

The fact that Kitty, Scott, and the Beast are chatting away while Frost speaks signals a certain lack of respect for her; the feeling is mutual, as we shall see later.

Notice Whedon and Cassaday’s cinematic technique in slowly shifting from the bantering X-Men to Frost, as she addresses the students. Frost takes up more of each succeeding panel, moving closer to the center. Finally, the page concludes with another extreme close-up as she utters a single line: "Violence of any kind will never be tolerated." Notice how Whedon paces his dialogue in comics, sometimes emphasizing a particular line by devoting an entire panel to it, and giving the speaker a close-up.

Sentinels, the gigantic mutant-hunting robots, break in, causing confusion and tumult among both the terrified student body and the senior X-Men: Emma has finally gotten her colleagues’ attention. And these are the Jack Kirby/Neal Adams-style Sentinels, not the inferior versions designed by other artists; hence, this is another tribute to the past, this time to a period of X-Men before the Claremont era began.

It turns out this is just a simulation: holograms created by the X-Men’s "Danger Room" technology. (It is said that Whedon pushed to have the Danger Room in the first X-Men movie, but it was dropped for budgetary reasons.)

Now, one reason for the Sentinel simulation is a practical one on Whedon’s part: so that there will be an action scene, however brief, in an issue that primarily deals in scenes of character interaction. (Indeed, it was Claremont’s character-driven X-Men that showed how a superhero book can hold a reader’s attention in an issue without real action scenes.)

Another reason is that Frost was seeking to make a point to the students. And she did it, characteristically, in a cruel, insensitive way, by gratuitously frightening them. Scott looks grimly at her, and the Beast and Kitty look downright angry. They don’t like being manipulated and tricked by a colleague. But there’s an even more important reason for them to be pissed off at Emma.

Frost tells the students, "We have learned the first lesson. They will always hate us. We will never live in a world of peace." Frost is thus attacking "Xavier’s dream," the vision of the X-Men’s absent founder, the father figure to Scott, Beast and Kitty, his hope that someday "baseline" humans and mutants will live together in peace and harmony.

Frost is undercutting their mission: she is teaching the students not Xavier’s dream, but her own cynical agenda. "We must give the ordinary humans respect, compliance and understanding," she tells them. "And we must never mistake that for trust."

This is a very interesting stance to take: preaching outward subservience to the humans while resenting and distrusting them. Imagine how people would react if a black civil rights leader advocated that as the way African-Americans should behave towards whites.

Later, alone with her, Scott confronts Frost over her little stunt, but these two are currently lovers, and she easily manipulates him into a change of subject. And by the end of that page, we see Emma and Scott in bed together. Yes, indeed, Marvel’s concept of who the audience is for comics has certainly changed. (Then again, so has the world. I was struck by the end of an article in the June 9 New York Times about Sex and the City. It quotes a passionate fan of the show, who turns out to be only fourteen.)

Of course, as a longtime reader, I am aghast at this sight for a different reason. Don’t the Powers That Be at Marvel realize that the love between Scott and his series-long amour, Jean Grey, is the heart of the book? What were people at Marvel thinking when they killed off Jean (yet again! See Comics in Context #28) and paired up Scott, the book’s traditional heroic lead, with former villainess Emma Frost?

And then comes perhaps the best moment in this entire issue. Scott looks up from the bed to see Wolverine perched accusingly at its end, staring ominously, accusingly at him. He says simply, with grim, deadpan irony, "Which stage of grieving is this?" Amazingly, Whedon and Cassaday can convey the tone of characters’ delivery without spoken dialogue! And Whedon can do timing in a static medium, as the next moment shows. As if in the equivalent of a pause in a Harold Pinter play, Whedon waits for the next panel, focusing on Scott’s scowling reaction, for Wolverine to follow up with a cutting punch line: "Denial?"

And Scott blasts Wolverine with one of his optic beams, as if reacting to a punch to the gut. And that’s just what Wolverine’s two lines were like. Wolverine - and Whedon - may be exactly right about Scott’s motivation for his otherwise inexplicable affair with Frost.

This brings us to the halfway point in this issue, and also in our discussion. I’ve got to send this column in early. So, in the grand tradition of serial fiction:

"To be continued."