“I don’t need to destroy the myth all I want to do is make people care about these characters.” “His return to the printed page provides an added advantage: a genre-friendly audience guaranteed to stay the course.”įor Whedon’s first issue, drawn by John Cassaday, school’s back in session at Xavier’s mutant institute up in Westchester. “I’m an old-fashioned storyteller to the point where I’m almost pedantic in my structure and moralism,” he says. Whedon has settled on a similar back-to-basics approach.

Whedon’s predecessor on X-Men is scripter Grant Morrison, who spent years on comics like Animal Man, taking a third-rate DC superhero and giving him the uncomfortable awareness that he was a fictional character more recently, however, he has shifted toward writing cracking-good yarns. But the trend seems to be moving back to pure storytelling. But Whedon may be the first television executive producer to take on the task of writing comic books for a niche audience-an unusual gambit, but one that comes naturally to a creator who thinks of himself as a geek who made good.Īs every fanboy knows, comics have long since grown up from their juvenile origins, taking on a self-consciousness that could give Dave Eggers a run for his money. Granted, he’s hardly the first cultural figure to draw from the comics: Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay the characters in Jonathan Lethem’s books keep acquiring superpowers. “People in comics knew this so long ago, they completely deconstructed the superhero and built it up again.” Whedon seems to be doing a bit of the same to his own career path. “Superheroes are one of the central myths of the twentieth century,” Whedon says.

But even as the television networks began presenting their latest slate of reality vaudeville and Law & Order spinoffs, Whedon was busy planning his next project: not a TV pilot but a year’s worth of a comic book, Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men. Two years ago, writer-director Joss Whedon had three shows on the air: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly.

Astonishing x men joss whedon run