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He Shows No Signs of Slowing Down |
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renowned creator/executive producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and its spin-off, Angel, both of which are critically praised
and immensely popular with viewers, is taking his beloved creations
to different levels of success on the small screen and in the pages
of comic books. A third-generation TV writer (his grandfather, Tom,
was a writer for Leave It To Beaver and his father, John, was
a writer for Benson), Whedon has become a force to be reckoned with
in Hollywood. Growing up on a steady diet of Marvel Comics, he graduated
in 1987 with a degree in film from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Known for his witty dialogue, he was nominated for an Oscar for 1995's
Toy Story and nominated for an Emmy with the 1999 Buffy
classic episode, "Hush" (which, ironically, had no dialogue for 28 minutes).
News of this endeavor made headlines in Entertainment Weekly and major daily newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune and The New York Post. Fray No. 1 sold out within two weeks of its release. An additional 10,000 copies of the first issue were printed to meet consumer demand. "That book has done so well for us, it's like our biggest runaway hit!" said Scott Allie, the book's editor, in an interview at the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con in late July. "We've got retailers all over the country calling and saying they love the book because people who never come into comic stores are coming in to get it and the last time we started getting phone calls like that was when we started doing Buffy (comics)… And now it's like the same thing but more." In addition to Fray, Whedon and Brett Matthews, one of his Buffy collaborators, will be helming the relaunch of the Angel comic book. The four issue mini-series debuts Sept. 12 with Mel Rubi doing the art. "I don't see the Angel of the comic as being all that different from the Angel of the show," co-writer Matthews said in an interview with Dark Horse Comics, "I think the circumstances he finds himself in, the monsters he has to face, the sheer scale of it all-that's different. And, no doubt, he reacts accordingly, but at the end of the day the Angel people love on the show is still the Angel of the comic. As to why change anything, comics are a different medium than television and they allow you to do a lot of things that you can't do well-if at all-on TV. We're just trying to play to the strengths of the medium."
Not only that, another comics book series, Tales of the Slayers, about other Slayers of different time periods, has been greenlighted. Whedon and other writers from the TV series, such as Doug Petrie ("Bad Girls") and Jane Espenson ("Band Candy"), will be penning stories about Slayers long dead, collaborating with other comic writers and artists. It Doesn't Stop There
Another Buffy spin-off is also in the works for the BBC, tentatively titled The Watcher. It is the story of Buffy's Watcher, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), who returns to his native England now that Buffy is dead. Whedon came up with this idea to accommodate Head, who requested that his role on Buffy be scaled back in order to spend more time with his family in England. Production for this series is tentatively scheduled for mid-2002. "I think of (Giles' show) as kind of a mystery series with monsters in it. Not kickboxing demons, more like classic English ghost stories…" Whedon described the new series. "…If I had to choose a word it would be loneliness. Because I think of it as the people who live there; it's all very isolated… and I want to play (Giles) as that sort. He was surrounded by a family, a de facto family that he longer has, and him picking up his life all alone and then getting involved in the sort of underbelly of other people's lives and finding out about them."
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