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.