Joss Whedon

ASTONISHING X-MEN #1 - Written by Joss Whedon and Drawn by John Cassaday - Published by Marvel Comics

Not even I can ignore the most high profile comics release of the year.

Seven seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER came and went, leaving an indelible, wonderful reminder that sometimes popular culture isn’t just a trash heap of insipid excrement designed to separate the gullible from their disposable funds. Instead, Joss Whedon’s metaphorical vision of the terrors of growing up and facing your responsibility found a higher road, one paved with quality writing and intelligent musings on the zeitgeist. It even spawned a spin-off that was ultimately a better show than the source material, in ANGEL. ANGEL’s dark look into the interior of the soul and the quest to redeem oneself that never truly ends, the two series combined to put 254 hours of television product on the airwaves, no mean feat.

The shows were well-designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of viewers, but it wasn’t long before there was a blatantly obvious “extra” feel to the shows, an extra pointed directly at comic book fans and readers. Not only did sly comics related jokes begin to crop up, but it became subtly apparent that Whedon and his talent crew of writers were actually creating comic books on screen every week. And BUFFY was easily the X-MEN. Willow would follow Jean Gray’s character arc. Angel himself was a nifty spoof of Wolverine. Giles was the Professor Xavier figure of the group. Xander’s wise-cracking evoked the earliest appearances of Iceman in the classic Lee/Kirby comics. And Buffy herself, while Whedon claims she was inspired by Kitty Pryde, was a pretty direct riff on Cyclops, right down to sharing the same last name. Cyclops, a stiff, priggish leader obsessed with his sense of responsibility would guide Buffy in many ways through those seven seasons. And as far as Kitty Pryde went, she would make her appearance as Dawn in season five.

Don’t believe me? Go watch the DVDs and then come back and talk to me.

Whedon would do some work on the script for the first X-MEN film, in fact, though not much of his work remains in the final product. But it took Grant Morrison tendering his resignation on NEW X-MEN to finally bring Whedon into the fold of writing the comics. ASTONISHING X-MEN is the result.

It’s a pretty decent result.

The book begins with Kitty Pryde returning to the X-Men’s school for mutants. Not only is she to be on faculty as an instructor, but Cyclops wants her back on the field/fighting team as a member as well. Even though she doesn’t have a great deal of offensive power ability, she’s cute, smart, and harmless looking- just the type of positive PR that the X-Men need as they take a more proactive role in making mutants look better in the eyes of the public. That PR role is also going to require the X-Men to put on colorful spandex costumes again, reportedly one of the caveats Whedon asked for. Ohhh-kay, there Joss.

We also get a wonderful sequence of Kitty’s favorite memories of the mansion as she walks through it on her way to first assembly, a terrific (and perfectly Whedon-esque) HARRY POTTER gag at the assembly, and Cyclops and Wolverine tussling with each other. If it had three times as much dialogue and over-written captions, you’d almost swear you were reading an issue of UNCANNY X-MEN from Chris Claremont’s prime. I mean that as a compliment, by the way.

I got into comics in a serious way when I bought UNCANNY X-MEN #151 at a local drug store as a kid. I was enthralled by the colorful and interesting characters, and I would buy every issue (and most of the ancillary titles) until around issue #380. A lot, and I mean a lot of shit passed through my hands during those latter years, and eventually I just couldn’t take any more of it. But as a reader, and a comic fan, I think that having a quality X-MEN title is important, not just to those who have been with it for a long time, but because in the end, that’s what retailers will always be able to sell well. There is also a need for simplicity as well. Part of what drove me away was the absolutely insane amount of junked-out continuity that had been piled onto the title. I think that’s what made Grant Morrison’s NEW X-MEN so successful: it didn’t feel bogged down.

And that applies to Whedon’s first effort here as well. He throws in just enough background to get the reader into a comfortable place, and he settles into his plot. He also smartly doesn’t crowd his plot, either, allowing superstar artist John Cassaday to do some wonderful, beautiful work. ASTONISHING has a chance to be the best X-title put out since Paul Smith left the art chores back in issue #175. It’ll be interesting to see if it lives up to that promise.

I do have a couple of caveats. You’re Marvel Comics; you’re releasing a new X-MEN comic written by the creator of two tremendously popular TV shows, and you’re hoping that this book will bring some new readers into the comics shops. So would you A) Create a dynamic and interesting cover that would stand apart from the rest of the X-title flood on the comics rack or B) Release the book with a bland, non-descript cover showing Wolverine’s claws? If you’re Marvel, for some reason you chose “B” for some retarded reason. Dumb dumb dumb. Let’s try another one. Would you A) Put that writer’s name in large block letters above the logo, allowing those coming into a shop for the first time an easier chance of finding it in the sea of X-shit or B) Put his name in small red lettering barely visible on the black background of the cover? If you’re Marvel, you once again chose “B”.

Can I get a great big “Duh!” from the congregation?

ASTONISHING X-MEN succeeds, regardless of corporate blundering, much like BUFFY and (until this year) ANGEL. When it comes to the X-MEN, Whedon must just be living right. Grade: A-

From Mediasharx.com
By Eric Valentine

Astonishing X-Men #1 - "Gifted" - Published By: Marvel Comics - Written By: Joss Whedon - Penciled By: John Cassaday

What You Should Know:

The school destroyed, Xavier gone, and Jean Grey dead, Scott Summers has decided to once again bring the X-Men back from the ashes. Rebuilding the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning and splitting the responsibility with Emma Frost, Cyclops is calling the shots, and not everybody is happy with the changes.

This Issue:

Kitty Pryde returns to the school, now completely rebuilt as if nothing had ever happened there. Stumbling right into Emma’s welcoming speech to the student body, Kitty soon realizes not all is well at mutant high. As tensions renew between Cyclops and Wolverine, some big trouble forms on the horizon.

This issue introduces us to Cyclops’ chosen team, essentially the public face of the X-Men. There are some odd choices in that regard, with a leader whose eyes you can’t see, an ex-supervillain whose wardrobe makes J.Lo look mousy, a blue furry monster with Avengers status, a bruiser with metal knives coming out of his hands, and a girl who can walk through walls.

As introductions go, it’s solid. For starters, despite the heavy continuity, Whedon takes a pretty bare bones approach. This could have been the movies, or a Marvel Knights kind of take. The rest of the industry need not exist to make sense of what’s going on in this issue.

Whedon, surprising no one, tackles the difficult task of following up Grant Morrison as the Big Name on X-Men (and some would say, cleaning up his mess) with style and grace. The death of Jean Grey (again) carries weight, but Scott is dealing with the loss far differently than he did in the post-Dark Phoenix Saga. Instead of whining, he’s moving on, and well, evolving. Whether the change is good or bad causes a wellspring of dramatic tension that Whedon plays well. Cyclops and Wolverine are at each others throats once again, but the reasoning behind it is intriguing and emotional. Scott’s moving on and that offends Logan’s grief.

In fact, apart from Hank, everyone in the group is a complete missmatch. While Scott and Logan trade blows, Emma and Kitty trade insults. Diametrically opposed to one another, the poetry of this particular line up begins to grow more sensible. If they can’t put aside their own personal differences, how are they going to protect mutantkind from humanity, and vice versa?

Each of the characters are emotionally streamlined. Instead of having to spend several issues establishing their personalities, Whedon lets you know right off where you stand. His take on these characters remain consistent with past stories, but somewhat streamlined. Emma in particular is a treasure, particularly with lines like "Superpowers, a scintillating wit and the best body money can buy, and I still rate below a corpse."

While Whedon is a selling point all on his own, Cassaday just sweetens the pot. One of the most spectacular artists in the industry, Cassaday doesn’t disappoint, energizing the comic to the point of jawdropping excess. A perfect compliment to Whedon’s trademark dialogue, Cassaday illustrates the fantastic within the norm like it belongs there. His stellar, cataclysmically awesome style rings in a new era. Even if the rest of the Reloaded project jams in the chamber, ASTONISHING has the stuff to put the mutants back on top because it’s actually good.

For the first time in a long time, the X-Men find themselves at the top of my list of monthly anticipations. Pick it up, you won’t be disappointed.

Want to discuss X-MEN or any other Mediasharx comic review, head on to the Mediasharx comic review forum on the Bite Back boards.

From Cinescape.com
By Tony Whitt

ASTONISHING X-MEN #1

"Astonishing" is the best word for it

Kitty Pryde, formerly Shadowcat, formerly Sprite, formerly Ariel, has returned to the Xavier Institute to become the new student advisor and computational theory instructor. Given that Logan and Scott are still fighting over Scott’s "abandonment" of Jean for Emma and over the direction the team should go in, she’s also returned to a battlefield. But elsewhere, a genetic scientist has taken up the battle against the mutant gene - and has succeeded. Kitty’s world, and that of all mutants, is about to change...

For that matter, so is ours - and in the case of ASTONISHING X-MEN, at least, it’s a change for the better. Even before reading the first issue, both comics critics and readers alike suspected that this title would be the only one in the entire "ReLoad" line-up worth a damn, and while that may be too broad and too harsh an assessment, it’s also not that far from the truth. In terms of writing, artwork, characterization, and sheer interest, ASTONISHING blows the other X-books out of the water.

It’s probably too obvious to state that Joss Whedon writes this first issue as if it were the script for a pilot episode for an X-MEN television series, but I’m going to say it anyway. There’s a decidedly filmic, almost televisual quality to the story told here that sets it apart from even the best writing of Grant Morrison. We begin with an honest-to-God "pre-credits teaser" that seemingly has nothing to do with the story being told (until the last few pages, of course), and then we follow the one character we can most closely identify with, Kitty Pryde, through her first day at the Institute. Whedon quite fittingly has cast Kitty as the Willow/Kaylee character in this series (which no doubt means that she’ll also be the one most often being put in danger, if that analogy holds), and it’s through her eyes that we see the new "alpha team" that Scott has put together. That’s all for the best: Scott and Emma both have agendas that make their view a bit too skewed; Hank’s views are likely to be a bit too clueless, despite his superior intelligence; and Logan is...well, Logan. Putting Kitty front and center humanizes the book in a way that the other books, to one degree or another, are trying and not always succeeding to do.

This issue also serves as Whedon’s manifesto for his approach to the series. There have been serious criticisms by fans about the direction the X-books are heading in, what with the return to the tights and the reappropriation of the term "super-heroes" to describe these folks. Whedon doesn’t necessarily try to convince us that these criticisms are wrong-headed, but through Scott he does give us the best justifications for these moves, so that when we finally see the team in "uniform" towards the end of the book, we’re surprised (and, yes, astonished), but not shocked. Reading the other books through the prism that this one provides might well explain the rationale for their differing approaches, and so it’s a shame that this one was the last of the group to be released.

Finally, as a fan of Whedon’s sly and self-referential sense of humor, I also have to give major kudos to the lighter moments in this issue. Emma has always been given a cuttingly dry wit by the writers who have best handled her, but here she becomes a quasi-Cordelia Chase, only without the humanizing charm. Her put-down of Kitty’s former codenames not only shows why Emma’s the epitome of bitchiness but also mirrors what we’ve all thought about those same names over the years. (It’s not a line Chris Claremont would write, that’s for sure.) Of course, making Emma so alarmingly catty towards Kitty may lead us to question - again - why Scott would end up with Emma in the first place, but I imagine that Whedon will end up giving us the best justification for that, as well...and when it comes, it’ll make perfect sense and be damned funny, all at the same time.

That filmic quality I mentioned earlier is perfectly captured by John Cassaday, who brings all the photo-realism that makes PLANETARY so visually remarkable to bear on our favorite mutants. He gives Kitty exactly the accessible human qualities - and an exceptional yet unusual beauty, besides - that we would expect her to have. (He also seems to share my opinion that FIREFLY’s Jewel Straite would make a perfect Kitty, despite the difference in eye color and facial structure.) Emma is almost terrifying. Scott has no chin and a far rounder face than we’re used to. Logan is a roughed-up version of Hugh Jackman. In other words, our heroes look so much like real people - except for Hank, of course - and even in their uniforms, that when the proverbial crap hits the fan, we’re going to feel it. With Whedon on the script, we’d have felt it, anyway, but Cassaday guarantees it.

In short, ASTONISHING X-MEN is nowhere near as good as we expected it would be - it’s ten times better. Welcome aboard, Joss.

From Silverbulletcomicbooks.com
By Kelvin Green

“Gifted”

Writer: Joss Whedon

Artist: John Cassaday

Publisher: Marvel

...and it’s okay. The hype is enormous on this one, so it’s actually quite hard to review it from an objective viewpoint. What makes the exercise even harder is that this is being treated as the heir apparent to Grant Morrison’s run on whatever New X Men is called nowadays, and to be honest, doesn’t fare too well in the comparison. Morrison started off with a bang, while this starts off with more of a yawn. A well-written and witty yawn, but a yawn nonetheless.

I must admit to some bias here. I’ve never been a fan of the X-Men. I have a number of conceptual problems with them that prevent my enjoyment of the stories, plus there’s the fact that for most of my life, you’ve needed to read about seventeen different X-comics a month to follow the story, which is just ridiculous. Grant Morrison changed all that and got me interested for the first time. Morrison introduced mutants who didn’t automatically have superpowers as a result of their mutation. He put the tired racism angle to rest. He refused to cross-pollinate with the other X-books, meaning I only had to get one of them per month. And he stopped them from being superheroes. You can’t have them being hated and feared and have them running about in brightly coloured spandex at the same time. They’re superheroes because Stan Lee invented them as superheroes back in the Sixties, but that series failed. All the interesting stuff about genetic bigotry that came a lot later and made the X-Men a success just isn’t compatible with Lee’s setup. So I’m not particularly enthused about the decision to make the X-Men into superheroes again, costumes and all. It’s part of a conservative, backward trend that’s spreading all across mainstream American comics right now. For the past five years or so, we’ve had forward-looking, genre-hopping, expectation-confounding comics, but since sales haven’t improved as a result, the companies are lurching back the other way. So the "Image-style" artists have all crawled out of the woodwork, multiple-foil-remarked-polybagged-holographic covers are turning up, crossovers are rearing their ugly heads here and there, Hal Jordan and Supergirl are back from the dead, and the X-Men are superheroes again. Quite how Bendis is going to survive all this, I don’t know.

Anyway...so they’re superheroes again, and they’re back in costume. I would give it a chance if the explanation was good, but it’s not. Frankly, it’s a little idiotic. Whedon has Cyclops claiming that if they looked and acted like superheroes, then the general population would accept them as they accept the Fantastic Four or the Avengers. Putting the almost-out-of-continuity-X-Statix aside, this is like saying the Nazis would have been lenient on the Jews if they’d only dressed like Wagnerian opera singers. Just because you put some spandex on, it doesn’t change your genetic makeup, which is the thing Marvel-Universe-people don’t like about mutants. And besides, even the Avengers have had their fair share of public relations problems due to having one or two mutant members. The argument just doesn’t make sense, and isn’t helped by the fact that it’s the exact opposite of Morrison’s argument against costumes, without giving any justification why it should defeat it. And who did Morrison use to deliver his anti-spandex rant in that first issue of New X Men? Cyclops...Perhaps that’s why Cyclops ends up with the so-called pervert-suit. His constantly-changing attitude to costumery probably ran the X-tailor the wrong way. "We have to astonish them," says Cyclops as he minces about in his body-condom. "Astonish" might be the wrong word. At least Wolverine looks suitably grumpy at having to dress like a canary again.

As a set-up issue, this is pretty well-done, but it just seems so conventional and...well, dull. Whedon enjoys himself with the dialogue, but doesn’t seem to want to get the plot going until the end, and only then as an afterthought. For such a high-profile project, I’d have preferred a more exciting opening rather than endless pages of people sitting about chatting and a couple of almost-fights. Whedon comes from television writing, where the pre-credits "hook" is almost ubiquitous and yet does not apply it here. Unless this comic is going to be twelve issues of spandex-clad people having a chat, it should have opened with more of a bang.

Perhaps some of this is down to John Cassaday’s artwork. Yes, it’s meticulous and each panel is individually gorgeous, if somewhat sparse, backgrounds especially. But there’s very little in the way of movement and dynamism. I don’t know if Cassaday uses photo reference in his art, but it does have the static feel that often plagues that style. As a result, the action sequences, such as they are, lack excitement. I don’t have an issue of Planetary to hand, but I’m sure his work is better there.

I’m sure that a lot of my dislike of this comic comes from my various biases against its content and philosophy, and I’m sure there’s an element of going against the hype too. However I’m equally sure that what I say here won’t make a difference, as this’ll sell shedloads anyway. I’m going to give this a few more issues to prove itself, but this isn’t the best start, especially for such a high-profile event.