by Amy Pascale
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.
Brian K. Vaughan had also created, with artist Adrian Alphona, the comics series Runaways, of which Joss was a big fan. The series follows a group of six teenagers who decide to run away together after they discover that their parents are supervillains. Their lives are fraught with both mundane difficulties and ethical challenges as they figure out how to fend for themselves and deal with their own emerging superpowers. The characters inhabit the same universe as Marvel’s higher-profile superheroes such as the X-Men and the Avengers, but they see them as a bunch of “old guys” who don’t understand what they’re going through. A “growing up is hell” story about headstrong and snarky teenagers steeped in Marvel mythology—it’s no wonder Joss fell in love.
The series debuted on Marvel Comics’ smaller Tsunami imprint in July 2003 and ran for about a year; Joss penned a letter begging Marvel to continue it. (The letter was later published in the series’ first hardcover compilation.) The Tsunami imprint was shuttered, but Marvel chose to bring Runaways back in 2005, after sales showed what a strong fan base it had. Vaughan and Alphona returned, but a year later they announced that they would be leaving when issue #24 came out in 2007. Vaughan was being wooed to join the ABC series Lost, where former Buffy and Angel scribe Drew Goddard had taken up residence. In light of Runaways’ popularity, Marvel was desperate to find a new writer who could step in and fill Vaughan’s shoes. Nick Lowe, the series editor, thought he knew the perfect person.
At the time, Lowe’s boss was Mike Marts, who was also Joss’s editor on Astonishing X-Men. Knowing that the writer was a Runaways fan, Lowe reached out to Marts to see if Joss would be interested in taking over the series from his Season Eight cowriter. Marts sent the offer over and Joss thought about it, but he ultimately turned it down. Lowe accepted defeat as gracefully as he could and left for the weekend.
“I came back on Monday to find an e-mail from Joss telling me that he’d changed his mind and would like to do Runaways after all,” Lowe says. “Apparently the thought was eating away at his brain and he ended up calling Brian K. Vaughan over the weekend. A week later he shot what the story would be over to me and I was over the moon. He nailed it right away and he had me tearing up in an outline. That bastard!”
Joss’s six-episode arc, “Dead End Kids,” brings the Runaways to New York City to meet with a long-running Marvel villain, the crime boss known as the Kingpin. There, the kids come across an artifact that unexpectedly sends them back in time. Trapped in 1907 New York, they fall in with the “Street Arabs,” a mishmash crew who also have superpowers, as they search for a way back to the present day. Joss created several memorable characters, including Lillie McGurty, a woman who can dance on air if there’s music playing, and Klara Prast, a young girl with the power to control plants, who has been married off to a much older man who is abusing her. Klara joins the Runaways when they return to the twenty-first century and remains with the series as it continues.
Joss’s first issue came out in April 2007, and in July, Marvel gave Whedon
esque.com readers a look at the full issue in digital form. As with Astonishing X-Men, putting Joss on Runaways had given Marvel the opportunity to appeal to Whedon fans who weren’t necessarily at the comic book store every Tuesday. And setting the tale in a previously unseen past made it more accessible to those who were interested in Joss’s work but intimidated by the idea of catching up on a lot of backstory.
Among existing Runaways fans, reception to Joss and artist Michael Ryan’s run was mostly supportive, especially considering that Joss was the first new writer to step into an acclaimed series that already had a strong authorial voice in Vaughan. While many enjoyed the new world that Joss created, some felt that it was less a proper extension of Runaways than a well-told tale by a fan who clearly loved and knew the series but didn’t quite capture the characters’ original voices.
Nonetheless, Joss’s involvement certainly did increase interest in the comic. “The sales were great,” Lowe says.
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WGA WRITERS’ STRIKE
As Joss was enjoying the streamlined production process that allowed him to write and release multiple comic book series over the course of just a few months, he was eager to translate those same quick turnarounds to the world of feature film. In spring 2007, he approached former Mutant Enemy writer Drew Goddard with an idea: he wanted to write a movie with him—in a weekend. The two of them, he proposed, would hole up in a hotel room and not leave until they had knocked out a script. It would be like they were back on Buffy, when they often fell behind and had to finish a complete script in just a few days.
At the time, Goddard was working on a feature script for another writer/producer wunderkind: J. J. Abrams. Goddard had freelanced for Abrams’s juggernaut Lost during its first season in 2004, then joined his spy series Alias in 2005 as a writer and coproducer for its final season. He returned to Lost for its third and fourth seasons and was now following that up with writing duties on Abrams’s upcoming horror film Cloverfield.
Cloverfield would be Goddard’s highest-profile project to date, a movie budgeted at $25 million that would go on to make nearly seven times that upon its release. But he knew well how slowly the film world worked, and he shared Joss’s desire for the energy and fun that could come from writing quickly and to a hard deadline. He also missed working with Joss. “I’ve told passionate Whedon fans, ‘Look, I know you guys think you’re the biggest Joss fans, but you’re not bigger than I am,’” he laughs. “I loved him so much that I actually weaseled a job with him. That’s how crazed I was. I actually got into his inner circle.”
So they decided to go for it.
First, though, the logistics needed to be worked out. The story had to be something they could realistically write under the strict time parameters—an intricate murder mystery, for instance, was out. But a horror film, they thought, could be written quickly without sacrificing quality. They both loved horror movies, and they both wanted to make one. Horror it was.
It was the right time for a horror movie, too; at the time, the genre was experiencing a resurgence. As with most returning trends, however, the newest generation of horror auteurs sought to put a new spin on the genre. Thus, the horror movies of the mid-2000s went for scares by placing a strong emphasis on graphic violence, nudity, torture, and mutilation. Critics labeled the subgenre, made popular by such films as Hostel (2005), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and the Saw series, “torture porn.” Established horror writers and directors were split on whether torture porn was a legitimate new subgenre or dehumanizing exploitation. Despite the criticism, the movies had many fans, and Lionsgate, the studio behind Hostel and the Saw films, found them to be very profitable.
Joss himself had recently jumped into the torture porn debate, to criticize the publicity for another Lionsgate film, 2007’s Captivity. The billboards and posters for the movie featured four images of actress Elisha Cuthbert being tortured, each with a caption: ABDUCTION, CONFINEMENT, TORTURE, and TERMINATION. On March 22, 2007, Joss posted an open letter on the Huffington Post in support of a campaign asking the Motion Picture Association of America to withhold the film’s rating:
To the MPAA,
There’s a message I’m supposed to cut and paste but I imagine you’ve read it. So just let me say that the ad campaign for “Captivity” is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it’s an assault. I’ve watched plenty of horror—in fact I’ve made my share. But the advent of torture-porn and the total dehumanizing not just of women (though they always come first) but of all human beings has made horror a largely unpalatable genre. This ad campaign is part of something dangerous and repulsive, and that act of aggression has to be answered.
As a believer not only in the First Amendment but of the necessity of horror stories, I’ve always been against acts of censorship. I distrust anyone who wants to ban something “for the good of the public.” But this ad is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people who have to see it. It’s like being mugged (and I have been). These people flouted the basic rules of human decency.
God knows the culture led them there, but we have to find our way back and we have to make them know that people will not stand for this. And the only language they speak is money. (A devastating piece in the New Yorker—not gonna do it.) So talk money. Remove the rating, and let them see how far over the edge they really are.
Thanks for reading this, if anyone did.
Sincerely, Joss Whedon.
Creator, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
He later took to Whedonesque.com to discuss the parallels between the stoning of Du’a Khalil Aswad, an Iraqi Kurd murdered in an “honor” killing, and the trailer for Captivity, in which “pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is ‘I’m sorry.’”
He’d also recently revealed that his mysterious spec script Goners was a story that had poured out of him in response to the popularity of torture porn films in which “kids we don’t care about are mutilated for hours.” The script, he said, is “about a girl named Mia … who sort of sees in a mystical way the underbelly of the city and of human society, and goes through a kind of extraordinary hell.” For Joss, Goners was “an antidote to that very kind of film, the horror movie with the expendable human beings in it. Because I don’t believe any human beings are.” His story, by contrast, “is much more a story about human connection and whether or not it’s possible.”
But with Goners still mired in the rewrite stage, perhaps his new horror project with Goddard would be the one to do right where Joss had seen so much wrong in the industry. Perhaps it would show moviegoers they could still be scared on a more cerebral level—by looking critically at the inescapable horror formula by which a group of kids are faced with a killer and proceed to make the worst, stupidest choice at every turn.
Of course, before all that could happen, he and Goddard had to write it. Joss had been musing on an idea for a horror film for a couple years, and he already had a clear vision for the third act of a story. (The only other time he’d ever seen a story so clearly before writing it was for his unproduced early sci-fi script Afterlife.) He pitched the idea to Goddard, who was quickly on board. They spent several months talking about the story and working up an outline for the script, and then checked themselves into a two-floor hotel room—Goddard was upstairs, Joss downstairs—and swore not to leave until it was done.
They wrote for three days straight. “It was a crazy three days,” Goddard says. “Just our laptops, and our appetites. We ate a lot of room service. We definitely tried to treat ourselves, because we were working from 6 AM till 1 AM every day. You need some creature comforts.”
The writing flowed smoothly as they divvied up pages and scenes and met up later in the day to mesh them together and figure out the next batch of assignments. They got to argue about who would win in a battle between werewolves and zombies—shad
es of Joss’s “The dwarves are demons! The midgets are vampires!” arguments in his Buffy days.
Goddard was stuck on a certain scene in which the characters needed to read from a young girl’s diary. He called downstairs to Joss to see if he was interested in taking a crack at her words. “Six minutes later, he ran upstairs with it, this full page [of] a beautifully written horror diary of a prairie girl,” he said. “He cranked that diary out faster than I’ve seen anyone write anything. I couldn’t write my own name repeatedly as fast as he wrote that diary.” Joss had once again found his calling in giving voice to a young girl.
What emerged from the marathon hotel session was The Cabin in the Woods, a comedic horror tale following a group of young people who head to a remote cabin for a quick weekend getaway. One by one, they’re each killed off in typical horror movie fashion. In this case, though, it’s not just the usual knife-wielding maniac behind the mayhem. The youths have been lured into a secret facility, where unseen technicians manipulate them into succumbing to horror clichés (“We should split up—we can cover more ground that way”), then serve them up as part of a ritual sacrifice.
With the bones of the story formed into a workable skeleton, Joss and Goddard checked out of the hotel knowing that there would be more rewriting to come. But the project they’d wanted to move forward with as quickly as possible soon came to a complete stop—along with the rest of the storytelling in Hollywood.