Joss Whedon

Astonishing X-Men #4 - Writer: Joss Whedon - Artist: John Cassaday - Publisher: Marvel.

"They haven’t bothered to put the story’s title even on the recap page, and I can’t be arsed to go back to #1 to check" Part Four

Well, everyone and his dog must know by now what the big plot twist of this issue is, especially considering Marvel’s ill-advised variant cover to the issue, but I’ll keep it quiet just in case someone out there doesn’t know what’s going on. The character who returns is one of my favourite X-Men, so I’m pleased that I get to read about them again, and I’m certainly not outraged by yet another of Joe Queseda’s broken promises, although I do find it a little bit cheeky. I just wish that these "changes" wouldn’t keep happening in this title. If you want to bring the costumes back, or resurrect characters, or whatever, then do it over in one of Claremont’s books, because he clearly fears and despises change anyway. But doing it here makes the comic feel dishonest, as if Marvel are abusing Whedon’s popularity and skill as a writer to slip things past the reader that they’d be infuriated by if done by a "lesser" writer. Let him tell stories, that’s what he’s good at. Leave the continuity-"fixing" to someone else, as here it just wastes time and distracts from the good stuff.

Aside from that odd feeling of dishonesty, the issue as a whole is somewhat dissatisfying. I didn’t like the first issue of this series much at all, but each issue since then has been an improvement on the last. However, this one just doesn’t do much for me. The pacing seems drawn out just a bit too far, with the main plot seemingly just sitting still and spinning its wheels until the cliffhanger ending. Admittedly, there’s some other stuff going on to keep the reader entertained, such as Ord’s easy infiltration of the school, but the general impression given here is that this is the mid-point of a trade paperback collection, not a satisfying read in itself. I can’t really get excited about an episode that seems to have no forward progression other than being a bridge between the last issue and the next.

The pacing may be somewhat weak this time around, but the plotting is exceptionally well-done (what Ord does to Wing is just so clever, if utterly horrible), and the dialogue is consistently excellent, with the highlight being the aforementioned infiltration by Ord of the X-Men’s base. Whedon has fun writing a little back-and-forth between two of the students, showing that he’s got that elusive mastery of teen-speak, although that’s clear from watching any Buffy episode that he personally wrote. Into this trademarked Whedon scene drops Ord, and the writer rather perversely plays the alien warrior for laughs. The supremely, spookily, confident warrior gets our sympathy here in an exchange that I don’t think I’ve seen in a "serious" comic before. Everything turns ugly after that, and there’s a very clever, if brutal, fight scene, but for just a moment, we feel bad for Ord. He’s come all this way to beat the X-Men up, and the buggers aren’t in.

A lot of the comedy in that scene is put across through a wonderful panel of Ord looking thoroughly exasperated at his own bad timing, which is probably Cassaday’s finest moment in the comic, although a sequence of panels towards the end depicting Kitty too dumbstruck to avoid machine-gun fire is also worthy of mention. All in all, this is Cassaday’s best job so far on this series. Backgrounds are still absent, but not conspicuously so, and if that’s the price we pay for having such wonderful foregrounds, then I’ll let it go.

So, it’s another good issue of Astonishing X-Men, and this is certainly much better than the other main X-books. It’s just not as good as it could have been, with some pacing problems and that odd sense that Marvel are using this book as a sort of Trojan horse for bad editorial-driven creative decisions. I’m still enjoying the comic, but the step down in quality means that I’m still not astonished.