Joss Whedon: The Biography (54 page)

“I really kept
Goners
at bay because of
Wonder Woman
. There’s also a lot of … there’s personal stuff that I’m not interested in talking about that was difficult,” he said in August 2007. “There’s also wonderful stuff that
was difficult, which was my children. I had to create a system whereby I could get a full day’s work [done] and still be the father that I want to be.”

It felt like it would be just a matter of time until
Goners
moved out of development and into production. But the rewrite he turned in to Universal later that year “was not incredibly well-received,” he said. So with his major-studio projects failing or stalling and no television series on the horizon, Joss starting thinking about developing “a real production company” that could create and produce smaller projects independently.

“I’m tired of not telling stories,” he said. “It’s really hard to get on television and birthing any television show is the most painful thing imaginable. Once you have one, you love it so much you forget, so you try to birth another one. Much like the female body…. Right now, the thought of trying to get a TV show off the ground is a little daunting. But the thought of making things that are smaller, a little more streamlined and a little more indie, so that I don’t have to spend three and a half years telling every story. It doesn’t feel like who I am. I feel like there are too many stories to tell.”

He added, “That’s part of why I’ve been working in comics so much, because the turnaround is so quick.”

By 2007, Joss was entering his final year as steward of Marvel Comics’
Astonishing X-Men
series, but his work as a comic book writer was far from over. For his next project, Joss returned to the defining hero of his career, four years after her television swan song. On March 14, Dark Horse Comics released
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
.

This was not the first time that Buffy had fought her way through the panels of a comic book. Dark Horse had premiered a monthly
Buffy
comic in 1998, initially without much involvement by Joss or his writers. At the time, it was rare for a television scribe to work on a tie-in comic while the show was still on the air. In fact, Dark Horse had obtained the license through Fox, not Mutant Enemy, and the series’ editor, Scott Allie, initially knew little about the program it was based on. As time went on, however, writers from the show such as Doug Petrie and Jane Espenson began to work on the comic, and it started to feel more in line with the show. With the success of these crossovers, bringing series writers into the comics fold became more common in Dark Horse’s tie-in properties.

When Joss was developing the spin-off series
Angel
, he approached Dark Horse with the idea of doing another tie-in comic, and this time he wanted to be more involved. Scott Allie met with several Mutant Enemy writers, including Joss and Doug Petrie, to discuss what a comic for the series should be. By this point Allie had a much better understanding of the Buffyverse, so he was able to strike up a good rapport with the shows’ creator. Their meeting opened the door to a lot more interaction between Joss and Dark Horse.

Next, Allie and Joss met to discuss doing a comics series centered around the Vampire Slayer Faith. He had a specific story that he wanted to tell—and he wanted to write it himself. He also had a particular artist
he wanted to work with. They discussed it off and on for a little while, until Joss decided that he wanted to work on a new idea instead: a futuristic
Buffy
spin-off called
Fray
.

The series follows a Slayer named Melaka Fray who lives in twenty-third-century Manhattan. The city, not unlike the 1970s New York Joss grew up in, is crime-ridden and dangerous, but it has also been taken over by mutant mobsters. Fray is a young thief working for Gunther, a mutant boss who’s willing to accept any and every job. Much like the ragtag crew of
Firefly
, Gunther and his crooks do what they need to do to get by in a harsh and unfair world. Fray accepts her lot in life until she, like a certain blonde cheerleader hundreds of years earlier, learns that she comes from a long line of Slayers.

Joss picked artist Karl Moline for the series. They were both very early in their comics careers, and thus there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion as they created a brand-new world with all-new characters. “Karl would give me thumbnails and we would go over them because there were certain things I was looking for specifically,” he said. “But I loved what he came up with.” The series was first published in 2001 and concluded in August 2003, with Joss’s TV writing causing publishing delays. Joss has stated a number of times that he has plans to one day return to the world of Fray—beyond the time-travel story that would see Fray and Buffy cross paths as part of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
.

By the time they were working together on
Season Eight
, Joss and editor Scott Allie had developed a strong collaborative relationship. By talking over stories with Joss, reviewing his scripts, and going over artwork with him, Allie had gotten great insight into Joss’s process and his vision. “His writing chops translate really well to comics,” Allie says. “The number-one thing for me that transcends comics and film and TV, the thing that goes across everything he does that I find so compelling, is the way that he tackles genre fiction in a way that’s all about character. Genre fiction, particularly in comics, tends to just be a quagmire of plot, and [Joss’s work] is funny.”

To the editor, Joss’s work stood in sharp contrast to many of the superhero stories that made up the bulk of the industry’s output. Allie has long said that one of the things wrong with superhero comics is that
a lot of writers come up with a story they want to tell that has no real connection to any specific character. For example, they might pitch an idea for a Batman story to the
Batman
editor, and if that person says no, the writer will say that it works just as well as a Green Lantern story and pitch it to the
Green Lantern
editor. “What that tells me is that the story isn’t remotely about the character,” Allie says. “The story is just the writer saying, ‘Well, maybe I can get some money out of the
Batman
guy.’ If the story works equally well for Batman as it does for Green Lantern, then it probably doesn’t work at all for either one of them.”

Joss, on the other hand, brought his intense focus on the “Buffy of it” to this new medium. “Once you focus and make sure those elements are integral to the story,” Allie says, “then it’s a
Buffy
story and you can’t equally [say that] it’s an
Angel
story. You can’t just take that story and say, ‘Oh, well, we’ve already got something going on
Buffy
this week. Let’s just do this on
Angel.
’” Allie also appreciated that Joss’s fantastical adventures were always grounded in relatable human concerns. “Not many of us have had the experience where our ‘stepfather’ actually turns out to be a robot [as in the
Buffy
episode “Ted”], but we can all really relate to what’s really at work there. We can really relate to feeling threatened by our stepfather and all our friends not understanding it and our mother seeming like she’s under some kind of spell. And that’s what happens to Buffy every week, or every month in the comic.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
didn’t just carry forward Joss’s focus on “the Buffy of it”; it was a direct continuation of the
Buffy
TV show. It picks up a year after Buffy shared her powers with all the Potential Slayers in the television finale and finds her and Xander running the operations of a worldwide network of new Slayers. It would become a five-year, forty-issue series exploring this new status quo. Before
Season Eight
, canceled shows like
The X-Files
and
Star Trek
had continued telling their stories in feature films, but no one had attempted a full seasonal arc in comic book form. The project’s success set a new trend in television-to-comics adaptations, as several other series launched comic book sequels, including
Buffy
’s onetime WB neighbor
Charmed
.

As with the unproduced
Buffy
animated series, the comics format enabled the writers to include moments that would have been too costly
to produce in live-action television. They set issues in fantastic worlds beyond the earthly domain and brought back numerous guest characters, some thought long-gone. But the enlarged scope of
Season Eight
also presented problems: with Buffy so preoccupied with running an army of Slayers, many of her concerns were problems that the average reader couldn’t actually relate to. As the series went on, it lost sight of the deeply personally stories Allie had so admired. “There were definitely things set up from the beginning of
Season Eight
that were very relatable,” he says. “But we found ourselves bogged down in some of the plot stuff that takes you away from the small personal stuff that I think really makes
Buffy
so extraordinary.

“There are places where I think, and [Joss] would say the same, we kind of strayed from the true path. At the end we brought it all back, and it was through a great deal of hard work that we did a good job of pulling it together at the end, but when you’re trying to figure that out, it’s always going to go back to character.”

Also in 2007, Joss again teamed up with Dark Horse to produce an online comic for
MySpace.com
.
Dark Horse Presents
had initially been a print anthology series, the first comic book that the indie publisher produced. Running from 1986 to 2000, it featured a mix of established and new writers and artists, giving many of them a much wider audience. Dark Horse decided to relaunch the series in the digital world as part of MySpace’s comics portal.

Joss’s contribution to the new collection,
Sugarshock!
, debuted in July 2007. It’s the tale of an “all-girl/robot rock band” that unwittingly gets pulled into an intergalactic battle of the bands. The band is fronted by Dandelion Naizen, the hyperspastic lead singer and guitarist, with an extreme and somewhat inexplicable hatred of Vikings. “She’s … more like me than anybody I’ve written,” Joss said. “She’s insanely bipolar and completely capricious but very dedicated to something or other.” Rounding out the band are “Wade, the drummer, who’s really sexy, kind of chubby and always takes a groupie home because she’s awesome”; L’Lihdra, the “very tall, very ethereal and very beautiful” guitarist who is always clad in men’s pinstriped suits; and Phil, the bassist robot.

Fábio Moon drew the world of
Sugarshock!
, and together he and Joss won an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic of 2008. Joss scored an additional Eisner for Best New Series that year for
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
, which he shared with artists Georges Jeanty and Andy Owens and cowriter Brian K. Vaughan.