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Fray
Read Fray. Just do it. You finished? This book is absolutely salivating for a sequel, no? This is one of those comic books that you tear through once and then read again as soon as you finish. Really, I am aching for this series to somehow be continued. Joss Whedon says he will be returning to this world, and I am waiting with bated breath.
Taking place in a future Buffyverse, Fray is about a vampire slayer (duh). She seems to be the only one, which makes you wonder where all those chicas that Willow magically deputized went. Here, the vampires are known as lurks, there are demons of a future kind, and there are no watchers. Or they’re crazy. Melaka Fray is a thief who likes to practice her extreme rappelling skills on and off of futuristic buildings. She has a cop sister and a dead brother—a brother she kinda sorta got killed with her slayerish impetuosity. I’d tell you more but I don’t want to spoil the set-up for you. In the intro to the book I read, Joss Whedon, with typical humility, describes his version of the future as a sort of mish-mash of your typical future-stuff—flying cars, weird mutants, etc. But it is a sturdy little world, and it doesn’t feel derivative, and it supports the fantastic story very well. What more can I say? Read it now.
Whedon wears his love of the comic book world on his sleeve. He had fanboys and girls salivating with the idea of a Whedon-penned Wonder Woman, which has since fallen through and might be the biggest tragedy in the entire history of Hollywood. Aside from X-Men 3, I guess. And the Fantastic Four, but who expected good movies out of that franchise? The closest the Fantastic Four ever came to being readable was in the Ultimate Fantastic Four.
Speaking of which, wasn’t Ellen Page a great choice for Kitty Pryde? Too bad such a good casting choice was lost in that morass of mediocrity. And speaking of Kitty Pryde (who is my favorite X-character of all time), Whedon writes her wonderfully for his run on the X-Men, Astonishing X-Men. John Cassaday’s artwork for this book is on the absolutely breathtaking range of the standard comic book art rainbow.
He also has writing duties on The Runaways, the book about a group of kids who find out their parents are supervillains. Among the original characters are a disaffected Daria-type whose time-travelling parents left her a telepathic dinosaur, a little girl who is stronger than Wolverine and insists on the name Princess Power (there’s a running joke where she keeps trying to tell the older kids about her newly emerging superpowers and they keep thinking she’s talking about the onset of her period), and a goth girl who, hilariously, has to cut herself to make her magic staff appear. Among the new characters are a super-hero obsessed robot (the truest of the true believers), who is an unwitting robot sleeper agent—shades of Boomer!, and a Skrull with some major gender issues. This is a book I started to read as a guilty pleasure. If I had read anything else by Brian K. Vaughan at the time, I wouldn’t have been surprised when it grew into one of the best books Marvel has to offer. Whedon is a worthy successor to the title. Let’s hope that he’ll continue to contribute his unique sensibility to the comic book world. He has a real understanding of the form, consistently perfect pacing, and very well-thought out action sequences. Add that to his well-known ability to create complex, ever-evolving characters, pretty much any book with Whedon’s name on it is worth a go. I’ll link to all of the Runaway books, since my favorite character is out of commission by the time Whedon got on board.
As for the new Buffy books, I haven’t read them, since I’ve been in Asia for the past two years. I was never a fan of the original ones, but they didn’t really have the Whedon touch. The curious can find them here. You know I’ll be reading them when I get back to L.A.
If you are interested in his blogosphere thoughts, you can go to http://whedonesque.com/
If you live in L.A., go to http://www.hideho.com.
Tags: astonishing x-men, brian k. vaughan, buffy, fray, joss whedon, runaways