The character Kitty Pryde from the X-Men comic was an early model for Whedon's strong teenage girl characters: "If there's a bigger influence on Buffy than Kitty, I don’t know what it was. She was an adolescent girl finding out she has great power and dealing with it." Many of Whedon's young female characters went through the same type of thing. Whedon has now come full circle, writing the character of Kitty Pryde in the "Astonishing X-Men" comic.