Books by author: Joss Whedon

I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan based on the Buffy and Firefly franchises, and I was a fan of the Uncanny X-Men (and spinoffs Alpha Flight and The New Mutants) back in the early-to-mid-eighties, so I suspect that I liked Whedon's take on the X-Men more than your average Whedon fan.

It should come as no surprise to any of Joss's fans that he finds a way to make the heart of the story arc be one of the not-so-powerful female characters from the X-Men universe: Kitty Pryde. Her story here is more compelling than those of the other mutants, and Whedon succeeds at giving her a bit of depth. The story covers insanely wide ground over the course of the four "volumes", and the premise is absurd (though no more than is usual for superhero comics), but it's good fun.

I liked this a lot better than the Buffy Season 8 comics. Fray takes place far in the future, with the first slayer being called since Buffy herself. That slayer is Melaka Fray, and her slayerhood is complicated by her family and her watcher stand-in in ways that Buffy never experienced. The story is slight but complete, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was on television, and I remain a huge fan of Joss Whedon's characters and writing. I had forgotten until recently that Whedon was writing "Season 8" of Buffy in comic book form, and I was happy to discover that the comic books have started to be collected into graphic-novel-esque volumes.

These comics are really only for true fans, and they do succeed at recapturing some of the great stylized dialogue that Whedon is famous for (when I read the dialogue, I effortlessly hear it in the voices of the actors). The plot line is a fairly weak and unnecessary follow-on to the televised seventh season.

Still, I enjoyed revisiting these characters and I've already pre-ordered Volume 5.

Another just-okay follow-on to the Buffy canon. It seems like the pop culture references are much more "of the microsecond" in the comics than they were in the TV show.