Whedon Studies Research Papers

Can popularized images of lesbians exist beyond their sexualized stereotypes? At different points Willow and Tara's relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer adheres to and transgresses constructed stereotypes. This paper seeks to explore... more

This article will investigate how the creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer used the opening title sequence. The opening montage evolves to update the narrative, note newly prominent creators, make new implicit promises, evoke different... more

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- by David Kociemba
- •
- 7
  Television Studies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon, Paratexts

Characters involved in crises, interventions, or recovery litter the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1999-2004) television series. As part of the fantasy genre, however, the binges and withdrawal symptoms of addiction are... more

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- by David Kociemba
- •
- 6
  Television Studies, Addiction, Masculinity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Opening title sequences play an important role in understanding television series. They are “a film within a film” whose “very purpose is to serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in the... more

Opening title sequences play an important role in understanding television series. They are “a film within a film” whose “very purpose is to serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in the context of careers, movie title, entertainment, commercials, fashion, and art” (Stanitzek 45, 46). Opening title sequences are but one example of what Gérard Genette terms paratexts, which are secondary texts that influence the reading of the primary text, such as book covers, title pages, author names, interviews, ads, reviews, and public responses. Genette likened paratexts to thresholds or vestibules, in line with Jorge Luis Borges’ description of prefaces (Genette 261). In film and television, opening title and closing credit sequences often function as the equivalent to the covers of a book, marking its beginning and end. Yet those metaphors are inexact. Some films eliminate the opening titles entirely (e.g. Citizen Kane (1941), Star Wars (1977), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)). On television, title sequences are increasingly contained within the text after a cold open, yet still serve to mark its borders. Lost (2004-2010) and Heroes (2006-2010) popularized the practice of showing only the series’ title, highlighting this function (Gray 74). Yet borders do more than mark territory: they also guide travelers. Like other paratexts, opening title sequences “guide the reader’s attention, influence how a text is read, and communicate such information as to give a text its first contours, its manageable identity so to speak. And paratexts are important not only for the process of textual reception but also for text production; they function as indicators to be aimed for, as structures of literary expectations” (Stanitzek 32). They are a film within a film that is both about the narrative and an independent creation. Even Lost’s sparse title sequence tells a story about the series’ themes of mystery, displacement, trauma, and insight through the rich cult television history of the score’s glissando and its tonal destabilisation (van Elferen 254-258), the title’s swirl evoking the series’ iconic plane crash as it moves from background to fall offscreen in the foreground, and its letters that come into momentary focus before clarity is once again lost. Opening title sequences are a form of narration, a pleasure in their own right, a genre of short filmmaking, and a mark of authorship,1 but not that of the auteur—as “it is the work of specialists, title sequence designers, themselves readers foremost” creating with incomplete access to the series’ final form and contingent on network and creator approval (Stanitzek 48).

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- by David Kociemba
- •
- 6
  Television Studies, Joss Whedon, Paratexts, Dollhouse

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s 2012 film, The Cabin in the Woods, has been touted for its smart treatment of cliches and tropes commonly found within the horror and paranormal genres. Amidst the film’s purposeful braiding of playful,... more

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- by Linda C Ceriello
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- 9
  Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Horror Film, Joss Whedon

With contributions from professors, scholars, bloggers, playwrights, and novelists from Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and Great Britain, as well as the US, this collection explores recent additions to the multifaceted Whedonverse.... more

With contributions from professors, scholars, bloggers, playwrights, and novelists from Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and Great Britain, as well as the US, this collection explores recent additions to the multifaceted Whedonverse. But it doesn't stop there. Above all comes the question "What's Next?" How will Whedon adapt other Shakespeares like Hamlet and Twelfth Night, seeing that he hates to make the same project twice? Will he offer a female Horatio, a stronger Ophelia, a play set on a spaceship or S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters? Who will star? Other creators have signed on for the Wonder Woman film, but can they surpass his unpublished script? What will come after Avengers: Age of Ultron – Star Wars?

In today's world of Netflix shows, comic continuations, and web releases, Whedon has far more options than he did in the '90s Meanwhile, fans across the world are devouring his Buffy motion comics even as American creators pay homage to his works in their own shows, from Husbands and The Guild to How I Met Your Mother. All of this combines to build a glittering future for Whedon's fans and for the creator himself as the Whedonverse swells larger with each passing year.

Contents
Presenting the Collection
Presenting the Classic Shows
Buffy’s Successors: How Both The Guild and How I Met Your Mother Spring from Buffy
Calvin Peat
The Vampire Family Plot: Naming, Siring, and Identity
Janet Brennan Croft
A Whedonite’s Guide to Characterization
Kate Johnson and J.T. Bock
The Future of Scholarship: Interview with Professor Rhonda V. Wilcox
Francesca Maria Stefanachi
Presenting The Cabin in the Woods
Watching the Whore: The Treatment of Jules in Cabin in the Woods
Carrie Sessarego
Something Nightmares Are From: Corporate Culture and Externalized Consequences
Erin Giannini
Presenting The Avengers
“That Man’s Playing Galaga” /Dis/ownership, Democratization and Demographics
Dr. Shathley Q
Collateral Damage: How The Avengers is a Superhero Film, Not an Action Flick
James Orbesen
Fun with Fandom in Avengers: Age of Ultron
Valerie Estelle Frankel
Presenting Much Ado About Nothing
The Whole Assembly: Much Ado About Superheroes, Shakespeare, and Shawarma
B. Mitchell
Sigh No More, Ladies: Much Ado Tackles Gender and Modern Judgment
Navya Dasari
Of Whedonverse Canon and “Someone Else’s Sandbox:” Marvel, Much Ado, and the Great Auteur Debate
Mary Ellen Iatropoulos
Presenting In Your Eyes
The Mad Girl Weds the Evil Doctor: Whedonisms in In Your Eyes
Valerie Estelle Frankel
Presenting Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Deployment Patterns: How Joss Whedon Leverages Transmedia to Force a Rethink of Old Media
Dr. Shathley Q
“I’m Every Bit the S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent That You Are”: Exploring Opposing Masculinities
Scott Interrante
Whedon’s Women: Melinda May and Maria Hill as Transgressive Superheroines
Leanne McRae
Presenting the Buffy Comics
From the Small Screen to the Panel: Buffy in Comic Form
J.M. Suarez
Big in Japan: A Cross Cultural Look at the Whedonverse
J. Malcolm Stewart
Presenting the Angel & Faith Comics
No Future For You? Faith and the Future of the Dark Slayer
Siobhan Lyons
Journey into the Heart of Darkness: Intertextuality, Redemption, and Rewriting (Neo)colonial Discourses in Angel & Faith’s Lost and Found
Jessica Hautsch
Presenting the Serenity Comics
The Browncoats Return! The New Rebellion in Leaves on the Wind
Eugena McCrann
Presenting Future Shakespeares
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”: Speculating on Adaptations of Shakespeare.
Carl Wilson
Much Ado About Whedon and the Hamlet Hypothesis
Stephanie Garrison
Joss Whedon’s Hamlet: The Problems of Ophelia and Representation
Joel Hawkes
Presenting the Future
Violence, Strong Language, and Adult Content: Whedon’s Return to Television
Sebastiaan Gorissen
How to Make a Wonder Woman Movie
Valerie Estelle Frankel
Cleaning the Slate with the Force: Star Wars, Joss Whedon, and the Mind-Body Problem
Dominic Nardi, Jr.
Contributors
Works Cited

Long before he was the internationally famous head of a major Hollywood superhero franchise, Joss Whedon was a beloved writer/director of cult TV shows, boasting a dedicated following of fanatics who parsed his every quirky turn of... more

Long before he was the internationally famous head of a major Hollywood superhero franchise, Joss Whedon was a beloved writer/director of cult TV shows, boasting a dedicated following of fanatics who parsed his every quirky turn of phrase. In the 1990s, when Whedon was building his fanbase with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kenneth Branagh was at the height of his dominance as a mainstream interpreter of screen Shakespeare, thanks to the series of adaptations that he inaugurated with 1989's Henry V. While Shakespeare plays like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth have received multiple big-screen adaptations, Much Ado About Nothing has received only two: Kenneth Branagh's own in 1993, and Joss Whedon's, exactly twenty years later. This essay examines Whedon's adaptation through the lens of Branagh's, noting the many conceptual, stylistic, and industrial similarities that unite them—for despite Whedon's insistence that Branagh's Much Ado did not provide him with an adaptational roadmap, the films demonstrate striking similarities in context and content that can't be simply explained by their shared source text. Indeed, Whedon takes pains to distance his own version of Much Ado from Branagh's. Whedon refers to the 1993 film only occasionally in interviews (and generally has to be prompted by his interviewers to mention it at all); clearly he prefers to avoid the issue of comparison. In the introduction that prefaces the published screenplay for Whedon's film (in itself a structural precedent set by each of Branagh's own published screenplays), Whedon's disavowal of the earlier film is much stronger: " I didn't want to try to make what Branagh had already made, " he asserts (Screenplay 24). In describing the tonal differences between his and Branagh's film, Whedon rather dismissively references what he calls a " Branagh-like experience " in working with his own cast, surrounded by " sun-dappled vines and a general air of joy and kind of sunny good times and when I looked at the movie as a movie, I realized that that wasn't the sort of overriding emotion that I was trying to evoke " (Screenplay 21). While Whedon expressly denies having used the ealier film as a model for his own, the new Much Ado bears unmistakeable marks of Branagh's influence. One style trait often associated with Kenneth Branagh is his use of a core group of collaborators; screening a Branagh Shakespeare film is, at points, much like watching a polished repertory company. Branagh's Much Ado features cast staples like Richard Briers (Leonato), Richard Clifford (Conrade), Jimmy Yuill (Friar), and Brian Blessed (Antonio). Behind the camera, Branagh relies on collaborators like production

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s 2012 film, The Cabin in the Woods, has been touted for its smart treatment of cliches and tropes commonly found within the horror and paranormal genres. The filmmakers also braid these playful, ironic... more

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- by Greg Dember
- •
- 10
  Film Studies, Film Analysis, Horror Film, Film and Media Studies

Joss Whedon’s Firefly should have faded into oblivion following its ten episode run in 2002, but despite its early cancellation, a fiercely loyal fan base grew. Blending the genres of science fiction and Westerns, Firefly told a story of... more

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- by Aya Esther Hayashi
- •
- 10
  Musicology, Fan Studies, Fan Cultures, Fandom

""Buffy the Vampire Slayer is inherently concerned with redemption. While this is true for many of the characters in Buffy it is the redemption of the vampire Spike that takes center stage. This paper examines the discourses of vampiric... more

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- by Andrew Herrmann
- •
- 25
  Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Communication, Media Studies

Resumen: La problemática genérica siempre ha sido un tema clave en el análisis del discurso audiovisual. Actualmente la televisión se encuentra en un complejo proceso de transformación en el que la fusión de géneros está marcando la... more

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- by IRENE RAYA BRAVO
- •
- 4
  Television Studies, Television genres, Whedon Studies, Genre Mixing

With dozens of nonfiction books on Joss Whedon’s works from Buffy to Avengers, one critical area has been ignored: Whedon’s comics. In fact, he’s written several series for Marvel and DC, along with independents and the many issues of... more

With dozens of nonfiction books on Joss Whedon’s works from Buffy to Avengers, one critical area has been ignored: Whedon’s comics. In fact, he’s written several series for Marvel and DC, along with independents and the many issues of Angel, Buffy, and Serenity comics for IDW and Dark Horse. While a few isolated essays have tackled Buffy season eight or Whedon’s X-Men run, there is no anthology devoted to only Whedon comics. Now that’s about to change.

Essays on any aspect of Whedon’s comics (as described below) are welcome. The completed essays should be 4000-5000 words. Essays must adhere to MLA format and be friendly and approachable, yet academic in scope and content. New papers or presented conference papers rather than reprints are appreciated. This collection is not yet under contract, but I have several interested publishers who are awaiting a list of essays to be included. McFarland, who publishes most of the Buffy criticism collections, will likely be on board.

Proposal Guidelines: Please send a 350-500 word summary of your proposed essay pasted into your email, along with a short professional bio or cover letter.

Direct inquiries and proposals can be sent to Valerie Estelle Frankel, pop culture author and professor, at valerie at calithwain.com with a subject of WHEDON SUBMISSION.

Abstracts are due Sept 14 (just extended), Complete papers Nov 30, 2014.

Essays on both canon and “less official” Whedon comics are welcome, as are comparisons between Whedon comics and other comics or other Whedon works. Discussion of comic conventions from canon to art to gender issues are also appreciated. Other areas, like comparing Whedon’s Avengers movie, Agents of SHIELD, Doctor Horrible, or other shows to comics are also possible. On the shows, Buffy is compared to Spider-Man, Superman and Power Girl, Angel is compared to Batman so much Boreanaz was offered the role, Dark Willow parallels Dark Phoenix, Cordy and Fred are called Wonder Woman, and Xander and Giles are compared to Jimmy Olsen and Alfred…there’s paper material there, too. This anthology welcomes established Whedon scholars as well as enthusiastic new writers.

Which comics are Whedon’s? Canon comics include the following Whedon products (as Whedon wrote or supervised them).

BUFFYVERSE

Fray

Tales of the Slayers

Tales of the Vampires

Buffy: The Origin (reprinted in Buffy Omnibus 1)

Angel: Long Night’s Journey (#1-4) (reprinted in Angel: Omnibus 1)

“Always Darkest” (reprinted in Myspace Dark Horse Presents #4 or available online)

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight (Whedon wrote #1-5, 10, 11, 16-19)

Angel: After the Fall, Angel: The End, and spin-offs

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Nine (Whedon wrote #1-2)

Angel & Faith

Buffy Season Ten and Angel & Faith Vol. 2 2014-

See http://valeriefrankel.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/a-guide-to-the-buffy-and-angel-comics/ for a more elaborate Buffyverse comics guide and reading order.

X-MEN

Astonishing X-Men vol. 3: (#1-24) & Giant Size Astonishing X-Men #1 (reprinted as the collections Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, Dangerous, Torn, Unstoppable)

“Teamwork” (in Giant Size X-Men #3, available online)

SERENITY

Serenity: Those Left Behind

Serenity: Better Days

Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale

“Serenity: Firefly Class 03-K64 – It’s Never Easy” (available online) by Zack Whedon

Serenity: Leaves on the Wind by Zack Whedon

DOCTOR HORRIBLE

Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories by Zack Whedon

DOLLHOUSE

Epitaphs by Andrew Chambliss, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen

OTHER

“Some Steves” (in Stan Lee Meets The Amazing Spider-Man #1)

Runaways vol. 2 (#25-30) (reprinted as Dead End Kids)

Superman/Batman #26 (p. 20-21)

Sugarshock 1-3 (reprinted in Myspace Dark Horse Presents #1)

Please contact Valerie Estelle Frankel at valerie @ calithwain.com with any questions.

Willow (giving a tour of the high school to Faith): “And over here, we have the cafeteria, where we were mauled by snakes.” Xander : “And this is the spot where Angel tried to kill Willow.” Willow: “Oh, and over there in the lounge is... more

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- by David Kociemba
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- 7
  Television Studies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon, Paratexts

Introduction to Slayage special Queering the Whedonverses edition

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- by Lorna Jowett and +1
  Hélène Frohard-Dourlent
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- 4
  Queer Studies, Whedon Studies, Queer Theory and Queer Studies, Whedonverse

Whedon Studies

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