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THE TEN GREATEST, MOST GROUNDBREAKING CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS IN WIZARD'S HISTORY | Check out this roundup of the creative teams that revolutionized comics
Part Two: Joss Whedon and John Cassaday | | | By Christopher Lawrence | | Posted 05/24/08 | |  | |  JOSS WHEDON / JOHN CASSADAY
Some celebrate new beginnings with a party. Others prefer a glass of champagne.
For Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, however, neither of the aforementioned options could quite possibly compare with a good, old-fashioned "fastball special."
The return of the famed Wolverine/Colossus offensive maneuver (perhaps the most recognizable battle tactic in Marvel Comics history) turned the ultra-talented creators of the first 20-odd issues of Astonishing X-Men into a pair of…well, keyed up fanboys.
"Joss and I were talking it over on the streets of San Diego," Cassaday recalls, "and we must have appeared not unlike big kids talking about their favorite toys. I couldn't wait to do it. What a way to say, 'Hey, we're back in business!'"
The scene, which Whedon described as "a two-page, giant shout-out to the history of the X-Men," was but one of many unforgettable events from the creators' Eisner Award-winning run.
Whedon and Cassaday firmly entrenched themselves in the ranks of superstar creative teams by taking comicdom's most popular team and painstakingly returning it to its superheroic roots. Unencumbered by the usual hassles of continuity and company-wide crossovers, Whedon and Cassaday could—and did—cut loose, strutting their stuff by resurrecting old characters (Colossus), debuting new ones (Armor, Blindfold, Ord) and unveiling the team's sleek new costumes.
"When I first took over the book," Whedon recounts, " [Marvel Editor-in-Chief] Joe [Quesada] said, 'Can you put them back in costume? We think we'd like to do that.' I was like, 'Okay, as long as John has a hand in shaping them.'
"I saw that panel [from issue #1, in which the new costumes first appeared] the way any fan would. I don't see sketches from John, the way I do other artists. He just draws the thing and shows it to me and I say, 'Yes, thank you. That's exactly what I wanted.' When I saw that I was like, 'Yeah, that's a badass team.'"
Cassaday explains he was trying to make that first in-costume shot "bold, but not over the top. I did what I could to dress them more or less in their original fashions," he says. "I feel simplicity and a certain uniformity is the key with the design of the X-Men."
While Cassaday took care of the stylistic redesign of Marvel's never-really-Merry Mutants, Whedon focused his prodigious skills on the internal dramatic elements that have made the scions of the Xavier Institute so beloved.
"He so got it," Cassaday says. "The heart of what works best for the X-Men. The soap opera of these wildly different people whose emotions and personal struggles are as interesting as their powers."
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Click here for more of the greatest collaborative teams in comics!
And, click here for the previous installment of the greatest collaborative teams in comics!
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