Astonished

[sigma7]

So one of my favorite recent comic book runs was Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's turn on Astonishing X-Men. It was quite the trip. You're not going to find many artists with the level of detail and depth Cassaday brings to the table, and Whedon's got a compelling passion for and awareness of the series and its legacy. They each have a downside or two -- some find Whedon's characters sound too similar, have disdain for a few particular plot twists he seems compelled to bring to every series he works on, and some of us could put our kids through college between Cassaday completing issues. But now that it's over and we're not clawing down the door to our LCS for the next issue, I think we can appreciate it all more.

Before Joss's 25 Astonishing issues, Grant Morrison (the delightful Scottish madman who gave us We3 and The Invisibles) took over New X-Men for a lengthy run, and while he saved most of his typical wide-eyed ideas for the last arc (set 150 years in the future), the duration of his run breathed new life into characters we'd given up on (Scott, Jean, even Emma Frost gets a new level of complexity and empathy) and added quite a few new wrinkles to the series mythology (Cassandra Nova, the Stepford Cuckoos, and the then-unthinkable Scott/Emma pairing) while subtly foreshadowing one hell of a revelation we all should've seen coming. Whedon doesn't quite serve so many screwballs with the established characters (except maybe Lockheed), and his few good fake-outs just aren't quite on the same level as Morrison's -- but they're not bad (except for maybe the identity of the second arc's antagonist, which is a conceit I still have trouble with), and he gives us Abigail Brand, for which I'll always be thankful.

The only reason I'm blathering about Whedon's Astonishing instead of Morrison's New X-Men is because the former has received the motion comic treatment. It's been tried before with other series (most notably Watchmen) and is not without virtue -- from what I could tell of watching the adaptation of Whedon's first arc, "Gifted," it seems verbatim (and panel-for-panel) from the comics, which is only occasionally jarring when referencing outside the history of this particular series (the state of Manhattan, Jean, the particular X-Man who appears suddenly in the fourth chapter). Otherwise understand that it's Joss Whedon dialogue, and if you're into that sort of thing, you should be quite happy. The first chapter's...uhm, not quite "animation," really, but its "movement," I guess, is pretty choppy (with no mouth movement whatsoever) -- later chapters have lip-synch and some interesting breathing-like effects on torsos that make it a bit more kinetic. The voice acting is...serviceable -- Emma's accent (or lack thereof) grates, but otherwise it's still better than Australian Wolverine or, for that matter, Halle Berry. And while "Gifted" is the first and only arc up at the moment, word is the three subsequent Whedon/Cassaday arcs, "Dangerous," "Torn," and "Unstoppable" are also getting the motion comic treatment, and I'm...curious as to how they'll turn out.

If you're just coming over from the movie timeline, well...things are a bit convoluted. Forget X-Men: The Last Stand (please). Scott and Jean married, but Scott drifted into having a psychic affair with Emma Frost (who is their contemporary and not a '60s-era character and trying to reform) -- before he could choose between Jean and Emma, Magneto turned Manhattan upside-down and killed Jean, only to be beheaded (yes, really) by Logan. Colossus (Kitty's boyfriend) died to stop a mutant-only virus from killing them all off. The Professor battled his genocidal long-lost twin sister (!) who he thought he strangled in the womb (!!) and has apparently absconded for parts unknown, leaving the school in the hands of Scott and Emma, who're now in a relationship. That's about all you need to know to delve into the motion comics, and really, as far as X-Men continuity goes, that's probably the best jumping-in point there will ever be. Yeesh.

Comments

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Not having seen this with my own eyes - more importantly, not having heard it yet - I wonder about the accent chosen for Emma. Someone once remarked that, being from the higher end of the wealth spectrum in Boston society, we should expect her accent to be not entirely unlike that of Dr. Winchester from M*A*S*H.

Wrong thinking? Or not?

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

That was more or less exactly what I was thinking. It's obvious from her word choice that there's something very distinctive in her speech, so I was thinking quasi-Bostonian, even faux-British, or just snide and refined. Didn't get any of those. I don't know if there was any attempt to distinguish her speech other than transliterating Whedon's speech patterns for her. Particularly her "I'm not Xavier, Scott," line, which sounded like it could be followed up with "...duh!" With all the work that Morrison and Whedon went through to rebuild her character, it's a disappointment that she's not more vocally realized.

The upside is that she wasn't as wooden as January Jones, but Stephen Hawking would've outperformed her.

Scott is Scott, he's...default. Kitty's okay. Logan's just a bit off, but Jackman's a hard act to follow. Hank took a little getting used to, but he's not quite as loquacious as Morrison made him to be (having been properly Whedonized), but there's a bit more depth to his delivery, especially given his very personal investment in the first arc.

[rainfletcher.livejournal.com]

Whedon's X-Men run... well, disappointed me, particularly with the way it ended. Considering the length of time between issues (which you touched upon so eloquently, above), each individual installment felt kind of empty to me. Maybe as someone who cut his teeth on Claremontian dialogues (and monologues), I wasn't ready for an X-Men issue to be over as quickly as those felt. I felt like the filler-to-plot ratio was very high sometimes, and it grated at me.

The way he wrapped it up, giving us not one but TWO classic Whedonisms (kill the one you love, sex equals death) kind of poisoned the well for me, and I've never felt the urge to go back and re-read.

Maybe the semi-motion aspect will make it more palatable. Worth a try, at least to see how this technology is developing.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

The end didn't surprise me -- knowing Joss, we could see it coming miles away -- but it did disappoint me. Not hugely, though, because of the huge loophole involved (and I'm not shocked that said loophole's been invoked, just that they invoked it so quickly), and knowing how that ends helps reconsumption, I've found. I was more surprised by the one Chekhov's gun that didn't go off (Armor), but I guess there's half a dozen X-writers now who have that in their hands.

Whedon's dialogue is almost anti-Claremontian, so yeah, I can see how jarring that is. And I definitely agree on filler -- "Unstoppable" was roughly three issues longer than it needed to be. But hearing that dialogue is still oddly satisfying in a way I wasn't expecting. It's not a perfect translation by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm glad it exists.