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Post by rberman on Jun 2, 2018 8:45:25 GMT -5
 After Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men concluded, that book dropped the “New” from its title under the auspices of new writer Chuck Austen, returning to be just plain “X-Men” as it had been prior to Morrison. Meanwhile, a new parallel book from TV writer/producer Joss Whedon began: “Astonishing X-Men.” Whedon was surprised by this title change; he thought he was just writing the next section of New X-Men, which he considered the best set of X-Men stories since Chris Claremont’s glory days in the early 1980s. Morrison’s run had ended with the Xavier school enduring a pair of public relations disasters involving rioting students and Magneto destroying much of Manhattan. Charles Xavier resigned from his own school, disillusioned with the failure of his dream to run an integrated institution where humans and mutants could study together. It turns out that enough humans and enough mutants were opposed to make that impossible. Jean “Phoenix” Grey had perished at the hands of Magneto, and in her dying moment, foreseeing (or perhaps imagining) a dire future if the school closed, she caused Scott Summers to fall as deeply in love with Emma Frost as Emma has already fallen with Scott. This led Scott and Emma to re-open the school. You might expect that Scott’s romantic about-face from Jean to Emma will be a subject of bafflement to his colleagues. You would be correct. In my review thread on New X-Men, we saw how a full understanding of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men required extensive knowledge of Grant Morrison’s life and personal philosophy. Obligingly, Morrison wrote a lengthy nonfiction book about all those topics. Joss Whedon is another story. He’s written no book, though books have been written about him. Indeed, he’s expressed a strong desire for his creative work to stand independent of him. But that’s too bad; we’re going to talk about him a bit before diving into his work on X-Men. Joss’ grandfather John Whedon was a screenwriter for popular 1950s situation comedy television programs such as “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show.” Joss’ father Tom Whedon followed the same path as head writer on educational/sketch comedy children’s show “The Electric Company,” which featured a live action Spider-Man in each episode, starting in 1974. Joss attended England’s prestigious Winchester School and then graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Like Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon is a lifelong fan of comic books. But where Morrison is drawn to the bizarre, the cerebral, the symbolic, and the metaphysical, Whedon prefers warm, interpersonal dynamics and near-constant wisecracks, but always in the service of a character’s personal transformation. Morrison plays in a punk rock band; Whedon grew up memorizing Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musicals. Morrison prefers DC; Whedon prefers Marvel. Both have consumed more than their share of cannabis and LSD. Left with plenty of time on his hands due to internal politics in the writer’s room for the television sitcom Roseanne, Whedon wrote the script for the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was disappointed to see how it was altered during filming by director Fran Kuzui and star Donald Sutherland, removing both jokes and dark dramatic elements such as a suicide and Buffy’s burning of the school gymnasium.  Despite his disappointment with the finished film, Whedon’s original Buffy screenplay got him pivotal jobs to completely rewrite the dialogue for action movie Speed (1994) and Disney cartoon Toy Story (1995). Speed’s credited author Christopher Yost later admitted that in the final draft, Whedon "wrote 98.9% of the dialogue.” Much of Whedon’s revamp of Toy Story was later changed by other writers, who nonetheless credited him for sending them in a fruitful new direction. But some lines that they kept bore his mark:  In 1997, Whedon brought his own vision of Buffy to the small screen in a successful series that ran for seven seasons, portraying a team of high school supernatural heroes battling villains and quarreling with each other. Sounds a little like the X-Men! Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada contacted Whedon through Marvel writer Jeph Loeb, who was working with Whedon on a Buffy cartoon that never came to fruition. Whedon was too busy for X-Men at the time, and Grant Morrison was hired instead. During the final season of Buffy, Whedon also launched his genre-bending TV series Firefly, which like Buffy blended action, soap opera, and comedy, this time in a space opera loaded with genre tropes from spaghetti Westerns. Though a cult favorite that later spawned a movie ( Serenity, 2005), Firefly was essentially abandoned by the Fox network before it ever aired, It lasted only one truncated season on TV, concluding about the same time as Buffy. While working on these projects as well as a companion Serenity comic book series, Whedon received a second offer from Quesada to write an X-Men series: (To read Grant Morrison’s recollection of this same day at San Diego Comic-Con 2003, see this post from my review of his New X-Men series.) Whedon, a lifelong fan of comic books and particularly X-Men, had required all of his television staff writers to read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1994) to help them think more visually about their work. Despite Whedon's lack of experience actually writing comic books, his scripts amazed X-Men editor Mike Marts: “They were so pristine. I would look for things to try to change, but I couldn’t find them.” (Ibid, p.234) When a computer crash required Whedon to send in one of his scripts written out in longhand, it was virtually free of cross-outs and other corrections; it emerged fully formed from his head, just like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Remember that scene in Amadeus where Salieri is amazed to see that Mozart's first draft of a new composition has no alterations? It was like that. He organized his Astonishing run into five large segments, each with their own title. The first four are six issues long; the finale was a “Giant-Sized” single issue: Gifted#1#2#3#4#5#6Interlude: Joss Whedon is Dr. Kavito Rao.Dangerous#7#8#9#10#11#12Interlude: Kitty's KitTorn#13#14#15#16#17#18Unstoppable#19#20#21#22#23#24Gone: Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1These headings will fill out with direct links to the individual issues as reviews go live. Also, Sabongero has done reviews of these issues as well in his own thread, and I’ll put links to his reviews when possible. |
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Post by rberman on Jun 2, 2018 21:52:39 GMT -5
#1: “Gifted” 1/6 (July 2004) The Story: Kitty Pryde, former teen X-Man, arrives late for her first day as a new faculty member of the Xavier School. After looking around the ol’ mansion a little bit to reminisce, she shows up late to the student body convocation for the fall semester, in the middle of Emma Frost’s “They will always hate us” welcome speech.   Scott Summers is not pleased with Emma faking a Sentinel attack to test the students, and Logan is not pleased that Scott is now sleeping with Emma. He expresses his displeasure with combat. Emma for her part isn’t pleased that the X-drama is still all about Scott’s recently deceased wife Jean:   The team huddles to discuss their relational dysfunction. Kitty wonders what she’s doing here, and she and Emma instantly get their snark on.   Scott wants to see the X-Men being more publicly heroic to make up for the bad impression Magneto left when he destroyed and enslaved Manhattan in the final Grant Morrison issues of New X-Men. “We have to astonish them,” says Scott. They get their chance soon enough; a big alien bruiser, accompanied by a human goon squad, has taken hostages in a skyscraper. The team dons their new costumes (bright colors to make the public feel happier, instead of the black and yellow of Morrison’s era) and heads for the Blackbird… My Two Cents: At the start of a new school year at Xavier’s School, Whedon’s first issue focuses on setting up the relational dynamics among our five core team members, so we don’t meet any individual students yet. From the get-go, Whedon washes us with Claremont/Byrne/Paul Smith era X-Men nostalgia as we revisit a few of Kitty’s formative memories around the mansion and see her face aglow with warm thoughts of the past. John Cassaday excels at these expressive close-ups.  Under Morrison's pen, Logan was supportive of Emma when Jean was mean to her, even though Emma was the one having an affair with Jean’s husband. But under Whedon, Logan is discomfited by the rapid pace of Emma and Scott’s romance, feeling correctly like Scott has moved on while Jean’s body is barely in the ground (again). Whedon’s Scott is more of a decisive, heroic leader than Morrison’s brooding, self-loathing version. Whedon’s delightfully snarky Emma gets many of the best one-liners, but everybody from Beast to Logan gets some zingers. Whedon’s version of Emma recalls popular-girl archetype Cordelia Chase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 And if Emma is "mean queen bee" Cordelia, that makes Kitty Pryde into Buffy, the star of this show. Whedon admits thinking mainly of Kitty when developing Buffy: “If there’s a bigger influence… I don’t know what it was. She was an adolescent girl finding out she has great power and dealing with it.” (p. 233, ibid.) One Claremont X-men story even depicted the X-Men going up against Dracula, which is about as Buffy as X-Men could get.  From Whedon’s wistful introduction of Kitty in this issue, you might think (indeed I did think) that she has been a dormant character, off living a normal life, and now called back into X-action for this story. That’s not really the case. In 2003, Chris Claremont penned the six part Mekanix story which depicted Kitty as a grad student in Chicago, tending bar to earn money, seeing a psychotherapist regularly to cope with her father’s death in Genosha, and battling both prejudicial classmates and Sentinels on the side, with some assist from Xi’an “Karma” Coy Manh.  Then in the first half of 2004, Kitty figured prominently in the series-ending arc of the Claremont/Igor Kordey series Xtreme X-Men, the last issue of which was published just weeks before this first issue of Astonishing X-Men hit the shelves. But as I said, you’d never know it; Whedon treats Kitty’s return to the X-Mansion like a young adult going back to look at the grade school gymnasium that used to look so cavernous.  As the two above images show, Claremont had gradually turned his plucky X-kid into a grad school sexpot. Joss Whedon immediately dialed that image way back. Astonishing Kitty is astonishingly chaste and optimistic, though as we’ll see, not naïve, particularly where Miss Emma Frost is concerned. This particular issue has multiple callbacks to Kitty’s early days but also shows her as a confident woman, now completely prepared to trade barbs with Emma Frost instead of just running for cover. Kitty gets a hero moment in pretty much every issue of Whedon’s run; I will call them out as we go along. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was renowned for its "Buffyspeak," a hip teen patois inspired by the breezy dialogue in Amy Heckerling's film Clueless (1995), brimming with repurposed words and pop culture references like Kitty's allusion (see above) to the "sorting hat" that divides incoming students into different cliques by temperament in J.K. Rowling's novel Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (1997). We also get a brief teaser about the main plot of the “Gifted” arc, with Dr. Kavita Rao working with a young mutant named Tildie in a spooky Exorcist-type scenario. It’s just enough to make us aware of these two characters and wonder what they are doing. Dr. Rao is the first of the three strong female characters which Whedon will introduce over the course of this first arc of Astonishing X-Men.  Remember Grant Morrison’s Quentin Quire "Kid Omega" story arc, in which Xavier’s dream of integrating the school with normal human students was defeated by a student insurrection which left Xavier so disillusioned that he resigned? Well, now that Scott and Emma are running the school, we get confirmation from the horses’ mouth that regular humans are on the faculty now. No word as yet about the student body. It makes perfect sense that the school would employ regular teachers to teach all the regular subjects. Do we ever see any of these teachers? Nope! But at least knowing that they exist gives the "school" aspect of X-Men a patina of legitimacy that I don't recall it ever having under any previous X-scribe.  After spending Grant Morrison's 40 issues wearing black turtlenecks under rescue team jackets marked with fat fluorescent yellow "X" across the front and back, the team is now back in traditional X-Men togs. Scott wears a version of his usual blue body stocking. Wolverine is back in the yellow tigerstripe in which he first appeared rather than the tan-and-brown version favored by John Byrne. Emma shows the most skin, but less (skin; more cloth) than either of the absurd X-halters she wore under Morrison and Frank Quitely. Kitty's costume is worth a post of its own down the line. And Beast's V-topped jumper is... interesting? The return to "superhero suits" was mandated to Whedon by Marvel on behalf of various merchandise franchisees who fretted that their T-shirts and lunchboxes needed to match the current appearance of the characters in the comics, so the New costumes of Grant Morrison's era went bye-bye. Sabongero’s review of this issue can be found here: classiccomics.org/post/265677/thread
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jun 3, 2018 7:01:41 GMT -5
Talking about Kitty.. this was also after the Excalibur run, right? I would argue that her transformation was mostly there, and Claremont just went with it.
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Post by Icctrombone on Jun 3, 2018 7:06:46 GMT -5
I have to say that the Whedon run is much better than the Morrison run. Artist Cassidy stayed with the book the entire way instead of the bad art the Morrison run began to feature from the middle to the end.
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Post by rberman on Jun 3, 2018 7:16:46 GMT -5
Talking about Kitty.. this was also after the Excalibur run, right? I would argue that her transformation was mostly there, and Claremont just went with it. Yes, Excalibur ran from 1988-1998. I was gone from comics by the time it started and thus long gone by the time it concluded, so I can't comment on how Kitty was portrayed over the course of that series, except that she was still wearing a version of her usual costume at the end, rather than Coyote Ugly duds:  |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jun 3, 2018 11:35:05 GMT -5
I have to say that the Whedon run is much better than the Morrison run. Artist Cassidy stayed with the book the entire way instead of the bad art the Morrison run began to feature from the middle to the end. Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. Morrison's run did a lot with theme, subtext and metaphor. I really liked how it was ABOUT the intersection of "minority" and "mainstream" culture. X-men had always been a little (to a lot) on the shallow side, even for superhero comics, and Morrison really changed that. Whedon's run was about... nostalgia? Decompression? Soap opera, I guess. What ARE you looking for that Whedon's run is better? And I honestly never "got" why everyone freaked out about Cassady. He's good at negative space. He's good at taking 1,049 pages to tell a story that a better artist could tell in 10. Dunno. |
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Post by rberman on Jun 3, 2018 15:03:06 GMT -5
I have to say that the Whedon run is much better than the Morrison run. Artist Cassidy stayed with the book the entire way instead of the bad art the Morrison run began to feature from the middle to the end. Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. Morrison's run did a lot with theme, subtext and metaphor. I really liked how it was ABOUT the intersection of "minority" and "mainstream" culture. X-men had always been a little (to a lot) on the shallow side, even for superhero comics, and Morrison really changed that. Whedon's run was about... nostalgia? Decompression? Soap opera, I guess. What ARE you looking for that Whedon's run is better? And I honestly never "got" why everyone freaked out about Cassady. He's good at negative space. He's good at taking 1,049 pages to tell a story that a better artist could tell in 10. Dunno. And here I thought you didn’t like “Here Comes Tomorrow,” which was Morrison’s most symbol-laden and idea dense arc in New X-Men! |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jun 3, 2018 16:26:29 GMT -5
I have to say that the Whedon run is much better than the Morrison run. Artist Cassidy stayed with the book the entire way instead of the bad art the Morrison run began to feature from the middle to the end. Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. Morrison's run did a lot with theme, subtext and metaphor. I really liked how it was ABOUT the intersection of "minority" and "mainstream" culture. X-men had always been a little (to a lot) on the shallow side, even for superhero comics, and Morrison really changed that. Whedon's run was about... nostalgia? Decompression? Soap opera, I guess. What ARE you looking for that Whedon's run is better? And I honestly never "got" why everyone freaked out about Cassady. He's good at negative space. He's good at taking 1,049 pages to tell a story that a better artist could tell in 10. Dunno. I will admit that , with few exceptions, art is the most important part of a comic book for me. The Morrison run ended with poor artwork and I stopped buying it before the 150th issue. I don't remember the Cassidy run being decompressed. I mostly remember a satisfying experience every issue. |
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Post by rberman on Jun 3, 2018 17:17:35 GMT -5
#2: “Gifted” 2/6 (August 2004)
The Story: The X-Men break in on the hostage scene described in the previous issue. The human goons are dispatched easily. Their alien boss, Ord of the Breakworld, turns out to be way tougher. He’s kicking the whole team’s tails until help arrives from an unexpected source which has its own tail: Kitty Pryde’s pet dragon Lockheed sprays a gout of flame onto Ord’s face. Ord turns tail and flees the scene in agony. The X-Men have saved the day! They’re heroes! Time for a press conference downstairs.  Then they hear the report of Dr. Kavita Rao’s mutant cure and are immediately divided on the topic. Beast, the most inhuman-looking X-Man, thinks of Dr. Rao as a scientific colleague and is immediately interested in being de-furried. Scott Summers wonders whether Dr. Rao and Ord have any connection. Emma Frost sees the cure as a threat that will become the government’s latest attempt to deal with mutants forcibly. She proposes destroying the BeneTech laboratory, and Wolverine agrees, while Kitty suggests that acts of mass destruction may not be the best approach.  That night, Beast sneaks into Rao’s lab at BeneTech and finds her waiting for him. She insists she’s on the level and just wants to help people, and he wants to know if he can get on the “people to be helped” cure list.  My Two Cents: The X-Men show good teamwork in the battle sequence. Emma uses her telepathy tactically to give the team intel about the positions of friend and foe within the battle zone. Kitty’s intangibility power comes in handy (hero moment!) for pulling hostages to safety on the level below. Ord shows himself to be a bruiser who can take a hit from Cyclops’ eyebeams and disembowel Logan.  Emma and Kitty trade some pointed barbs referencing Emma’s evil actions during the original Hellfire Club story. Throughout his run writing the series, Joss Whedon strikes a nice balance of paying homage to X-Men’s best stories, ignoring the dumb ones, and staking out some new territory all his own. So yes, there's nostalgia, but certainly not just that, unlike Guggenheim's current run on X-Men: Gold. We’ve seen some discussion about the differences between Joss Whedon’s writing and that of his immediate predecessor, Grant Morrison. It struck me that the reader is a bit like Cyclops, having been turned from a previous lover (Morrison) to a new one (Whedon) somewhat forcibly. Although Whedon has immense nostalgia for Claremont’s run on X-Men, one element of Claremont that Whedon skips is the years that Scott Summers spent recovering from Jean’s loss. Been there, done that. This time around, Phoenix has intervened forcibly so that Scott is resolute. He thinks about Jean, but now he’s with Emma. Similarly, the reader is invited to put aside Morrison in favor of Whedon, but we can’t help but think about Grant. Now, Morrison was great at a lot of things. Philosophy. Symbol. Cultural analysis as a comic book subtext. What, it’s been asked, is Whedon great at that Morrison was not? You might say “soap opera,” but I prefer another term: characterization. Now, maybe this is just my own American-ness clashing against Morrison’s Scottish-ness. British protagonists have a reputation for being prickly and unlikeable. Think of Rowan Atkinson’s scheming Edmund Blackadder, or Ricky Gervais’ misanthropic David Brent. All the same, I appreciated the stories that Morrison told much more than I was rooting for the characters inhabiting those stories. Think about 40 issues of New X-Men. Did you meet anybody that you wanted to hang out with? OK, Logan is cool as usual, but who else? Not surly Scott, or aloof Jean, or haughty Emma, or hostile Angel, or woebegotten Beak. Fantomex is a big faker pretending he’s James Bond. Quentin Quire and his droogs belong in jail. Even Lilandra is bonkers now. OK, I liked Xorn. But he wasn’t real.  But with Whedon, I like all these people. I like the core team of five Old X-Men. I like Dr. Rao, and I only just met her. They’re all different, but they’re all engaging, and I’m rooting for them to win whatever they’re trying to do. How many times in Morrison’s run did you see the team sitting around talking? A couple of times. But usually he broke the team up. Four issues of Jean and Charles off doing their thing. Four issues of Logan and Scott off doing their thing. Five issues with Magneto keeping the team separated until the last few pages. Four issues of a crazy future dream-world without any of the usual relational dynamics of the team. And so on. I only remember two full-team battles with Morrison, against Cassandra Nova and Magneto. In forty issues. Whedon on the other hand gives us huge chunks of dialogue with the whole team sitting around together, discussing what they think of what’s going on in the other pages. This probably comes from Whedon’s background in ensemble television programs; Firefly and Buffy are loaded with scenes like this. You don’t get four or five million people to tune into your TV show every week unless you’re good at giving them clear narratives and good reasons to spend time with your characters. So yes, I can make a strong case for Whedon bringing value to the table, even if he’s not as thematically ambitious as Grant Morrison.  And all I can say about John Cassaday’s art for now is: Wow. During dialogue sequences, he makes full use of widescreen panels, allowing for close-ups on two heads or part of one head, allowing for expressions that really sell the emotions in the dialogue. His background in cinematography really comes in handy for understand the uses of different shots. If you’re not familiar with the way that cinematographers think of different distances between viewer and scene, here’s a great primer: The idea of Kitty having a dragon originated embryonically in X-Men #153, in which Kitty Pryde told Illyana (still a child, pre-Belasco) a fairy tale version of the story of Phoenix, with the Blackbird aircraft re-imagined as a black dragon named Lockheed:  Artist Paul Smith had long wanted to draw a girl with a pet dragon, so when he took over art duties from Dave Cockrum, he quickly introduced an actual tiny dragon for Kitty, which of course she named Lockheed:  Even after Paul Smith moved on from X-Men, he did another “girl with dragon series” called “Leave it to Chance” (1996-9, 2002):  Sabongero’s review of this issue can be found here.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jun 3, 2018 18:23:18 GMT -5
Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. Morrison's run did a lot with theme, subtext and metaphor. I really liked how it was ABOUT the intersection of "minority" and "mainstream" culture. X-men had always been a little (to a lot) on the shallow side, even for superhero comics, and Morrison really changed that. Whedon's run was about... nostalgia? Decompression? Soap opera, I guess. What ARE you looking for that Whedon's run is better? And I honestly never "got" why everyone freaked out about Cassady. He's good at negative space. He's good at taking 1,049 pages to tell a story that a better artist could tell in 10. Dunno. I will admit that , with few exceptions, art is the most important part of a comic book for me. The Morrison run ended with poor artwork and I stopped buying it before the 150th issue. I don't remember the Cassidy run being decompressed. I mostly remember a satisfying experience every issue. Yeah, that' fair - I've basically given up on current DC because they can't keep a single artist for a single arc of a title. I liked a lot of the art in Morrison's run but it was wonky and inconsistent at best, and M wasn't great at writing to the strengths of his artists. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jun 3, 2018 21:12:01 GMT -5
Talking about Kitty.. this was also after the Excalibur run, right? I would argue that her transformation was mostly there, and Claremont just went with it. Yes, Excalibur ran from 1988-1998. I was gone from comics by the time it started and thus long gone by the time it concluded, so I can't comment on how Kitty was portrayed over the course of that series, except that she was still wearing a version of her usual costume at the end, rather than Coyote Ugly duds: I was thinking more during the Ellis run when she was hanging with Pete Wisdom, but most of the images I saw online weren't really particularly different... Maybe I'm mixing stuff up in my head. |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jun 4, 2018 5:11:27 GMT -5
For the record I didn't hate this - It was perfectly fine superhero comics, or much-better-than-anything-from-the-'90s X-men comics.
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Post by badwolf on Jun 4, 2018 10:12:27 GMT -5
I enjoyed this run but as with a lot of "arc style" storytelling, the endings were often a letdown.
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Post by rberman on Jun 4, 2018 20:57:32 GMT -5
#3 “Gifted” 3/6 (September 2004)The Story: Kitty Pryde, in her role as high school guidance counselor (a job that Whedon’s Kitty stand-in Buffy held in the last season of her TV show), talks with forlorn student Wing, who is worried that he’s going to be forced to accept Dr. Kavita Rao’s cure for mutation, thus taking away his flying powers. Kitty assures him that the government wouldn’t do that. Inside BeneTech, we see that the X-Men’s fears are sort of justified. Dr. Rao is indeed working with the alien bruiser Ord of the Breakworld, but their alliance seems very tenuous and full of arguments. Rao treats this alien giant as a misbehaving colleague, not a fearsome overlord who could pound her into a pulp. As I said yesterday, she’s a strong, witty female character of the sort for which Whedon is known.  Cyclops visits Nick Fury in the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier to get information about the tech that Ord’s goons were using. Fury is reluctant to share information with a known associate of both Xorn (who turned out to be Magneto in disguise) and Emma Frost (who has a past criminal history). Fury also has a previously unseen associate, a woman with green hair.  Meanwhile, a long line of mutants is forming outside BeneTech Laboratories hoping to receive the cure. The X-Men remain divided as to how to respond to this existential threat. Beast has acquired a sample of Rao’s serum from her directly and is testing it in vitro, but what he’s really like to do is test it on himself. “I used to have fingers. I used to have a mouth you could kiss… Maybe Cassandra Nova was right. Maybe I’m devolving.” Logan is strongly opposed to the cure, saying it would be bad for student morale, and the two fight verbally and physically until Emma forces them to stop. Beast eventually commits not to act unilaterally in trying out the cure without team approval. Then his research reveals that Rao’s research involves data gleaned from the body of an X-Man… Who could it be?!?! Scott has an immediate idea.  My Two Cents: Kitty and Emma’s animosity continues to be the main animating force within the team, recalling the constant hazing between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm in early issues of the Fantastic Four.   Whedon sets Kitty and Emma up not only as dramatic foils but as opposite temperaments: Kitty is a uniter, while Emma is a divider. Whedon’s biographer Amy Pascale describes lessons he learned about this during his first TV screenwriting job, on the 1980s sitcom Roseanne, named after the star, comedienne Roseanne Barr: Roseanne ran for nine seasons (1987-1997) and returned for a tenth season in 2018. Its second cancellation (just last week as of this writing) was due in part to falling ratings but was also overshadowed by insulting Twitter comments which Barr made against a member of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration. Barr’s co-workers had steeled themselves for something like this, since she has a reputation for inflammatory, insensitive speech. This fits with Whedon’s perspective on how Barr was a divider instead of uniter for the crew of her own television show: She saw them as threats to her personal life rather than collaborators on an artistic and commercial venture of mutual benefit. She operated out of weakness and fear. So too Emma Frost, though a powerful telepath, operates out of a position of weakness and insecurity. Grant Morrison had already shown us that though high-born, Emma occupied a low position in the pecking order of her immediate family. She also got accustomed to manipulating telepathy and thus never developed any social skills.  So even as the public face of the Xavier School, her first message to the students is fear-based (“They will always hate us; here’s what a Sentinel attack feels like.”) rather than the inspiration-based approach favored by Charles Xavier. She perceives that in her personal life as well she’s operating from a position of weakness, still trying to measure up with the ghost of Jean Grey who hangs over her relationship with Scott Summers. Not to mention the insecurity of knowing that Phoenix has a habit of being reborn, which could mean the end of the line for her romance. So yeah, Emma has lots of reasons to act the way she’s acting. Kitty on the other hand has been through plenty of dreadful things as an X-Man but eventually came out on top. She’s been an adventurer, a bartender, and eventually a physicist. Chris Claremont summarized her career in a story in this year’s X-Men: The Wedding Special #1, which shows us how her naturally plucky personality, combined with the successes she’s seen in life, leave her with the confidence to operate from a position of strength as a uniter rather than a divider.  Emma’s making her presence very much known, and Scott seems to be deferring unduly to his telepathic girlfriend, which Kitty in particular finds worrisome.  Scott immediately assumes that Jean is the X-Man on whose corpse BeneTech is doing research. This makes sense both due to her recent demise and her historic power potential; we’ll see whether he is correct in the following issue. Surely Beast’s genetic research would show exactly which X-Man it is, but for dramatic purposes we are being kept in the dark about that.  Although Kitty is clearly Whedon’s favorite, he’s also giving us the Hank-centric story that Morrison never did. All Morrison did with Beast was break him up with Trish, give him a few weird pages where he was pretending to be gay to make some sort of statement about tolerance and the gullibility of the tabloid media, and have him show some interest in Emma Frost as a kindred spirit of high cultural appreciation. But Whedon follows up on a Morrison thread that Morrison himself never did. Early in Morrison's tenure, Cassandra Nova immobilized Hank by de-evolving his brain to that of a wild animal. Hank now remembers that experience and dreads the thought that his recent physical change into a more cat-like form is just the start of an ongoing process which will rob him of his most precious commodity, his brilliant mind.   Logan, of all people, is sympathetic to the liminal “man/beast” dichotomy, having spent time on both sides of it himself. But he expects Hank, who doesn’t think twice about risking his life on mission after mission, to be similarly sacrificial about the prospect of a cure, in consideration of the effect it would have on the institution with which he’s associated. Remember this “man vs institution” conflict. It will come up again in a few days. Sabongero’s review of this issue can be found here.
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Post by rberman on Jun 5, 2018 17:55:40 GMT -5
#4 “Gifted” 4/6 (October 2004)
The Story: Last issue, Beast uncovered evidence that BeneTech is performing experiments on mutants, apparently including the corpse of an unspecified X-Man. So the X-Men raid BeneTech’s laboratory. Kitty Pryde slips inside to turn off the alarms (hero moment!) and explore the sub-basement. The metal structure is bizarrely thick, going down a really long way, and also made of a material which has some moderately unpleasant interaction with her intangible form. She also finds a huge door whose electronic lock she disrupts. Behind the door is, of all people, her deceased colleague Colossus, very much alive, and very much enraged, charging straight through her intangible form to attack some security guards nearby.  Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine, and Beast find a dead mutant on a dissecting table, apparently a suicide. Emma gets a psychic distress call from the Stepford Cuckoos that something is wrong at the mansion, but before the team can respond, they’re interrupted by gun-toting goons. Back at the Xavier School, Wing and his classmate Hisako are chatting in the hall about how all the male students have a crush on Kitty. They get a distressing shock when Ord of the Breakworld shows up, hoping to bust some X-Man heads.  Since no X-Men are available, Ord settles for injecting Wing with “ Hope,” which is the name of Dr. Rao’s mutant cure. It works instantly, and Wing plummets from the sky where he was grappling with Ord. Hisako reveals her power to summon the spirit of her ancestors as a mystical exo-skeleton to enhance her combat strength and durability. Ord says that his mission is to ensure “That the mutant abomination will never be a threat to the Breakworld.” So, not a “conquer the world” kind of guy, but a super-hero in the view of his own people. How can the X-Men threaten his planet? The most likely candidate is Jean Grey, but Phoenix just died a few issues ago; maybe Ord didn’t get the memo?  My Two Cents: The return of Colossus is the big reveal for this issue, occupying several decompressed pages at the end of the issue, culminating with him kneeling to hug Kitty and ask whether he is “finally dead” and reuniting with her in heaven. Cassaday’s art remains exquisite, as Kitty registers the changing face of her shock over a series of panels. But why does Colossus have short hair and a shaved face? This is a missed opportunity to show him with long hair and an untrimmed beard, since he’s evidently been prisoner here for a long time. His return makes zero sense in continuity, because his death was a major plot point in the Legacy Virus storyline (X-Men #390 from 2001), his ashes scattered by Kitty. But Joss Whedon is telling an early 80s X-Men story here. That means Kitty. And Kitty means Lockheed and Colossus. We’ll see next issue how Whedon sort of justifies this turn of events within the story.  Peter isn't the only ghost in this tale. Scott and Emma are working through the way that the memory of Jean lingers over their relationship. Essentially, Emma fell in love with her own notion of who Scott was, and now that she’s seeing what he’s really like, she’s trying in her gormless way to change him. This is one of those “be careful what you wish for; you may get it” scenarios. Her relationship with Scott was originally based on his moody Mr. Darcy behavior, and the opportunity for her to be needed and feel useful by helping him work through his emotional trauma, while competing romantically with her nemesis, his wife, Jean Grey. Now that Jean is dead, she’s left with Scott, and being with him is more work than she expected. People really ought to play “what happens next?” with their contemplated relationships, but mating instincts can make people do all sorts of things that are not in the best interests of either themselves or their beloved. Remember, Scott and Emma didn't fall in love because they were so right for each other. Scott fell for Emma because Phoenix made him do so, in order that they would keep Xavier's School going. It's entirely possible that they don't have to stay together in order for the school to keep going, now that it's up and running again, and it's easy to imagine how their personalities might grate on each other, causing a separation in the near future, especially when Emma so readily tromps on Jean's memory with exchanges like this:  We met X-student Wing last issue as Kitty carried out her role as campus guidance counselor; their conversation ended with him cussing her out. Now we get a nice exchange between Wing and his classmate Hisako, learning that Kitty gave Wing detention for his outburst. This leads to the conversation about how all of the male students are smitten with Kitty, which is right out of Whedon’s own past: (BTW Joss: Swamp Thing is not in Marvel Comics. Man-Thing is. Swamp Thing is in DC. Ha! In your face! I'm a bigger nerd!)  Logan and Hank have a further exchange about the Hope cure. The problem isn’t that it could be used on mutants who want to be normal. As Wing's case illustrates, the problem is that such solutions have a way of going from options to mandatory ‘treatments for the good of society.’ This parallels the real world concern that that the availability of euthanasia for terminally ill patients in terrible pain will lead inexorably to a Logan’s Run scenario in which citizens are expected, even forced, to end their lives once their perceived value to society has elapsed. Let's talk for a minute about one of John Cassaday's recurring art techniques:  In this tunnel sequence with Colossus and Kitty, we see an artistic feature which Cassaday will use repeatedly throughout Astonishing X-Men: Some characters are held static or nearly so, while others move. This could be seen as a cheap artistic trick since he didn’t redraw the images; they are simply digitally duplicated across panels. I’ve seen original art pages for his work online, and some panels are simply blank, to be digitally filled in later with the art from an adjacent panel.  Does it save time? Sure, and time is money. But I don’t think Cassaday is just being lazy. This is a dramatic technique, substituting space for time, in order to build tension for some kind of punch line. In fact, when I saw this artistic choice, my mind immediately went to the first place I saw it used, which was by Paul Smith (X-Men #183, September 1983). Madeline Pryor is at Logan’s wedding, and she discovers that the basket she’s been asked to mind contains not a cat but a small dragon:  As a kid, I found the static camera and Madelyn’s unchanging expression across the first three panels to be hysterically funny when paid off by the final panel. It was like a four-panel Doonesbury strip or something, and I remember reading it repeatedly with much merriment. Whedon has lots of TV experience with such techniques for both dramatic and comedic timing. So while we’re not going to see a lot of cool vanishing point “down the skyscraper with Spider-Man” kinds of camera angles in Astonishing X-Men, there will still be plenty to enjoy in the artistic choices, not just the artistic renderings. I'll have more to say about decompression's effect on camera choices in a few days. Sabongero’s review of this issue can be found here:
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