Unlike some, I do not consider this good news

So, recently came the announcement that Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona would be leaving Runaways with issue #24. This made me sad, mostly because of Alphona rather than Vaughan. Don't get me wrong: I like Vaughan, not only because of Runaways but also for his creator-owned titles like Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man. But despite the fact that Young Avengers & Runaways is sub-par (mostly due to the contrived and pointless fight scenes and painful art), it demonstrates that Zeb Wells is capable of writing the characters more or less adequately. They're all recognisably who they are, which (I thought) boded well for whoever took over as writer after Vaughan: he's set a high standard, but he hasn't landed his successor with characters only he can understand or a situation too bizarre to be workable on a continuing basis. (See: Grant Morrison.)

Alphona, though... I loved Alphona's art, and it was wonderful to watch him improving from "really good" to "oh my GOD that's incredibly gorgeous, I think I'll spend the next hour staring at this page". I don't know what Alphona's doing next, but whatever it is, I hope he's paired up with a writer I like to read, because I'd hate to lose the opportunity to ooh and ahhh over his work.

I was optimistic for Runaways. It's a simple and appealing concept, and the characters are well-established and easy to work with. I didn't think it would be easy to fuck it up.

Then I heard that Joss Whedon's going to be writing it.

Oh, shit.

I used to love Joss Whedon, oh my yes! I used to be glued to the box every time Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on. Then came the fourth season of Buffy, and without the high school setting, the show started floundering, and I lost interest. Then came Firefly. I wanted to like Firefly, I really did. All my friends adored it with a scary level of passion. But when I borrowed the DVD set (and Serenity), I found that the first three episodes really sucked, and after that the overall standard seldom rose above the level of "amusing, if inconsequential", and sometimes dipped to "good God, who thought this was a good idea?". One or two episodes came close to greatness -- episodes that weren't credited to Whedon -- but the setting was so stupid, the plots so weak, the characterization so thin, the science so risible, the politics so dubious, and the ethics so repulsive that I can't help but feel the series deserved its early cancellation.

(This is without even getting into the fact that ALL the female characters are stereotypes -- even the tomboy mechanic has a hankering for frilly pink dresses, and she's not a better mechanic than the men just because she is, oh no; that would not be feminine enough. She has to have a Speshul Gift. That lets her "talk" to engines. *eyeroll* Then we have the other women: the prostitute, the violently insane childlike psychic abuse victim (how many clichés can you fit into one character?), and the woman whose entire personality is defined by her relationships with her husband and (male) boss. Joss Whedon a feminist? MY ASS.)

(Oh! Oh! And -- so, in the Firefly world everybody speaks Chinese, right? They eat with chopsticks and everything. So where are the fucking Chinese people? "We had to cast the right actors for the roles" is not an excuse. You're asking me to believe that there are no Asian actors in California? This goes hand-in-hand with the incredible whiteness of Sunnydale. It's not overt "people not like me are bad"-type racism, but it is "I'm not personally racist, so as long as I don't discriminate, I don't need to do anything to counter entrenched racism in society", which is in some ways worse because it allows inequalities to go uncorrected without leaving an impression of wrongdoing for the sidelined groups to point at. You don't want quotas, do you? Why, that would be reverse racism! *sigh*)

Then there's his comics work. Which isn't as bad as Firefly; in fact, the first time I read Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, I was favourably impressed. There were traces of his origins as a TV writer in the panel-to-panel pacing -- Whedon hasn't quite assimilated the rule that comics are about what happens in between the panels, which results in some pages not flowing as well as they should -- but overall, I rated it highly.

Until I read Mark Millar's "Enemy of the State" story in Wolverine, and noticed something peculiar: Millar gets Wolverine. Whedon doesn't.

How the hell is it possible to not get Wolverine, the most overexposed character in the history of comics?

I have a megapost sitting in draft form which will go into this issue in detail, along with a bunch of other stuff about violence and superhero comics, but for the time being I'm just going to note that the contrast between Millar's characterization of Wolverine and Whedon's prompted me to look again at the "Gifted" arc, and it did not hold up very well under the scrutiny. Greg Burgas has outlined some of the reasons why this comic is likely to age badly, and isn't nearly as good as it may appear on the surface. I basically agree with him: the plotting is very weak, a mere string of "awesome" events with little in the way of underlying logic to make the "awesome" events seem earned. The whole thing is terribly superficial and doesn't really work.

I am reluctantly (reluctantly, because a lot of people I respect think he's awesome, and Marvel aren't going to stop giving him work any time soon because his name sells comics) coming to the conclusion that Joss Whedon is the most overrated writer in comics today. He can't plot his way out of a wet paper bag. His range of characters is severely limited. He trades off existing stories to a degree that makes me doubtful if he has any ideas of his own. He constantly falls back on the myth of redemptive violence without questioning or subverting it. He makes his characters suffer in contrived and gratuitous ways. He seems to be incapable of depicting a sexual relationship that doesn't result in horrible pain for both parties (and frequently the horrible pain has no obvious source in the relationship, yet strangely the single characters don't suffer in the same way). He frequently gives the impression of thinking he has said something terribly significant and profound, when in fact all he has done is slap the audience in the face with their own expectations, so that the entire emotional impact of the story is dependent on the reader's not knowing what's going to happen next. He plays both ends against the middle by using the conventions of the genre to lull the audience into a false sense of security, then undermining those conventions in a "shocking twist" -- which does not succeed in hiding the fact that his stories are basically conventional to the point of being hackneyed. Oh, the good buy beats the bad guy in a sword fight! Well, gosh, I would never have predicted that. Gee, one of the two lesbians dies and the other becomes a murderous psychopath! How FUCKING groundbreaking.

I am NOT happy that he's going to be writing Runaways. I could be wrong. I am open-minded enough to allow for the possibility that his Runaways may be brilliant. But I shudder to think what he's going to do with Xavin and Karolina. I fear very greatly that Molly will become a Buffyclone. I don't feel sanguine about the prospects for Chase -- Whedon treats traditionally masculine characters very badly (look at what he's done to Wolverine in Astonishing X-Men, or at the contemptuous characterization of Jayne in Firefly), and although Chase is still too young to be a "manly man", that's what he's going to be when he grows up. Vaughan has shown us subtleties in Chase's character that I do not trust Whedon to respect.

(Snap Judgements agrees with me (although our reactions to Buffy and Firefly are reversed, the overall tenor of her post has me mentally high-fiving her); while Comicsgirl says "I bet he wouldn't have killed the Jewish girl." Naw -- he'd've killed the lesbian. Tell me, is that better?)