Obviously the facial expressions are all Cassaday. I'd be interested to know how much of the "directing" (i.e. page layouts, dramatic dialogue-free pauses, etc.) was explicitly in Whedon's script, and how much leeway Cassaday had to improvise. Given their shared background in cinema, the two doubtless had a lot to talk about. Overall I find the wordless sections of Whedon's X-Men more effective than the wordless passages of Morrison's X-Men.

#21 “Unstoppable” 3/6 (May 2007)

The Story: Wolverine and Armor arrive at the temple where Beast is studying the puzzling mural of Colossus destroying the Breakworld. The team then divides on separate missions.




Elsewhere, Kitty Pryde and Colossus are finding the inhabitants of the Breakworld, even the children, to be bizarrely bloodthirsty. They finally meet a friendly alien (technically, they are the aliens, and he is the native) who takes them to meet Aghanne, a former gladiator now turned administrator of a secret hospital on this planet that normally disposes of the sick and elderly. In this haven, Kitty and Peter settle in for the night and grab a moment of intimacy.



Danger has been captured by Powerlord Kruun’s forces but talks her way into being his underlying, sent to wipe out the X-Men. Scott Summers and Emma Frost commandeer a two person fighter jet and fight off aliens while bickering about their relationship. Danger causes their ship to crash and confronts Emma while Scott lies unconscious.



Beast and Agent Brand weather a snowstorm attack by Powerlord Kruun, hunkering down in a snowdrift where Brand reveals some sort of secret power to keep them alive in the cold:



My Two Cents: Another strong issue with multiple jeopardy situations in parallel. The narrative is straightforward and action-based, so there’s not much to analyze. The people of the Breakworld are nasty! The X-Men are actually being tempted to play judge, jury, and executioner for this race of aliens that they never met before today. Kruun is a stereotypical dictator with no Doctor Doom-style nobility to cloud his hissable badness. Aghanne, his ideological opposite, suggests that Colossus may somehow be the agent of Breakworld’s reformation rather than destruction.
I suppose we should count Danger among Whedon’s “new strong female characters,” though there’s no obvious reason that Danger adopted a female physique instead of male or genderless. But I guess not every robo-person can have the inspired, fluid lunacy of Bill Sienkiewick’s Warlock.

Yay, Armor made the cover pin-up! And looks great.

#23 “Unstoppable” 5/6 (January 2008)

The Story: Sort-of-safely-back on the Breakworld after last issue’s disastrous venture into space resulted in the death of Scott Summers, Emma Frost rebuff’s Kitty Pryde’s attempt to console her.



Time to split the team up again! Beast and Agent Brand find a lab, where they determine that the mural prophesying the destruction of the Breakworld by Colossus is (1) much more contemporary than it seemed, and (2) seems less like a prophecy made by augurs and more like a deliberate message about how to destroy the Breakworld by destabilizing a fusion reactor under the palace.



Wolverine and Armor are captured by Powerlord Kruun’s forces. Scott, having died from the vacuum of space last issue, is the beneficiary of the same technology used to re-animate Colossus after his death from the Legacy Virus. Alive again! Kruun interrogates him about the previous mention of “Leviathan,” and eventually Scott confesses that it was all a trick. We get a replay of the “strange conversation” I mentioned in the last issue and discover that the oral conversation was just a ruse covering up a more important telepathic planning session that Emma was facilitating. Very clever! They should use this trick more often.



Then Scott springs another surprise on Kruun: His optic blast power, deactivated by Emma several issues ago, is not only returned, but under his complete control now; he doesn’t even need his visor. This is new territory for him, as far as I know.



My Two Cents: The return of Scott’s (still not "Cyclops!") power was a nice moment, although the reveal was stretched out over six mostly wordless decompressed pages, which is a bit indulgent, suggesting the issue ran short of other plot. Danger kind of dropped off the map when the X-Men decided to go to space; we really should have had a scene or two keeping her in play, since whatever team she’s playing for, she’s surely not just twiddling her thumbs during all this action.

Wolverine and Armor continue to make a fun team in the tradition of all his previous teen sidekicks. Marvel doesn’t do the whole “Batman and Robin” thing often, but the Dynamic Duo dynamic does have its benefits.

Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1 “Gone” (July 2008)



The Story: Earth’s mightiest heroes gather on S.W.O.R.D.’s satellite, The Peak, to discuss how to stop the giant bullet headed towards Earth from the Breakworld. Psychic attacks fell most of them, trapping each one in a fantasy in which he is the hero who saves the day. Only Spider-Man recognizes the absurdity of his scenario and tries unsuccessfully to snap the other heroes back to reality. The Mega-Sentinel from Genosha, guilt-wracked over the genocide it committed, interposes itself in the bullet’s path in hopes of slowing or deflecting it, but to no avail.





In the fusion reactor chamber, Colossus struggles with Aghanne, who has donned a radiation suit to grapple with him. Her past life as a gladiator stands her in good stead, and she slowly forces him toward grasping the reactor core, which will doom the planet. Peter recognizes that the only way to stop her is for him to switch from organic steel back to human form, which of course will kill him instantly. But just before he can carry this out, he gets help from an unexpected quarter. Ord saves his world by entering the fusion sphere unprotected, damaging Aghanne enough for Colossus to get control again and tear her suit open. Both Breakworlders perish in the heat.




Now the mop-up. The rest of the X-Men have returned from orbit, having failed to prevent the launch of the giant bullet. Time for tough negotiation tactics with Powerlord Kruun. Wolverine amputates Kruun’s right arm (a sign of shame and defeat among his people), and Colossus threatens to take Kruun’s place as the ruler of Breakworld unless Kruun helps them disarm the bullet headed toward Earth. Sadly, bullets cannot be disarmed once fired.



Emma Frost manages to connect telepathically with Kitty Pryde across the light-years. Kitty, you may recall, is trapped in the hollow point of the giant bullet, which is made of a metal which has some sort of sickening interaction with her intangible self. Realizing that all other remedies have failed, Kitty puts her every ounce of energy into phasing the entire bullet into intangibility, just before it strikes the Earth. She succeeds, and (biggest hero moment!) it flies through Earth harmlessly.






The good guys have won again. But Kitty has merged with the bullet irreversibly and is now sailing intangibly with it off into the cosmos. Her teammates mourn each in their own way; Even the ice queen Emma is affected.



My Two Cents: This last arc starting with #19 essentially took a year and a half to publish seven issues, one being “Giant-Sized,” doubtless in homage to the Len Wein/Dave Cockrum story that re-ignited the X-Men in the first place. What combination of scripting and art issues resulted in this leisurely publication pace? This job was something of a labor of love for Joss Whedon. In the meantime, Whedon was involved in a few other projects, to put it mildly. Like these:

• The Serenity film (2005) provided the next (and probably final) chapter in the story begun in the TV series Firefly. A tie-in comic book was also released.
• He spent two years 2005-2007 working on a Wonder Woman film that never got approval from Warner Brothers, as well as movie Goners that’s still only in script form today.
• He shepherded a continuing Buffy the Vampire Slayer story in comic book form for Dark Horse also in 2007.
• He wrote a six issue series for Marvel’s Runaways (#25-30, 2007).
• With Drew Goddard, he wrote the movie satire Cabin in the Woods, which suggested that horror films like Friday the 13th and Saw are actually pagan rites to placate dark Lovecraftian deities.



• He threw his clout behind a Writer’s Guild of America strike seeking fair compensation from movie studios for the use of their work in streaming video. This seems obvious now in the age of Netflix original series, Amazon Prime programming, and other internet-only creative outlets, but at the time it was a huge battle.
• On a shoestring budget as a guerrilla film-making venture during the writer’s strike, he funded, wrote, and directed a 45 minute, 14 song musical, the Emmy-winning Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, (2008) about a lovelorn supervillain and boorish hero fighting to woo a naïve community organizer.



• The 2009 DVD version of Dr. Horrible included a commentary track which was itself a completely different musical with the cast performing another two dozen new songs describing their thoughts about the original musical. One particularly revealing track, sung by Whedon himself, discusses his misgivings with the hype surrounding the process of filmmaking, which he feels becomes a story of its own that can only detract from the story which the creator actually wants to convey.



• He began work on a TV show Dollhouse (it ultimately ran for two seasons 2009-10), an allegorical satire on Hollywood in which vapid young actors learn to leverage their skills and take their fate into their own hands.

Whedon has acquired a reputation for killing his most sympathetic and optimistic characters, and this story keeps his record unbroken. It’s as definitive a departure as you might give a comic book character, though of course nothing lasts forever, which is why Kitty is back, leading the team of X-Men Gold and marrying Peter in 2018. Nevertheless, Whedon injects genuine pathos and a sense of loss into the conclusion of his X-Men run. He also deserves credit for forshadowing not only the “bullet” part (as discussed yesterday), but also the danger that Breakworld metal poses to Kitty, beginning back in issue #4. Peter gets a nice scene recalling his last deep conversation about “the transience of happiness” with Kitty when they were staying at Aghanne’s hospital. Grab it before it’s “Gone,” which of course is the title of this issue:



Whedon also gives an ending/new beginning to the story of Special Agent Brand. We get to see her super-power in action, followed later by some exposition explaining her alien origin as well as her attraction to Beast. It doesn’t appear that post-Whedon writers have done much with this character, which is too bad; I like her.





Tomorrow: A few closing thoughts about the series. Quite a few.

Retcon Central

Whedon used his time on X-Men to propose re-writes of many of the characters. Most of them, in fact. Let’s review:

• Colossus wins the retcon award just for not being dead any more. It’s a pretty big deal that Breakworld tech can resurrect humans, but I have a feeling that we won’t be hearing from it again.
• Scott’s mutant power was revealed to be uncontrollable not inherently, but only as the result of a subconscious choice that he made as a teen. His deepest fear was revealed not to be losing control of his power, as you might expect, but rather losing his uncontrolled power altogether.  He spends the last several issues in complete control of his optic blasts. But once he gets back to Earth, this control fades, for reasons never explained. Too bad. It would have been interesting to carry that story element on for a while before hitting the reset button. I guess they couldn’t call him “Cyclops” then, though.
• Logan was de-retconned. He is apparently not from the Weapon Plus program as Grant Morrison claimed. He really is a centuries-old Canadian yokel, hardened into a super-soldier by time and experience rather than selective breeding.
• Lockheed is not just a tiny alien dragon who happened to meet Kitty Pryde on the Broodworld and then hitched a ride to Earth. He is, at least as of now, an agent of S.W.O.R.D., collaborating with Earth authorities for unclear purposes, as they help him with "homeworld issues," whatever that means.
• Emma Frost was a helpless puppet of Cassandra Nova, an unwitting sleeper agent for years, trying to subconsciously subvert the secret agenda brewing within herself. Her mysterious secondary mutation of turning to diamond was somehow brought about by Cassandra Nova.
• Xavier is shown to be ruthless, enslaving an intelligent being and ignoring its cries for help. I’m not sure how cut-and-dried the matter of machine intelligence is in the Marvel Universe, but the characters treat it as a clear crime against sentience, so we have to go with that too.
• I can’t think of any retcons involving Hank, who has relatively little history to rewrite in the first place. He’s still relegated to a supporting role. He does have his temptation with Hope in the Gifted arc, his fear of going feral in the Torn arc, and his teasing-as-romance arc with Brand in the Unstoppable/Gone arc.

Here are a few items which Whedon left unresolved by the last panel of the final issue:

• Has Cassandra Nova been successfully re-contained within Stuff? Is there a better long-term solution to containing this world-threatening menace besides a foot locker in the basement? Do the Shi’ar really not care whether they get Stuff back?
• What is Armor’s status within the school after this mission? Logan has clearly bonded with her. How much school does she have left? Scott and Emma are running the school now. Do they even have a vision for recruiting new X-Men from the student ranks?
• What’s the deal with Emma’s plan to somehow betray Xavier to Danger?
• Why are Emma and Scott still a couple? Their romance was easily the least credible plotline of Whedon’s (and Morrison's) run, which probably means that it was editorially mandated and can’t really be justified based on who the characters are and the things that they have experienced.
• Has Hank completely forgotten about the Hope cure? Has Dr. Rao? Have all those mutants lined up outside BeneTech? I guess the “No More Mutants” story obviated this one not long afterward, so most of those mutants probably got their wish anyway. All of Dr. Rao's materials were destroyed aboard Ord's spaceship in issue #6, and Rao might have trouble recreating the innovations without help from the Breakworld. But we also saw that Breakworld wasn't really that keen on the whole idea of medical science, so surely other geniuses, whether human or alien, could provide similar assistance.

This makes my fourth read through this series. Having now written about it, I was struck that there weren’t as many pop culture references as usual for Whedon, just one from Harry Potter and a couple from Star Wars. We still didn’t get to see much of the school working as a school, though Hisako made a great feature student. The Kitty/Peter relationship built evenly through all four arcs. The Kitty/Emma feud got the most attention in Gifted but was resolved in Torn; they were not together much in Danger and Unstoppable. The Scott/Emma relationship had moments throughout Gifted, Torn, and Unstoppable, with issue #14, their Nova-driven "therapy session," as a major character focus issue for Scott. Colossus' only significant relationship is with Kitty; Logan's is with Hisako, though he has fights with both Scott and Hank in Gifted. Brand's relationship with Hank was one-sided. My favorite arc was Torn, followed by Gifted, Unstoppable/Gone, and Danger in that order.

Excelsior!