When Joss Whedon's television show Firefly (2002-2003) was cancelled, devoted fans cried foul and demanded more--which led to the 2005 feature film Serenity. Both the series and the film were celebrated for their melding of science fiction and western iconography, dystopian settings, underdog storylines, and clever fast-paced dialogue. Firefly has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention--less so, Serenity. This collection of new essays, the first focusing exclusively on the film, examines its depictions of race, ableism, social engineering and systems of power, and its status as a crime film, among other topics.

In Organizational Approaches to the Works of Joss Whedon, Andrew F. Herrmann offers an in-depth analysis of the connections between communication, organization, gender, discourse, and ethics in the works of Joss Whedon. Herrmann examines how characters go to work in organizations, how characters fight against organizations, and how some organizations themselves are characters. Whedon’s works offer both popular and scholarly appeal, often including portrayals of organizations, such as The Union of Allied Planets in Firefly and Serenity and S.H.I.E.L.D. in The Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Herrmann argues that by looking at how Whedon portrays these organizations—including the ways in which employees are impacted by their organizations and how decision-making is affected by gender, masculinity, and economic discourses—we can gain fresh insights into our own working lives. Scholars of film studies, organizational communication, gender, rhetoric, and ethics will find this book particularly useful.

The films, television shows, and graphic novel series that comprise the Whedonverse continually show that there is a high price to be paid for love, rebellion, heroism, anger, death, betrayal, friendship, and saving the world. This collection of essays reveals the ways in which the Whedonverse treats the trauma of ordinary life with similar gravitas as trauma created by the supernatural, illustrating how memories are lost, transformed, utilized, celebrated, revered, questioned, feared, and rebuffed within the storyworlds created by Joss Whedon and his collaborators. Through a variety of approaches and examinations, the essays in this book seek to understand how the themes of trauma, memory, and identity enrich one another in the Whedonverse and beyond. As the authors present different arguments and focus on various texts, the essays work to build a mosaic of the trauma found in beloved works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, and more. The book concludes with a meta-analysis that explores the allegations of various traumas made against Joss Whedon himself.

Joss Whedon's works, across all media including television, film, musicals, and comic books, are known for their commitment to gender and sexual equality. They have always encouraged their audiences to love whomever, and however, they wish. This book is a history of the sexualities represented in the works of Joss Whedon and it covers all of Whedon's genres, including fantasy, horror, science fiction, westerns, superhero stories, and Shakespearean comedy. Unique for its consideration of the entire arc of Whedon's two-decade career, from the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's first season in 1997 through the conclusion of its twelfth (comic book) season in 2018, this book examines in detail both better-known queer sexualities of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and lesser-known non-normative sexualities. The book includes chapters on Whedon's sexually dominant women and submissive men, sexual pluralism on Firefly, disabled sexualities in Whedon's superhero narratives, zoophilia in Buffy, queer and heteronormative sexualities in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the subversion of the sexual tropes of slasher films in The Cabin in Woods, and dominance and submission in Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing.

This book explores the transmedial nature of the storyworlds created by and/or affiliated with television auteur, writer, and filmmaker, Joss Whedon. As such, the book addresses the ways in which Whedon’s storyworlds, or ‘verses, employ transmedia, both intrinsically as texts and extrinsically as these texts are consumed and, in some cases, reworked, by audiences. This collection walks readers through fan and scholar-fan engagement, intrinsic textual transmediality, and Whedon’s lasting influence on televisual and transmedia texts. In closing, the editors argue for the need to continue research into how the Whedonverse(s) lend themselves to transmedial study, engage audiences in ways that take advantage of multiple media, and encourage textual internalization of these engagements within audiences.

Director, producer and screenwriter Joss Whedon is a creative force in film, television, comic books and a host of other media. This book provides an authoritative survey of all of Whedon's work, ranging from his earliest scriptwriting on Roseanne, through his many movie and TV undertakings--Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly/Serenity, Dr. Horrible, The Cabin in the Woods, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.--to his forays into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The book covers both the original texts of the Whedonverse and the many secondary works focusing on Whedon's projects, including about 2000 books, essays, articles, documentaries and dissertations.

According to Joss Whedon, the creator of the short-lived series Firefly (2002), the cult show is about “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things.” The chronicles of crewmembers on a scruffy space freighter, Firefly ran for only four months before its abrupt cancellation. In that brief time, however, it established a reputation as one of the best science-fiction programs of the new millennium: sharply written, superbly cast, and set on an exotic multicultural frontier unlike anything ever seen on the small screen. The show’s large, enthusiastic fan following supported a series of comics and a theatrical film, Serenity (2005), that extended the story, deepened the characters, and revealed new wonders and dangers on the deep-space frontier. In Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series, Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith present a collection that reflects on the program, the characters, and the post-cancellation film and comics that grew out of the show. The contributors to this volume offer fresh perspectives on familiar characters and blaze new trails into unexplored areas of the Firefly universe. Individual essays explore the series’ place in the history of the space-Western subgenre, the political economy of the Alliance, and the uses of music and language in the series to immerse audiences in a multicultural future. These essays look at how the show offered viewers high adventure as well as engaged with a range of themes that still resonate today. As such, Firefly Revisited will intrigue the show’s many fans, as well as Whedon scholars and anyone interested in the twenty-first-century renaissance of science-fiction television.