Reviewer: Tim Sheridan
Story Title: Dangerous: Part 2
Written by: Joss Whedon
Art by: John Cassaday
Colored by: Laura Martin
Lettered by: Chris Eliopoulos
Assistant Editors: Stephanie Moore and Sean Ryan
Editor: Mike Marts
Publisher: Marvel Comics
I’m one of those fans who really liked the X-Men under Grant Morrison. For years, I read the X-books with a passing fancy. They were fine, and I understood all the excitement over them, but I just couldn’t get into them. When Morrison came along, I finally saw something different in the X-Men. For the first time in a long time, they had evolved, in more ways than one. It was a natural evolution for the characters, a long time in coming, I thought.
So when Morrison left, I thought I would too. But then I heard all the hype behind Joss Whedon, so I decided to stick around for a bit. And I’m glad I did.
As it’s been pointed out countless times, Whedon’s run is a return to the traditional type of X story, down to the return of costumes. I was against this at first, seeing as how I was bored silly by the traditional X story. But I was wrong. Those traditional tales are not out of date at all; they were just not done by this man.
Joss Whedon has given us a run of issues that is respectful of what has come before, but is done from a fresh perspective. He makes his writing just personal enough so we can see that he is genuinely jazzed to be writing this comic. His writing is not something I was overly familiar with. I was not a Buffy or Angel fan, so I didn’t know the traces of Whedon-esque dialogue.
But he has infused the book and the characters with a sense of fun and danger that was missing, even during Morrison’s run.
And of course I have to praise John Cassaday. His art gives the book a very high class feel. It’s not quite as stylish as his work on Planetary, but it’s simply beautiful, and along with the scripts, maintains a very classic feel for the X-Men.
This issue is the second of a story called “Dangerous”. It seems as though the Danger room is angry about something. So things are going a bit crazy. In a very chilling sequence, a half Sentinel comes back to life, spewing some sort of pseudo-religious diatribe.
But the worst thing that happens is that the danger room may or may not have killed a young mutant. But then he comes back to life, in a zombie-like way. We don’t know all the answers quite yet, as we’re only a third of the way through this arc, but it’s still very interesting.
This was not my favorite issue of this run. Not enough happened to push the plot forward. It was almost as it they were killing time. The issue also jumped around quite a bit, so I couldn’t say it was a very comfortable read either.
But despite those quibbles, Astonishing X-Men is still a top notch book. The art is outstanding, and Whedon’s characterizations more than make up for any plot hiccups. I know this will read better when I have the whole story, so of course, I look forward to the next issue.
