comic

So I bailed on last month’s Buffy comic review/recap – mostly because I got carried away with other things and partly because issue seven was the first real disappointment of the series (though maybe “underwhelming” might be more fair). Anyways, Faith has donned a fake British accent and gone undercover at the estate of rogue slayer and super-villain Genevieve… to kill her. But as it so often happens with Faith, she’s straying from the mission and feeling the temptation of the high life, hoodlumery and possibly same-sex hanky panky. All of this would be fun if she wasn’t playing off of such a flat, annoying character. More >

It seems fitting that this month’s sidetrack into the world of television-related comic books fall on the first day of Comic-Con – which I unfortunately am not attending. One blessed week ahead of schedule, the fifth installment of the eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on the shelves. It marks the first stand-alone issue and the last to be penned by Joss Whedon for an indefinite amount of time. Apparently a story he was quite anxious to tell, The Chain focuses on one of the unnamed faux-Buffys planted by the new council to keep evil on its toes. And if you’re at all familiar with the last season of Angel: no, it’s not the fun “Buffy”, hoing it up in Italy… it’s the emo “Buffy” who has to live in caves and be unceremoniously killed.

Just as he likes them, Joss’s anonymous heroine is strong, intelligent, selfless and ultimately tragic. It seems odd that after all of this time he still feels the need to deviate from the linear storytelling for a random parable of female empowerment. Isn’t this girl just another Buffy, Faith, River or Fray? Actually, she’s not. Unlike her predecessors, she exists in a vacuum – without friends, family, history and, given of the brevity of her cameo, she will never even have fans. Joss has tried to create characters that are truly alone in the past, but because of either his affection for them or the fans’, they never remain completely detached. This is the heroism he seems to like the best, the noblest of sacrifices, but this was the only way he could really tell it.

The Chain is brief but poignant. It’s not funny like the previous books, and our glimpses of familiar Buffyverse faces or mighty brief. As the pencils go, Paul Lee’s first stab at the new incarnation of the Buffy seems to be a bit more accurate than Georges Jeanty’s. Andrew and Vi (the red-headed, beret-wearing potential) show up in a hilarious infomercial aimed at educating new slayers, and for the first time in the series, comic book Andrew actually resembles Tom Lenk.

Buffy: Season Eight returns in early September with the first of a four issue arc that promises a lot of Faith, a lot of Giles and a lot of Cleveland (which, Liz Lemon, ain’t so hot). The Chain was an entertaining and heartfelt departure, but I’m much more interested in the folks I know and the story that matters. Futility is too depressing.

Last month’s installment of the Buffy Season Eight comic series left our heroine in a magically induced coma. Though just one of many cliffhangers, the excitement of seeing how Buffy would wake up paled in comparison to the prospect of seeing some classic Whedon dreamcapades.

Joss Whedon has always been quick to dramatize and exploit the absurdity of the human mind and the potential for truly outlandish subconscious activity – going so far as to devote an entire episode of Buffy to explore the goings on in deepest recesses of the four leads’ brains. Because of his heavy use of the subject matter, Buffy herself was often forced to rely on her dreams, on herself, to get to the bottom of her most dire circumstances. The comic book proves no exception to this tradition.

As funny as it was confusing, Buffy’s bizarre dream showcases the comic’s most impressive visuals thus far. After what might be the most amazing image ever drawn in all history on page three, Buffy falls through time and space, past hundreds of memories. George Jeanty’s renderings of classic Buffy moments and characters (and hilarious cameo by Whedon himself) seemed to raise the bar even higher for the series, but left me disappointed in the subsequent pages when Buffy started to look increasingly puffy, leaving her more closely resembling a post-rehab Britney Spears than Sarah Michelle Gellar. Despite that misstep, it’s his portrayal of Andrew (however brief his appearances remain) that continues to be the least convincing.

Now that we’ve been reunited with Willow, and she’s about to face-off with an old nemesis I was almost positive we’d never see again, I haven’t the slightest idea where he’s going with this story. But it’s going somewhere fast – The Long Way Home concludes next month, and with it, so does the first Whedon-penned portion of Season Eight.

It took almost the whole of the two years since Joss Whedon’s announcement that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would get an eighth season in comic book form* for me to reconcile reading it. Though I’m confident in his abilities (Joss penned for the first arc and crafted the plot outline of the entire run), I am one of the few fans who was utterly content with the way almost everything was wrapped up. I didn’t see the need to open old wounds, kick dead horses or alter my perfect memories. After all, I have spent the majority of my life suffering from an unhealthy obsession with this character and the thought of voluntarily seeing her go through any more misery (without the payoff of an extravagant film), just seemed too risky.

As I should have known, and as anyone might have predicted, I caved several months ago when plot details, cover images and Whedon quotes started popping up online. The Buffy-shaped hole in my heart has been vacant for too long and I’ll fill it with anything you’ll toss my way – even if it involves subjecting myself to comic book people for the second time in less than a month.

And so I bit the bullet, found a quiet space in my office, and absorbed the first bit of Buffy canon that’s been thrown my way since the mediocre, severely misleading, final season of Angel. We reunite with Buffy a year or so after the destruction of Sunnydale, commanding one squad of the Slayer army, and kicking some serious ass. Here’s where the bittersweet starts to kick in. Joss Whedon loves comic books as a medium because they allow the creator to pull crazy stunts – too impractical or expensive for film or television. Seeing Buffy dive off of a helicopter into an ancient Scottish cathedral and start wrastling demons five times the size of anything we saw on the show is as exciting as it is sad. It makes me nostalgic for a visually sumptuous Buffy that I never saw on TV and I’m certain I’ll never be lucky enough to see in film. Falling somewhere between books and TV, comics eliminate the need to rely on imagination but don’t allow for complete visual saturation. It’s something I respect, but as a medium, it falls into a grey area that I traditionally avoid.

But for roughly the next two years, I will be very much in the grey. And if this issue is setting the standard, that’ll be just fine with me. The Long Way Home started warming my cockles about five pages in, when my hands stopped shaking long enough to fully indulge in the glory of Joss Whedon’s dialogue. There is nothing happening on these pages that couldn’t have easily happened on the show, and none of the words written would sound unnatural coming out of cast-members’ mouths. Even one of the new slayers is written in a bizarre Irish/Cuban/German accent like the dearly departed (and hilariously portrayed) Kendra.

The comic is not without its flaws. The potentials are still there, but now there are thousands and they’ve more or less fulfilled their potential. I’m all about female empowerment, but can the other slayers not speak – like mute, violent lady-monks? I’m also not too pleased with the fact that Buffy isn’t frolicking through the hills of her puppy farm with a newly mortal Angel (as I had imagined her fate), but I doubt that storyline could stretch for 22 issues. Buffy still has her ennui, and changing the world is taking a lot more work than she’s hoped for.

So while nothing is perfect, this comes ridiculously close. And with a once irrelevant Scooby given an amusing and unexpected storyline, long-forgotten characters assuming unique and villainous roles and so many others still waiting in the wings, Buffy Season Eight looks to be a new monthly highlight; more exciting than what’s on TV these days, but probably never as great as what we once had.

*pardon the deviation from the orthodox, but it’s TV to me.