The JCU: Joss Whedon’s Comic Universe

Nerds know heartbreak. Our favorite TV shows get cancelled (Star Trek), beloved characters die (Terminator), beloved comic properties turn to shit on screen when artistic vision clashes with the movie business (X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3). It seems like there’s a hundred ways to ruin a geeky property and only a handful of ways to get it right. When properties go right they endure (Star Wars episodes 4-6), but wrong turns can derail franchises just as quickly (Star Wars episodes 1-3).

Joss Whedon knows a thing or two about heartbreak, both causing it and enduring it. He’s killed our favorite characters without mercy, seen his dialogue get whittled away to nothing and had more television series cancelled than I will ever have produced. What I admire about Whedon is his tenacity, and his ability to keep trying in the face of adversity. Movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer not a financial success? No problem; take it to TV. Fan-favorite series Firefly gets cancelled? Show up the TV executives with the amazing film Serenity. Keep canceling TV series, one after another? Hmmm…

Thankfully for fans, Whedon doesn’t let a thing like cancellation keep him from realizing his vision. Beginning with Buffy, Whedon continued his properties in comic-book form. Not just one-offs, the following four series continue the events Whedon started on TV, and offer closure for those of us wanting to know what happened to Angel after the series finale, or just what a Dollhouse movie would look like.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Of the four series listed here, Buffy is my favorite. I came in to the TV series in the first season and have rewatched the series several times. I could probably sing all the lyrics to the “Once More With Feeling” episode if I tried…although some of the time signatures are quite complex. With Seasons 8 and 9, Whedon examined the aftermath of the Buffy series finale. What new Big Bad would emerge once the First as defeated? Which characters would live and which would die? Would Buffy ever find love?

Buffy Season 8 (and indeed all the titles in the JCU) is helped by the limitless nature of comic books. Comics don’t have to wait for an actor to be available, or re-cast the part. All characters from seasons 1-7 are fair game for inclusion. With no budget to worry about, action sequences can be bigger, stakes can be higher, and enemies can be more outlandish than ever was possible on the small screen. This unlimited potential allows for some of the best moments in Buffy Season 8, but limitless can also be a weakness. Sometime I felt like the series was relying too heavily on established characters, instead of creating new ones. The problem with relying on established characters is their tendency to become caricatures of themselves; two characters in particular (Warren and Amy) start out as menacing, but gradually descend into a Punch-and-Judy couple. Minor quibbles aside, Buffy Season 8 is a great addition to the Buffy canon.

Angel

Oh Angel. So broody, much dark. Angel had some of the best character development of any of Whedon’s series, and the best character arc in the form of Wesley Wyndham-Price. Starting off as the ponciest of ponces on Buffy, Price migrated to Angel and began a downward spiral the likes of which I had never seen on TV before. Only Gul Dukat from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went through more character transformations. The man behind Price, Alexis Denisof, was a joy to watch, and I love seeing him pop up in other Whedon projects, from Dollhouse to The Avengers.

Angel: After the Fall picks up several months after the final events of the Angel TV series. Los Angeles has gone to Hell…literally. Angel continues to battle Wolfram & Hart, Spike continues to not give a damn about anything, and Illyria continues to inhabit Fred’s body. Like Buffy Season 8, Angel: After the Fall brings back characters from all seasons of Angel. It also continues exploring Angel’s dark themes. Wesley and Gunn faced some heavy trauma at the end of the TV series, and as the comic opens, neither of them is particularly happy about it. Angel: After the Fall is a bit better than Buffy Season 8 at bringing in fresh new characters and is a great continuation of the events of the TV series.

Firefly

I’m the worst kind of nerd: one who doesn’t really care for Firefly. I’ve seen the series through once and never saw the reason behind the rabid devotion to the show. While the characters were intriguing, I disagree with my fellow nerds that the show was perfect. I felt that the series needed a few more seasons before it would achieve perfection. Sadly that never happened and Fox left us with a single season that only hints at what could have been.

Enter once again Whedon’s tenacity. Not only did fans get a feature-length movie that provided some kind of closure to the series (the amazing Serenity), but we also got a comic series to bridge the events of Firefly and Serenity. Those Left Behind is the Chasing Dogma of the JCU: a way to explain how the characters got to where they were at the beginning of Serenity and serving as another way to interact with these characters that so many people fell in love with over such a short time. Worth a read.

Dollhouse

My indifference for Firefly is only matched by my adoration for Dollhouse. This show blew me away; it was so high-concept it was almost doomed from the start. I loved that Whedon was able to explore the themes of mind control and men and women’s bodies being used by the wealthy without resorting to perversity every episode. There was so much to explore about that universe that I was crushed when the show was cancelled after two seasons.

I recently found Dollhouse: Epitaphs at the library, a continuation of the Dollhouse series that serves as a bridge between the two Dollhouse season finales, when all goes to hell with the Doll technology. Despite my love for the TV series, I have mixed reviews about both this comic and the plot line it follows. I would have liked to see a few more seasons of Dollhouse before the show runners decided to cut loose with the mind-wiping technology. I don’t feel like I got enough time learning about the universe before it went to shit. Out of the four series, I recommend this one the least.

I’m a big fan of expanded universes and continuing story lines, whether it’s Season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Twitter or Eoin Colfer writing another book in the ever-inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s trilogy. While I’d much rather see Joss Whedon’s work on TV, I’m sated by each of his comic-book series that continue the story. Comics can sometimes do things TV can’t, and Joss’s overall supervision means the books don’t stray far from the vision. One bright spot: if Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D ever does get cancelled, its origin in the comic-book universe almost guarantees that the story of Agent Coulson won’t end anytime soon.