Joss Whedon: The Biography (46 page)

Joss finally gave Quesada his response: “Can I take a day or two to think about it?” Quesada was floored that Joss would even take the time to think about it. He told him to take a week.

Joss was surely tempted. This was his chance to produce official stories for the comics publisher that had so consumed him since he was young. But when Joss looked at his schedule—
Buffy
and
Angel
on the air and
Firefly
in the pipeline—he was forced to gracefully decline. Wellknown writer Grant Morrison picked up the X-Men run instead, but Quesada realized that his instinct to draft Joss into the Marvel family had been a smart one.

Now, in 2003, Quesada was doing a signing at San Diego Comic-Con, when he learned that Grant Morrison had publicly announced that he was leaving his
New X-Men
series. Morrison hadn’t discussed it with him previously, and as Quesada sat there disappointed, trying to put on a good face for the fans lined up to see him, he was consumed with what he would do next. He tried to remember if he had Joss’s number, and wondered if Joss would consider writing for the X-Men again. “I wish Joss Whedon were here in San Diego. I’d pull him aside and talk to him,” Quesada remembers thinking.

“I swear, I looked up and there in front of me on the line was Joss Whedon with his hand extended, saying, ‘Hey, man, how are you doing?’” Quesada recalls. “I didn’t see Joss walk up to the table, so I assume he just metamorphosed or transported there—whatever sort of Joss Whedon magic contraption that he has at home, as brilliant as he is.” Quesada, shocked, put his arm around Joss and pulled him behind the booth. He explained his predicament and asked if Joss would want to write an X-Men series now. Joss again asked for time to think about it. “Then I went back to the table and started thinking, ‘Gee, I wish Angelina Jolie were here at San Diego Con.’ I looked up and she wasn’t there.” Apparently that’s a special kind of Joss magic.

With
Buffy
and
Firefly
off his plate, Joss now had time on his hands. A couple days later, he let Quesada know that he was in. He’d get a new outlet for his storytelling skills, and Marvel would get a writer who might attract new readers to the franchise—whether it was people who were fans of Joss or those simply looking for a fresh voice who hadn’t written for Marvel before. The initial plan was for Joss to write for one of two existing X-Men series,
Uncanny X-Men
or Morrison’s
New X-Men
, but the more they got into the project, the more they realized how special
Joss’s run was going to be. Ultimately, they decided to give him his own series, and so
Astonishing X-Men
, a title that had been used for limited runs in 1995 and 1999, was born again.

“What Joss is popular for and what people admire him for is his ability to take characters and breathe life into them, to make the characters feel like they’re people that you and I know, and because of that, we get to care about them so much,” says Mike Marts, the regular group editor for the X-Men series when Joss signed on. “Then he brings these characters that we’ve fallen in love with on these exciting journeys with huge ups and huge downs and twists that we never expect. He did that so well on
Angel
and
Buffy
, and then to apply that to the X-Men—that’s great.”

Marts was already a huge fan of
Buffy, Angel
, and
Firefly
. “I loved his writing. I loved the way that he ran his shows and, without a doubt, he was someone I would have loved to work with,” he says. “But being realistic, I always thought it was an impossibility, just knowing that he was a Hollywood guy, that his schedule was extremely demanding and he was always working on new projects. So when it happened, it was really just like a dream come true.”

Joss, in turn, was an X-Men fan who had been keeping up with Morrison’s run on
New X-Men
. He didn’t see a need to make dramatic alterations in the continuing storylines, and most of the characters he wanted to work with were already a part of
New X-Men
. In addition, Marvel asked if he could find the right storyline to bring back Peter Rasputin, a.k.a. Colossus, a Russian mutant with the power to turn himself into steel. The character had died in a 2001 storyline when he sacrificed himself to stop the spread of a deadly plague roaring through the mutant world. Joss also wanted to include Kitty Pryde, a young mutant who can phase through solid matter and often serves as the moral center of the X-Men, but she was starring at the time in a different ongoing series,
X-Treme X-Men
.

Joss has often discussed how much his creation and development of Buffy owed to Kitty. “If there’s a bigger influence … I don’t know what it was,” he said. “She was an adolescent girl finding out she has great power and dealing with it.” Unsurprisingly, now that he was in the Marvel fold, he had a specific story in mind for the character.

“We started talking not only about how we could revive Colossus, but also about how we could separate Kitty Pryde from
X-Treme X-Men
,” Marts says. That series was being penned by renowned writer
Chris Claremont, who had started at Marvel in 1969 and wrote the
Uncanny X-Men
series from 1975 to 1991, the longest run of any writer. He cocreated a number of beloved X-Men characters, including Rogue, Emma Frost, and Gambit. Paul Levitz, who served as president and publisher of DC Comics, said that the complexity of Claremont’s stories “played a pivotal role in assembling the audience that enabled American comics to move to more mature and sophisticated storytelling, and the graphic novel.”

Joss was a huge fan of Claremont—and the feeling was mutual. Claremont agreed to relinquish the character of Kitty. “It was fun to see these guys admire each other’s work and then to see the baton passed with Kitty Pryde,” Marts says, “Chris wrapping up the storyline that he had with her in
X-Treme X-Men
, and then Joss moving on to doing something great with her in
Astonishing X-Men.
”

John Cassaday, an artist known for his work on
Captain America, Hellboy
, and
Uncanny X-Men
, was assigned to
Astonishing X-Men
, and he and Joss developed a wonderful working relationship. Still, Marts was concerned about how clean Joss’s scripts would be and how kindly he’d take to editing. When someone has written primarily in other mediums, it can be difficult to learn how to write for comics. But Marts needn’t have worried about the man who had been reading comics for over thirty years, who had made all his writers study Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics
, and who, perhaps most important, hated to rewrite so much that he would wait until he had the story exactly the way he wanted it in his head before putting it to paper.

“When Joss’s scripts came in, they were so pristine,” Marts says. “I would look for things to try to change, but I couldn’t find them. He was so meticulous with his scripts that I don’t think we ever had a second draft—unless Joss, somewhere along the way, decided that there was a better way to pull off a certain scene or a certain moment. The scripts came in and they were near perfect.”

Nick Lowe, then–assistant editor under Marts, remembers a particularly frantic time when Cassaday was about a day away from finishing an issue and they desperately needed a script. The next day, he got a fax with handwritten pages—Joss’s computer had crashed and he didn’t have one to use, so he’d written the script out in longhand. “The craziest thing was that while the handwriting wasn’t the neatest, it was
really
clean,” he says. “So he either did a whole handwritten draft or he just had it all
in his head exactly how he wanted. There were only a handful of things scratched out on that whole thing. It was nuts.”

From December 2003 to February 2004, Joe Quesada teasingly denied the “rumors” that Joss was taking over the X-Men series. Then, on February 18, Marvel announced that Joss and Cassaday would launch the new
Astonishing X-Men
, to the great excitement of Whedonverse fans.

Joss’s first
Astonishing X-Men
arc, “Gifted,” introduced the idea of a “mutant cure.” It explored a very simple but very profound premise: “What if somebody had a cure for your being different? Would you take it?” The premiere issue hit the street on May 26, 2004.

Kitty Pryde was a core member of the X-Men team from the first issue, and shortly thereafter it was revealed that Colossus wasn’t dead. Joss ensured that the storyline in which the beloved character was resurrected was emotionally driven and character-centric. Each issue still featured a lot of action, but Marts felt that the strength in Joss’s run was how he handled the relationships between the characters. Readers immediately felt the love and affection Joss had for them. “More than the plots themselves,” says Marts, “when people talk about
Astonishing X-Men
and his run on it, that’s mostly what people remember—that it was a time where we fell in love with these characters again and we cared for them. We laughed and cried along with them.

“That’s exactly what a publisher and editor is looking for: someone like Joss with a great creative vision to come in and to breathe new life into these characters that we all love and to do unexpected things with them and to take chances with them and to really bring the readers on this journey where hopefully we get some laughs and tears, some anger, some frustration—but in the end, this feeling that, wow, we accomplished this great journey together with these characters and we’re so satisfied with the story.”

Nick Lowe was impressed by how Joss was able to service preexisting character arcs and hit “fan buttons,” while at the same time he injected a lot of new characters and new life into the X-Men’s world. “Joss’s run was a pitch-perfect mix of old and new that no one before him had accomplished,” he says. “He played with the Kitty Pryde / Colossus relationship, messed with the Danger Room, continued the Cyclops / Emma
Frost relationship, but he and John Cassaday also created Breakworld and S.W.O.R.D., which are still big parts of the Marvel U. And Agent Brand, the head of S.W.O.R.D., is still one of my favorite characters in the Marvel U.”

IGN.com
called Joss’s first run the “best X-Men title published in over a decade” and praised his ability to write believable team dynamics while letting each character shine in his or her own unique way.
Astonishing X-Men
won the prestigious Will Eisner Award, the “Oscars for the comics industry,” for Best Continuing Series in 2006.

But his tenure was not without its criticism—mostly for its delays. Joss’s contract with Marvel was to produce twelve issues in one year. But starting with issue #6, they started coming out every month and a half, pushing the final issues to September 2005 (issue #11 came out two weeks after #12).
Astonishing X-Men
started a new arc in February 2006, which was not as well received as “Gifted.” Marts left Marvel for rival DC Comics in August 2008, while Joss and Cassaday continued on the project through issue #24, ending their run on January 23, 2008.

Joss had breezed into his
Astonishing X-Men
run with his own fan base built up over three television series, but with some wondering whether his interest and ability would translate to the pages of a comic book. When he left, he’d proven himself in yet another medium—and paved the way for future forays into the Marvel universe.

By late 2003, a year after its cancellation, Joss was still fighting for
Firefly
. Although fan campaigns hadn’t succeeded in getting the series renewed, the community sent a stronger message with their wallets, when the
Firefly
DVD set was released on December 3, 2003. Fox hadn’t even been sure they were going to bring the series to DVD at all; prior to that point, few series had been released on home video if they hadn’t at least lasted a full season. But the studio took a chance on the release, and as the numbers started coming in, it found that the fans were buying the DVDs in droves. They stepped up to support Joss and his
Firefly
team, jumping at the chance to finish the line from “The Message”: “When you can’t run, you crawl, and when you can’t crawl—when you can’t do that …” “You find someone to carry you.” The Browncoats were carrying
Firefly
home.