Joss Whedon

The ’Lurks’ in Fray are, of course, sprung from the same well as the Reavers in Firefly (as are Joss Whedon’s future-archaism slang, like ’rutting,’ and the Western flavour of the proceedings - ’They called it the cavalry’). Indeed, Melaka Fray has as much in common with Malcolm Reynolds as with Buffy Summers, down to the lust for battle and stupid fools-rush-in improvisatory tendencies and ’it’s about the guy in the foxhole next to you’ soldier sense. You might say Fray is a test run for some of the Firefly sensibility - not surprising, given that it sprang into being in 2001, during Season Five of Buffy, when that show was reaching its teen-apocalypse apex and Buffy (not coincidentally) was moving decisively into adulthood. With the future-Slayer comic, Whedon could deal with a character whose hardness was less constantly negotiated than Buffy’s, which was surely a clarifying and liberating experience for Whedon - it is, after all, a terrific comic book. [Update: I left out the killer panel: Melaka’s standoff with Icarus! The dropped scythe, then: ’Faith.’ Basically it’s a teaser for Firefly with Mal and River rolled into one. Hello Whedonesque types!]

There are a few throughlines like this in Joss’s work; after all, Alien: Resurrection is in many ways a dry run for Firefly, as I outlined before:

A band of misfit smugglers tracking down a dangerous killer from the depths of space aboard the government spaceship on which they’ve been captured. A crotchety mercenary. A noble captain. A loving criminal couple - of which the husband is lost in the line of duty. A young girl with superpowers - who by the way is able, when she wants, to ’become’ a spaceship - and who’s as dangerous to the crew as to her enemies. A sentimentally-named starship. Folktales of earth that was.

Can you identify this Joss Whedon sci-fi story?

Of course both are heavily indebted to Star Wars too - Whedon has described Firefly as a series version of Act Two of Star Wars.

Whedon is the patron saint of a certain screen/comics tough-girls movement, as well he should be, but he also comes back to his non-feminist (or only implicitly feminist) hobbyhorses often. That’s part of what makes it so easy to like him rather than just one or two of the things he’s done: there’s a certain way of structuring the world that gets ported from one of his tales to the next. Not just the typical American sitcom’s surrogate-family structure, but a particular left-of-the-law outcast circle standing for the moral right (indeed the need) to be imperfect. Not just young people standing up for themselves, but young people realizing that they have to help peers above and below them on the status ladder stand up as well. Not just Big Hero Moments, but the repeated staging of the moment when power is given, and as often given up (check out the latest Buffy comic, the finale of Drew Goddard’s arc, particularly the way Dracula’s behaviour in the final fight surely prefigures a great sacrifice at the end of Season Eight). Not just a complex revulsion/worship toward childbirth - there’s never been a happy birth on a Whedon show! - nor the usual generation-gap resentments, but a belief in the possibility of grownups and kids becoming more like one another through vocational interaction and apprenticeship, a belief (in other words) in continuity of experience, rather than the irritating streak of teen-exceptionalism that shoots through nostalgic depictions of adolescence.

Whedon isn’t a lazy nostalgia peddler or even centrally a pulp writer; he’s a hardheaded ethicist, and even a comic as outwardly ridiculous as Fray (futuristic criminal superhero fights demons!) is part of a rigorous and - here’s the important bit - surprisingly consistent moral argument about the meaning of ’family’ and the nature of ’maturity.’ He can do silly pulp - see the funny, forgettable Sugar Shock for a reminder - but even his silliest big works are dead serious. I confess that I kind of love the guy.