The End Of An Astonishing Run That Changed Our Lives

After 24 regular issues and a Giant Sized finale (cover shown here), Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's extremely entertaining run on Astonishing X-Men is now complete. How significant of an impact did this series have on me, personally? Well, there's a bit of a story there.

To begin with, I only bought the first issue, back in 2004, because the great John Cassaday - of Planetary fame - was providing the artwork, and I'd buy almost anything he drew. I'd largely avoided anything X-Men-related up to that point, going back to the Speculative 90s when the core Uncanny X-Men title exploded into a franchise (and became virtually unreadable in the process). I'd dropped back into the X-Men Universe briefly for Grant Morrison's Uncanny run, which I enjoyed, but that was about the extent of my interest over the past 15 years or so. Because of that, I didn't really care about the characters or the writer of Astonishing X-men, but just wanted to see the gorgeous artwork.

So there I was, reading issue # 1, and finding myself pleasantly surprised by how streamlined the continuity was - you didn't need to know much of anything about recent events to follow what was going on - and how clever the writing was. This Whedon guy really "got" the characters who I'd once cared about, those being Cyclops, the Beast, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. And his plotting actually surprised me once or twice, in a good way. Bad surprises occur when something happens that's completely out-of-character or improbable... good surprises are the ones where you didn't see it coming but then you kick yourself immediately because you really should have! And that was the experience I kept having with Astonishing X-Men, alongside the beautiful artwork of John Cassaday.

So how is that significant? Well, the comic series made me want to read more by this Whedon fellow, and of course I quickly realized/remembered that he wasn't normally a comic book writer. On the contrary, he usually wrote (and masterminded) TV shows! Tammy was already a die-hard Buffy fan by this point, but I'd avoided that franchise and had even missed out on the short-run Firefly series. However, Serenity was about to come out, and it was getting a lot of positive buzz, and so I took a leap of faith and borrowed PeterJ's DVD collection of Firefly. To say that Vicki and I were quickly hooked would be an understatement! And when we went to the theatre to see Serenity, a few months later, we were blown away!

Eventually, we followed this path on to seven seasons of Buffy on DVD (thanks to Tammy) as well as the current Season Eight comic series, and have at least tried to follow suit with Angel (though we're kind of stalled in Season Three at the moment). Not only that, but I'm looking forward to Dollhouse, Whedon's latest TV project, which is set to debut in January. That's a lot Whedonverse entertainment that's come our way, in large part because of me picking up Astonishing X-Men for the John Cassaday pictures! How's that for a life-changing (in a good way) comic book experience?

As for Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men itself, it was an appropriately large and grand conclusion to a terrific series. Whedon brought Peter Rasputin back from the dead (he died after I'd quit X-Men comics), re-united him with his one true love, Kitty Pryde, and then stuck the dagger right back into our hearts by consigning Kitty to a quasi-death of her own. Whedon also introduced a very improbable love interest for the blue, furry Beast in the form of a green-haired femme fatale, despite the fact that Henry "Beast" McCoy had recently indicated that he thought he might be gay (kind of the opposite of what Joss pulled with Buffy in the March issue of her Season Eight comic series... in Whedon's mind, perhaps the closet comes with a revolving door?)

I think these 25 issues will be considered one of the great X-Men runs of all-time, for several reasons:

• both the writer and artist were at the top of their game, every issue
• the same creative team did the entire run (no fill-ins)
• the series managed to operate outside the happenings of the rest of the Marvel Universe (Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc) and therefore there's a certain timeless feel to it that should still hold up decades from now
• when other characters were brought in, such as Spidey, the Avengers, the FF and others in the finale, they were written and drawn so well that you can't help but wish these guys were doing their series!
• everything you need to know is right there on the page, with no tie-ins or spin-offs to worry about

I don't normally buy hardcovers of series that I already own, but just as I plan to do with Planetary - if DC ever publishes an Absolute version of it - and have already done with Watchmen, Sandman, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Kingdom Come and a few select others, I think I'd fork over the cash to own this run in that format. It was just that good!