3. Astonishing X-Men #1-18 (2004-2006) “Gifted/Danger/Torn” by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday




Story overview: Kitty Pryde returns to the fold as the X-Men grapple with aliens, robots, and their own inner demons.

My Two Cents: As Joss Whedon was making his reputation with action/comedy TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fans of genre fiction couldn’t help but notice influences like Scooby Doo, as a gang of recognized archetypes (mentor, leader/fighter, everyman, preening beauty, geeky girl, brooding loner) banded together to solve arcane mysteries week after week while engaging in witty repartee. The fights were beside the point and often occurred in a “getting this out of the way” manner at the beginning of the episode before proceeding onward to a story allegorizing some element of teenage life (crush on a teacher, new kid in town, feeling out of sync after time apart, etc.) as a monster which could be punched into submission. As the show went on, its archetypes evolved into a Monster Squad (hunter, werewolf, vampire, witch, demon, etc.) with a very X-Man-like camaraderie.

Whedon (born 1964) was sixteen at the peak of the X-Men’s Dark Phoenix glory in 1980. A memorable Claremont/Sienkiewicz two-parter in 1982 (Uncanny X-Men #159 and X-Men King Size Annual #6) turned the team into vampire slayers, with teen X-girl Kitty Pryde playing a key role in freeing her surrogate mom Ororo from Dracula’s clutches. Hey, girls can make great vampire hunters! Hmmm…



I can only imagine that I speak for a generation of X-Man readers (I was born in 1971) for whom Kitty was the idealized super-girlfriend: optimistic, capable, and probably very open to talking for hours with the kind of guy who spends hours reading comic books. Sure, she did ballet, but she had Rubik’s Revenge (solved) on her desk, and she wrote Elfquest fan fiction for Illyana’s bedtime story! Whedon nails her appeal in this discussion between X-students Wing and Armor:



It was not at all hard to see Buffy Summers as Whedon’s Kitty Pryde stand-in, so it was not surprising that when Whedon was given the opportunity to write a two-year run on X-Men, he made Kitty Pryde the protagonist. He came onto the X-Books at a time when Fox’s semi-successful X-films had influenced the comics into darker territory, with black costumes and a psychic affair between Scott Summers and Emma Frost. Grant Morrison’s just-concluded run as X-scribe had some terrific stories and introduced a dozen enduring concepts into the ossifying franchise (Cassandra Nova, the Stepford Cuckoos, Emma’s diamond form, Quentin Quire, and more), but he had also ended on a sour note, with another death of Jean Grey and the implausible revelation that gentle X-recruit Xorn was really Magneto in disguise. Whedon intended to resurrect a heroic X-Man team not just to compensate for the wreckage wreaked on the world in Morrison’s final issues but also to change the tone of the stories themselves, emphasizing optimism and sacrifice. Kitty Pryde was the perfect character for that, so back to the team she came, reliving classic moments along with us. This is a story by an 80s X-fan, for 80s X-fans.



Whedon also inherited Claremont’s penchant for super-romance. Other writers had hooked Kitty up with Peter Wisdom and Peter Quill, but there’s only room for one Peter in her life to be the stand-in for us 80s fanboys, and his name is Rasputin. Jim Shooter hated this pairing because of the age difference and personally ended it by giving Colossus his own tragic love interest in Secret Wars.



But Kitty is old enough now to revisit that ground without being creepy. So after resurrecting Colossus, Whedon gives us the sweet Kitty-Peter romance that we’d been shipping our whole lives. By the way, John Cassaday’s art is amazing throughout the whole series, but he deserves special notice for not glamming Kitty up, as artists have been occasionally tempted to do. She’s not a bimbo. She’s not busty. She’s not even super-pretty. She’s just the super-idealized girlfriend for lonely nerds.

Story? Oh yeah. Comic books have those. Enough about Kitty for now. Whedon arranges his run into four arcs of six issues each, but only the first three arcs fall within the “August 2007 or before” timeframe of this current survey. The four arcs do form an overall story that benefits from completion, but even the first three arcs are great without the gut-punching finale. (Whedon fans can guess that it involves tragedy, because Whedon.) The first arc, “Gifted,” accomplishes the following amidst some of the wittiest and most caustic dialogue the X-Men have ever seen:

• Puts Kitty, Lockheed, and Peter back in the mix, alongside Scott, Hank, Logan, and Emma. A nice streamlined team.
• Establishes Ord of the Breakworld as a “big bad” who poses a credible threat to the entire X-team.
• Shows that Ord’s ship is made of material which is not great for Kitty’s intangible form.
• Sets up Emma and Kitty as antagonists within the team.
• Picks up the Scott/Emma pieces that Grant Morrison left lying on the ground.
• Introduces Dr. Kavita Rao and her “mutant cure” which sorely tempts Hank McCoy.
• Gives us Brand, Agent of S.W.O.R.D., a Torchwood-like organization that guards Earth against extra-terrestrial threats just as S.H.I.E.L.D. deals with earthbound foes.
• Demonstrates more of the functioning of the mansion as a school, including returning students like Grant Morrison's Stepford Cuckoos (who get great Heathers-esque rapid-fire dialogue whenever they rear their hive-mind) as well as newbies like scrappy Armor, spooky Blindfold, and forlorn Wing.

The second arc, “Danger,” builds on “Gifted” while building a whole story around, of all, things, the Danger Room, and not just in the expected “trapped on the holodeck” way. Along the way we get some Genosha, the return of Morrison’s Extinction-Sentinel, more evidence that Charles Xavier is a horrible human being. Kitty and Peter get nice moments that show how much better Whedon is at writing comic book romance than the average super-hero scribe.



Cassaday’s art favors panoramic panels the whole width of the page, giving the whole series a cinematic effect that suits Whedon’s background. There’s also ample use of blank and repeated panels and panel fragments to achieve the desired timing effect. Is it decompressed? Yes, extremely, but decompression done well, to serve the story, not just to pad it out to take up enough pages to fill a trade edition. And accompanied by dialogue that nails the characters, with a tersely taciturn Logan that’s more like your favorite grumpy uncle than like Claremont’s version, the closet philosopher always engaged in a verbosely expository internal monologue.



Meanwhile, Special Agent Brand shows herself to be Whedon’s newest great kick-butt heroine, loaded with his trademark sarcasm.





The third arc, “Torn” takes a real left turn. Emma and Scott’s relationship gets profoundly weird, and a bizarre coalition of villains, including Sebastian Shaw, Cassandra Nova, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, turn up at the mansion. I really can’t say more about it without spoiling it, but Whedon accomplishes a real feeling of plot and character movement. It’s not just the Kitty Show, and Wolverine gets his rightful role as a player rather than a spotlight-hogger. We get to see his claws being actually swordlike, with real decapitations and impalings unimaginable in the Comics Code days.



X-Men have often been justly maligned as a bloated super-soap opera riddled with unnecessary alternate reality versions of the same few basic characters. No alternate realities here, and the real issue is whether those characters are written in a way that makes you want to see more of them. Whedon gives us reasons to do that for pretty much everybody here, even frigid Emma Frost. Only Beast gets relatively neglected and relegated to his usual “tech guy” role, but even he has some nice moments and finds unlikely romance before Whedon’s time on X-Men is done. These stories were my re-introduction to the X-Men after almost 20 years away, and they made me want to see what I’d missed. (Answer: Morrison was mostly great and occasionally terrible. Onslaught was as awful as I’d heard. Avoid at all costs. Age of Apocalypse was just meh.) As in Buffy, the fights are fine, but the talking is where it’s at.