The Astonishing X-Men

I haven’t been by Accordion City’s best-known comic book store, The Silver Snail, in months (despite living a couple of blocks away), so I’ve been unaware of the Marvel effort called “X-Men Reload“. They’re working on revitalizing the X-Men titles, and the most buzzworthy one is Astonishing X-Men, for which they hired Joss Whedon, the creative mind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.

With Whedon, you get the best of both worlds: a guy who understands the

long and complicated history of Marvel’s mighty mutants and a guy who

can tell a story and write dialogue, especially bitchy dialogue. He

uses this to great effect with Kitty Pryde’s and Emma Frost’s clashes (When did the White Queen join the X-Men? When did she get involved with Scott Summers? They’re running Xavier’s now? When did Jean Grey die? What the hell is going on?).

You can read Astonishing X-Men #1 online at Marvel’s DotComics site (you’ll need Flash installed).

Wolverine: “Time to make nice with the public, eh, Summers?”

Scott: We have to do more than that, Logan. We have to astonish them.