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Underground > Comic Books >

Astonishing X-Men

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Matthew Fluxington

22:40 / 22.02.04

Maybe Emma thinks it is sexy on him.

23:05 / 22.02.04

Yeah, Suedehead’s got it, at the top of the page. Whedon’s bold take on Scott is that without Jean around, 30 years’ worth of suppressed pervyness is bound to gush forth. Clearly, his first act as headmaster is to insist all the kids at his school wear flimsy skintight costumes like this, all the time. And the teachers have to set an example.

No longer does Xavier’s dream hold sway, it’s “Summers’ dream” now, and it’s a bit wrong. Cyclops as colossal pervert. He really wears those ruby sunglasses all the time so no-one can see where he’s looking. Do that too much and you’ll go blind/spurt optic beams out of your eye-holes. Grant predicted all this in Doom Force, you know.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

23:45 / 24.02.04

Part of the script. This is going to be so very terrible. Kitty is just plain being written as buffy, and it sounds arse.

00:16 / 25.02.04

Dear God. Skipping it. Big time.

00:36 / 25.02.04

"Kitty doesn't look happy, therefore Emma is."

ahh, the subtleties of characterization.

that aside, i don't know if it looks so horrible. well, alright it does, but i might still give it a try.

01:17 / 25.02.04

I don't think it looks so bad, and this probably isn't the best page to judge his writing by. In addition, as Cameron Stewart says on MillarWorld, most Whedon scripts are a lot more detailed, which means that this is more a transcript of the page, than an actual script excerpt.

And, it's targetting the people who read Marvel Previews, probably the sort of fans who are loving the return to spandex. That said, it is a little bit too jokey, in the same way that Buffy was at times. However, I'm waiting for the finished product before making a judgment.

01:23 / 25.02.04

Eek. Black leather is making people nervous? WEAK. At least we got a pathetic stab at keeping the costume switch in-character... yeah, this really doesn't hearten me at all. Sigh.

I think I'm just gonna start buying back issues of X-MEN with my repurposed NEW X-MEN cash.

Regrettable Juvenilia

09:44 / 25.02.04

Actually, I'm impressed that Whedon's thought about this enough to cover so many of the issues that people have been speculating on after seeing that photo - like the fact that Scott's in charge now, and he is the kind of person who thinks the X-Men should dress like that; or that Logan hates the tights but will ultimately do whatever Scott tells him; or the fact that after the Morrison run the X-Men/X-Corp name is mud (again) and it might be a good idea to disassociate the new school & team from what happened in the last three years (or so).

13:16 / 25.02.04

"I'm not a fighter like you guys." wtf?

The girl is practically a ninja. She's whooped more ass than Clubber Lang, fool.

Matthew Fluxington

13:32 / 25.02.04

I don't know, I like it. I like that it's somewhat veering into X-Statix territory, but earnest.

I like Kitty Pryde, too, so I'm glad to see her being used in this way. She's no longer the new kid, but she's still a new person in the group dynamic and isn't sure of why she's there. I think Whedon has a good idea of who that character is, and she'll probably be the focus of the series.

She may sound Buffy-ish to you, but Buffy and Willow always seemed very Kitty Pryde to me, like the character was split in two.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

13:55 / 25.02.04

I think this is looking pretty good. Very much Scott's X-men. I like that a whole lot. I mean, I liked the x-men before the new uniforms too... I'm sure I can make the amazing effort to like them be-costumed again (condom suit tbc). I don't see what people are moaning about so much, here. It all makes sense, at least there's a reasoning behind all the changes.

Matthew Fluxington

14:01 / 25.02.04

I agree - at least there's a logical reasoning for the return to costumes. I also like that Scott is stressing the rescue squad thing again.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

14:29 / 25.02.04

Yep. File me among the "I Like This" Squad.

There are a few clunker lines in there, but hey, C'est Whedon. The way I see it, for most writers (unless you practically invented the modern franchise *cough*Claremont*cough*), writing the X-Men is something you've been dreaming of most of your life. I bet Joss had been sitting on that line of Scott's, "I haven't looked anyone in the eye since I was fifteen", since he was fifteen.

That's why I like the new trend in Marvel (now spanning all the way to DC) towards more contained arcs by differing creative teams. It's also pretty obvious that this method, a concentrated story telling that pretty much stands on its own continuity wise (Bendis/Maleev, Morrison), is much better than hacks just keeping the wall holes spackled (Austen, et al).

This is Whedon's dream team (and you know Colossus was on his list too. Everyone loves Colossus. Damn you, Scott Lobdell.) and his dream team wears costumes.

I'm with Fly, though. At least he bothered to explain it.

14:35 / 25.02.04

I have to say, the dialogue did a bit to console me.

Sad as it is, I've been fished into watching Buffy with my roommate. Once I got over my knee-jerk antipathy I found I really started to like it. Whedon's got some obvious excesses as a writer but he does know character, and drama, and he can be funny.

Something I think is interesting is that, in totally different ways, both Whedon and Morrisson are "children of Claremont".

The Mozz once wrote (in back of his first Doom Patrol) that he aimed his superhero writing to try and escape from/destroy the Claremont-Byrne dominant paradigm which was so universal in early '90's comics. So for me it was interesting to see him come full circle and end up delivering a more faithful working on newXmen than anything I've seen since 1988.

Whedon, on t'other hand, obviously thinks that CSC is the bee's knees. Buffy is one of the most overt transcriptions of comic book approaches to TV that I've ever seen. (Admittedly, I don't watch a whole lot of TV any more, but I'll stand by this.) In particular, there was a whole "Dark Willow" arc where she gets super-powerful and loses control, etc.

At this point, I'm prepared to say that I think Whedon's writing on Astonishing will be Interesting. And I doubt that I'll find the rest of Cassaday's art on the title as unappealing as the image above.

That's not strong praise, but it's early days yet.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

14:39 / 25.02.04

Yeah, I can dig that, Benjamin!! This is totally - and unashamedly - Joss writing the X-men of his childhood. The characters he remembers from then. But you know what - I liked them too!

I'm pretty fond of Beast's last costume line.

15:02 / 25.02.04

I wanted very much to love this, but this dialogue seems kind of cheesy to me. Too much 'aren't we clever' witty banter and a kind of lame, in my opinion, reason for bringing the spandex back.

How do we know that page of script leaked on MillarWorld is even real, by the way? Some guy just said "Someone just sent this to me".

Matthew Fluxington

15:23 / 25.02.04

But clever banter and subverted cheesiness is what made Joss Whedon famous! Why should he drop his winning formula/creative voice?

16:57 / 25.02.04

I really like that page of script... but Logan still looks like a knob in that jumpsuit... and it's more him than anyone else... I just cannot stand the friggin' mask. But other than that, I'm very happy (big surprise this is Whedon). Even the Penis-suit is growing on me...

17:04 / 25.02.04

Clever banter is OK, as long as its well-written clever banter. This came off as mostly bad writing to me, which is different than fun cheesiness. Also, after Morrison's very intelligent and fun-but-not-cheesy X-Men, I find it hard to envision an over-the-top campy X-Men. It does not follow that all dialogue that is clever banter is necessarily good dialogue. And 'cheesy' is a very relative term - there's fun cheesy and bad cheesy. This scene, to me, comes off more like bad cheesy. Buffy (which I really enjoyed) was rarely bad cheesy, and even when it was, the tone of the style was more tongue-in-cheek than X-Men should be, I think.

Also, who's to say we should make the X-Men sound like Xander and Giles (or the cast of FRIENDS, for that matter) and such? I like the clever stuff and humor, but it seems like he's just lifted the speech patterns and character styles from Buffy and pasted them right onto X-Men. I thought that as a writer he wouldn't do that quite so blatantly.

That's again, if this script page is even geniune. Remember, it was just emailed to someone with no discernible source.

Although I did like the bit where Scott tells Emma to shut up - after months of Emma trying to get Scott to come out of his shell and be more agressive and assertive and confident, that rebuke is probably a hell of a turn-on for her, the kinky little minx!

17:45 / 25.02.04

>>>That's again, if this script page is even geniune. Remember, it was just emailed to someone with no discernible source.<<<

It is real. I picked up the Previews catalogue today and the script excerpt is in there, word for word.

19:04 / 25.02.04

Wow -- thanks for the verificaiton, Cam. I figured it was real, but in this day & age, you never know...

15:21 / 26.02.04

Last night's ANGEL shows what good Joss Whedon writing is like. But to be fair, this is only 2 pages of script, or just 1. I'll totally give this book a chance -- the only Reloaded book I'm psyched about. Though that JC sketch of Cyclops looks pretty boring...

13:31 / 28.02.04

but it seems like he's just lifted the speech patterns and character styles from Buffy and pasted them right onto X-Men.

Hmm, not sure about this. Sure, it's chatty, sure it has a certain light humour, but it seems to me that just about every one of those lines develops character. Logan is blunt and too the point, Emma is sadistic and ascerbic, Scott is all business and Hank is playful. As for Ms Pryde, well, perhaps Joss is more interested in the young, brave, caring girl-with-a-pet (bring back Lockheed!) Kitty than the ninja ass-kicking incarnation. I know I am.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

13:47 / 28.02.04

Spot on, that man. I don't get the fuss and moaning.

17:10 / 28.02.04

It's the comics internet, dude.

08:20 / 29.02.04

have to see what it looks like wi pics but oh no so far.
problem is perhaps his penmanship was thrust too deep into the zeitgeist's solar anus, as of a year or three ago. needs to change his stylee else appear tired, as does in this admittedly tiny excerpt.

with this i can tell i am being written at and it's annoying. felt like i received a letter in the post two weeks ago telling me what the beast's last line was going to be. whedon's proved he can't write boy-gay many times, and hasn't managed to do so here either.

08:28 / 29.02.04

WTF are u talking about, dude???????

08:59 / 29.02.04

well duuuuuuuude i was reiterating a point given by others earlier that this feels too much like dialogue that could have come from an episode of buffy. this was fine for said tv show (usually) but here it feels like whedon's trademark dialogue is being pushed at the expense of every single other element of the comic. (qualified by the fact that so far i've seen one page of dialog and a couple of snatches of art that while hardly driving me wild with excitement haven't pissed me off as much as some.)

i admire much of whedon's writing (and directing) for TV and will definitely be buying at least the first three issues of this comic but feel that here the transition between media hasn't quite been managed. (his other big comic fray was alright but had a few problems, and the strip he wrote that blither stewart drew recently was really rather good indeed.)

and the beast, disappointingly for me, has been given the campy andrew role, which means he waits for the end of the scene and then says something funny about clothes (if it was andrew it might have been a comment about rpgs or something - role-playing games not rocket-propelled grenades). this unfortunately seems as far as whedon's characterisation of gay(ish) males can go.

and while i'm here, how would being able to walk on air and turn intangible and back at will be no good in a fight?

09:15 / 29.02.04

I don't think one X-Man has been written "out of character" in the excerpt... it really just seems like u are projecting some disdain towards Whedon without justifiably backing up your claims. But continue to bash, I care not...

10:11 / 29.02.04

well there's international superhero shadow ninja kitty pryde saying 'i'm not a fighter like you guys', that's a bit "out of character" (whose quotes are they?). [if i wanted to be a real arsehole about it i'd also say that kitty has never seen a danger room as primitive as the one she describes] and summers says 'hank's as articulate as anything', which sounds like something i'd say, not something he'd say. but i'm not concerned with consistency of character, this is an open-ended medium where the characters shouldn't remain static for long. if i'm projecting disdain, it's because i think this dialogue sounds like i've heard it before in much of whedon's other work. and fear that more like it might distract from the action/adventure elements of the comic, much as it distracted from those elements in the last few series of his most successful tv show.

this is't bashing, just commenting. bashing has more swear words.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

16:04 / 29.02.04

The valley girl speak was one of buffy's worst points, especialy after the humor dried up and it all got really angsty. It's poor dialouge, plain and simple. Hats off to Josh for making Kitty even more of an annoying character!

18:58 / 29.02.04

I have to say that the script there looked pretty terrible in that it basically seemed to be dismantling most of the good work that Grant did while leaving blocks of the bad stuff. I mean, the costumed X-men eras really didn't interest me that much - they were pretty good around the Fall of the Mutants / Mutant Massacre stuff but I always thought of the X-men that I grew up with as much more of the real-world - much more weird people than as super-heroes. Their world was much more soap-opera-ish, a universe rather than a battle of the week, and the stuff they had to deal with was much more allegiance-based and aspirational rather than battle-based and combative. The x-men weren't really super-heroes in that sense for years, only really becoming so again when Jim Lee and X-men #1 happened again when they started becoming a kind of proto-Ultimates (before descending into Avenger style tosh).

That enormous move that Grant did - not super-heroes, but rescue workers - was a return to the spirit of the beginning of the X-men and recontextualised to make them actually part of a world full of politics and division and confusion in which the institutions and the on-the-ground perception of mutants was as important as who they fought. I don't WANT scott to say that they should look like Super-heroes again. And the black leather thing? Well that's where I think Whedon really demonstrates how he's missed the point. Black leather is sexy and slutty and a bit dodgy. But they didn't WEAR black leather, did they? They wore kevlar and impacted polyester - tough practical real-world materials. So far - I'm very disappointed.

21:31 / 29.02.04

Well I think the pants and jackets were, at least, leather...

10:32 / 01.03.04

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm pretty sure they were made of ink.

13:56 / 01.03.04

>> with this i can tell i am being written at and it's annoying.

That's exactly how I felt.

And I don't think it's fair to dismiss reasonable criticisms or different opinions of something by saying "Aw, it's the comics internet, everyone loves to bash stuff." The internet isn't any more or less bashing than the average movie critic, or the average group of friends after they see a movie. The internet only gives more people a chance to voice their opinions, and of course some people will voice them in an obnoxious way.

I second the Buffy/potentially Kitty valley-girl speak. But at least it made sense for Buffy, that's what kind of character she was. Although I do confess I am more interested in spunky young-sounding Kitty than older, more mature ass-kicking Kitty (even though it seems odd to take away a character's maturity and growth over the years for the sake of a style or a preferred incarnation of a character, though this has been done before to great effect, sometimes).

Whatever the case may be, these pages made me wince a little, but of course I'm going to get the series. It would have to suck pretty hard for me to drop it after I give the first few issues a try.

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