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.