Alas, Mr. Whedon

I read the first issue of Astonishing X-Men last night. In my opinion, Mr. Whedon succeeded in part and failed in part.

There are hints that he might do something interesting with Emma Frost and Kitty Pride. He spends a lot of his time showing us aspects of these characters: Kitty pride was late to an important meeting; Emma Frost frightened her students with a computer hologram of a dreaded enemy in order to prove a point. But they are the characters most susceptible to change. They are relatively minor characters and most readers will tolerate variations. And by bringing Kitty Pride back into the comic, Mr. Whedon plays to his strength. He’s proven that he’s good at creating strong and interesting female characters and we see some of that with Kitty. I have never been terribly impressed with Kitty but I like the voice Mr. Whedon is developing for her. I also like the idea that Emma Frost, despite a recent defection from the “dark side”, still plays hard ball. There are hints of conflict in her relationship with Cyclops and I have more faith in Mr. Whedon’s ability to portray this sort of tension than many other comic writers.

But Wolverine and Cyclops are still the same characters they were twenty years ago. They exhibit the same characteristics, they rehash the same conflicts. Mr. Whedon did very little to change that. This is the biggest missed opportunity. I hoped to see Mr. Whedon take a page from Firefly and create a dynamic between these characters much like the one between Jayne and the Captain. I didn’t see that happen. I could have seen the same scene in a Chris Claremont book from 1983.

And there was little plot development at all in this issue. The heroes get together and talk. Someone claims to have found a cure for mutations (!) and some dude crashes a party. That’s pretty much it. Again, I hoped for more. Comics suffer from “decompression” these days, telling a story in five issues what once took twenty five pages to complete (with origins for both the good guys and the bad guys thrown in for good measure). I guess this trend can be attributed to the trade paperback phenomenon, where each monthly issue is merely a single chapter in a larger story that will be collected and repackaged at some later date. I have no problem with a larger story arc – it rewards loyal readers and gives the writer more room to tell a complex story. But I had hoped to see a return to an earlier approach to comic books, where a series of shorter tales add up to a larger plot. Mr Whedon did this so well in Buffy’s early seasons but he gives it a pass here.

However, I acknowledge that this is the trend in comics and I must accept it if I want to continue to enjoy the medium. I also acknowledge that Mr. Whedon had only twenty five pages or so to strut his stuff. Although I am saddened by the missed opportunities, I will continue to read the comic in order to see how he develops this story.