Astonishing X-Men

The X-Men have long been my favorite characters in comics. Yet I've had a hard time really appreciating the main X-books since about 2001, when Grant Morrison began his run on New X-Men. The plots were needlessly convoluted and the characters seemed to be alienated from each other, but the biggest reason for my dislike came down to his treatment of just two characters: Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Morrison took Cyclops, the X-Men's ultimate idealistic boy scout, and turned him into a wimp-ass wannabe bad boy. He took Jean, who had emerged from the shadow of the Phoenix entity in the 1990s to become a truly formidable leader, rebonded her to the Phoenix, and reduced her to the fanboy distortion of "that chick who dies a lot." And in the process, he tore apart their marriage, which I would still argue is the greatest love story in comics.

Now, I'm not saying there haven't been great X-Men stories told since Morrison's reign. But without Scott Summers and Jean Grey at the center of them - with Scott instead shacked up with Emma Frost, with whom he had a psychic affair before Jean's death - they just haven't been my X-Men.

Which kind of makes Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men live up to its name all the more. I've just finished reading it all, start to finish, for the second time, and I still don't hate it.
Joss immediately sets right a lot of what Morrison muddled. He puts the X-Men back in spandex, gets them back in the game of reaching out to the human community by being superheroes rather than holing up in the mansion and teaching mutant kids how much better they are than humans. He gives Cyclops his idealism back, and shows us the X-Men actually enjoying each others' company again (even as they wind up in fist-fights every other page). They're a family. An endlessly squabbling family that expects the world of one another, but what family doesn't?

What's more, the Whedon issues of Astonishing X-Men offer some of the finest visual storytelling in comics. The "camera angles," the intercutting between parallel scenes, the characters' body language and blocking, it's all brilliant. The scene where Colossus returns from the dead is a perfect example: the guards' bullets pass through Kitty Pryde and ping off something in the shadows; Colossus steps out; Kitty freezes, Colossus running right through her to take down the guards, but the view remains locked on Kitty and the shock on her face. It's perfect. I'd love to get my hands on some of the scripts, and really pick apart how much of this was planned by Whedon and how much was the genius of artist John Cassaday.

But the really weird part? When Joss is writing them, I don't even hate Scott & Emma as a couple. Don't get me wrong; I still hate how it started and the revisionist writers who try to suggest Scott & Jean were never good for one another. (Joss has Emma suggest it, but Scott clearly isn't buying in.) But Joss emphasizes two people with ridiculous cases of survivor's guilt - for different reasons, from different pasts - coming together, each seeing the other very differently from how they see themselves, and trying to be better together. It's almost kinda cool. I still want Jean to come back, I still want to see her and Scott put back together, but I don't have to hate the Scott/Emma relationship as a step along Scott's journey.

- JC