Predators and Prey (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, volume 6)

Gosh, it seems like forever since I wrote about volume 4 back in June. This most recent volume of Dark Horse’s comic continuation of the epic television series was released in September, but it’s taken me quite some time to catch up. First, Barnes and Noble postponed my order for about a month, and then when it finally did arrive one thing lead to another, and now here we are in November and I’m finally getting down to business.

All in all, this was a decent installment of Season 8, but the comic as a whole still fails to recapture the awesomeness that was the original television show. It has all of the same characters (well, most of them anyways), and I do like how it has boldly continued to develop the mythology of the story beyond the cataclysmic series finale. Yet much of the magic of the series has been lost in its translation into the comic medium. One of the main casualties of the switch is the show’s humor, which by and large has not carried over. The writers of Season 8 do sprinkle in the occasional witty one-liner here and there, but without the delivery of live actors the dialogue tends to fall rather flat on the page. The show should always find fresh, surprising ways of being laugh-out-loud hilarious. So far, Season 8 has yet to achieve that. Or maybe I’m just too picky, or too close to the original material to judge the comic objectively. I will say that, for what it is, Season 8 is usually a pretty solid, entertaining read. So long as one remembers that what it isn’t is as good as the original.

But anyways, on to a discussion of the particulars of volume 5, which contains issues #21-25, plus a few extras.

Issue #21, “Harmonic Divergence”, was pretty exciting in that it reintroduced one of my favorite recurring characters from the show, Harmony Kendall. Harmony was a vapid mean girl, characterized by pettiness, petulance, a week will, and an absurd love for tacky unicorn figures. Very little of her personality changed when she was made into a vampire at the end of season three (with hilarious results.) Her incorporation now into Season 8 is a really good illustration of why the comic both works and doesn’t work. Harmony’s foray into the world of reality television in this issue was a great storyline that stayed true to her original character and was very entertaining. And yet, at the same time, it just wasn’t’ the same as watching Mercedes McNab’s pitch-perfect performance. I’m not sure, but I also think the writers may have been taking a dig at (or at least playing off of) True Blood in this issue, what with their setting up Harmony as a kind of spokesperson for vampire rights, spearheading the integration of vampires into mainstream society. Of course the twist here is that the social justice movement modeled in True Blood (“vampires are people too!”) is made out to be shallow, manipulative PR designed to put a negative spin on the real heroes of society (i.e. the slayers).

Issue #22, “Swell”, featured two characters I don’t really love (Kennedy, who first appeared in season seven, and Satsu, an original creation of Season 8), but still managed to be pretty cool, regardless. Kennedy shows up in Japan to run a “standard op” evaluation of Satsu’s performance in her new role as cell leader. That’s the official reason anyways, but in truth Kennedy just wants to give Satsu a little pep talk to help her get over the whole still-in-love-with-Buffy thing. (Of course, this is Kennedy we’re talking about, so her heart-to-heart, while well intentioned, is a little bit on the abrasive side.) Nevertheless, I like the way this episode provided some closure to the whole Satsu/Buffy thing without writing off her character or making her too one-dimensional. Well done, Season 8 writers. Oh, and the Japan team also takes down an army of vampire teddy bears as well.

Issue #23, “Predators and Prey”, was kind of a confusing issue, plot-wise, that involved Andrew and Buffy tracking down a rogue slayer and her team of marauding thugettes in the Italian countryside. While the duo fails to bring Simone and her gang back over from the dark side, they do share some much needed bonding time. Ah, Andrew. Another one of my favorites from the show. If I could pick any television character to be my real-life best friend, it would be a toss up between Marshall from How I Met Your Mother or Andrew from Buffy. Sure, he’s annoying, slightly delusional, and not too long ago he was a weak-willed accomplice to murder. Yet he’s become the poster boy for second chances, and I really dig that. He’s walking proof that even geeky villain wannabees can find redemption. Plus, how much do I love the fact that, in this issue, Andrew makes the confession when confronted with certain death that he’s always been on team Spike? (I love Angel too, don’t bite my head off, I just have a special place in my heart for Spike.) So although I wasn’t too enthused about the story of this issue, I thought the character stuff was great, and at the end of the day that’s what really counts.

In issue #24, “Safe”, we return to Giles and Faith, who teamed up and kind of broke away from the slayer organization, at least temporarily, back in volume two. While I’m very glad to see these two back in action, it’s also very sad for me to be reminded of how distant Giles and Buffy have become. They barely keep in touch with each other anymore. Their relationship underwent a great deal of strain in season seven, and although there’s no real animosity between them they’ve kind of grown apart. It’s just sad considering how uber-close they were in the past, in spite of their differences. They shared a genuine father-daughter love for one another, but Buffy’s a hero, and Giles was always more willing to make the hard choices. I’d like to think their bond will never truly fade, but I guess only time will tell. Another question I had about this issue: didn’t the entire Watcher’s Council die in the bombing in season seven? Where did this survivor come from? I guess it’s not important, I just felt like that needed more explanation.

Issue #25, “Living Doll” was a little blah in the plot department as well, but it served a much greater purpose in the grand scheme of things: namely, turning Dawn back into her human form for good. This whole deal with Dawn and the tricewise’s curse dragged on long enough, and I was more than happy to see it finally explained and resolved. It seemed almost as if the writers didn’t really know what to do with her character in Season 8; this weird plotline has kind of marginalized her from the group for a while now. I hope now that she’s back to normal she will play a more integral role in slayer operations. I know Buffy wants to protect her, but Dawn’s practically grown up now, and has at least as much right to be included as Xander, who’s just as human and powerless as she. Oh! And how tickled was I when Dawn made that reference to Valley of the Dolls, which I recently finished reading?

After issue #25, volume five also contains a special short story featuring the misadventures of Harmony on her reality show, “Harmony Bites”, as well as some faux magazine inserts and advertisements from her publicity. Fun stuff, but I’m not sure how I feel about sweet, unaffected Clem (the loose-skinned demon who used to play kitten poker with Spike) being Harmony’s new “friend” (i.e. chauffeur/pawn/source-of-amusement-when-she’s-bored). I guess it makes sense, though, since Harmony uses people and Clem’s a total pushover. I just feel bad for the guy. I wonder if the two ever reminisce about their former mutual friend Spike?

Volume six of Season 8, entitled “Retreat”, will be released in March of 2010.

Time of Your Life (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Volume 4)

And speaking of semi-cannon print continuations of film/tv classics, the fourth collected volume of the “eighth season” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out last month. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of the comic book medium (by which I mean traditional U.S style comics as opposed to graphic novels, for example, or manga). I generally prefer their cartoon adaptations, as is the case with my beloved X-Men. That being said, I have been following the comic book continuation of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ended with its seventh season in 2003, primarily because I love that universe and am a total sucker for all things related to it. So when the fourth volume of the collected edition, entitled Time of Your Life and containing issues #16 – #20, came out a few weeks ago, I hustled my butt down to Barnes & Noble and plunked down sixteen bucks for my copy. While the comic series doesn’t necessarily retain all the charm and appeal of the show, it nevertheless provides lots of fun for fans and usually a good read as well.

The title “Time of Your Life” refers to issues #16 – #19, a time travel story arc that also crosses over with Fray, an eight-issue comic about the slayer of the future. In this arc, Buffy and Willow head to the New York group on some mystical tip Willow got through the vague and mysterious spiritual pipeline and end up – you guessed it – walking into a trap. Bottom line: Buffy gets transported 200 years into the future and finds herself in a sci-fi version of Manhattan coming face-to-face with Fray, a slayer whose English is even more garbled and incomprehensible than Buffy’s. Once she adjusts to the bizarre circumstances a bit, Buffy’s dismayed to see the rather grim conditions of the future, and to learn that the number of total slayers has somehow dwindled back down to one (in fact, Fray’s the first to be called in years.) Before she can piece together the whole, story, however, we find out just who’s been pulling the strings behind Buffy’s little jaunt through time. Well, the cover art kind of gave it away, but yes, it’s Dark Willow! (dun dun dun) But she’s not like the Dark Willow of season six, who was full of incontrollable rage. This is a Willow darkened not by sudden anger, but rather twisted and hardened by the inexorable passage of time and filled with cold, merciless calculation, and perhaps not a little sadness as well. Her motives for bringing Buffy to this time are not exactly clear, but it doesn’t take long for her to turn Fray and Buffy against one another.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Dawn and Xander are left to hold down the Scotland base. This proves rather difficult when Amy and Warren (these two never die, do they?) orchestrate a two-pronged supernatural/technical attack on behalf of their new boss, the ominous and mysterious Twilight (who is undoubtedly the big bad of Season Eight.) Xander and Dawnie and the rest of the troops pull through in the end, of course, but not before sustaining some casualties and having a hilarious encounter with the tree-folk of the forest surrounding the castle. Also in this arc, we get to see a lot more of Kennedy (she and Willow are evidently still a thing), and we learn that Riley Finn has apparently gone over to the dark side. Too bad Buffy still thinks he’s a reliable source.

After all the intense action of issues #16 – #19, I really loved how issue #20 provided a little break from the increasingly entangled developments of the Season Eight mythology. Entitled “After These Messages … We’ll Be Right Back”, this issue was much lighter in tone and really played up the nostalgia factor by hearkening back to the early days of the original series, showing us how much has changed since then, but also how much is still the same. In this issue, Buffy returns to the base totally exhausted from an evening of demon slaying and has a strange dream in which she finds herself back at Sunnydale High, as if the past eight years had never happened. Initially thrilled to be relieved of the pressures of leading a worldwide slayer army, she soon finds that high-school slaying isn’t all fun and games the way she remembers. I loved this issue. I loved seeing old characters like Cordelia and Joyce and Principal Snyder, not to mention the high-school versions of Buffy and Willow (let’s face it, Xander hasn’t really changed all that much, bless his heart). I loved how the art during the dream sequence shifted to a more cartoonish, Betty-and-Veronica type of stylization. I loved how it was funny like the original series was, but also drove home a really powerful message about what changes over time and what remains constant.

All in all, Time of Your Life was a pretty nifty installment of Season Eight. I never read the Fray series, but I was still able to follow and enjoy the crossover. The series may not be as funny or clever as the show was, but it’s still really engaging and enjoyable. Plus, with little gems like “After These Messages” and the tree-folk embedded here and there throughout the series, how could I not read it? Also, the artwork is gorgeous. I kind of like that the characters don’t look exactly like the actors from the show; the series has its own distinctive style. And if there’s one thing that comic books have over manga and graphic novels, it’s color. The colors in here are so prettyyyy. If nothing else, Season Eight sure is easy on the eyes.