Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8

In a perfect world, this comic book would not exist, because in a perfect world, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would never have ended its seven-year run on television. It would still air on a very accomodating network, sharing an evening with its sister series Angel and Joss’ most other since-cancelled TV series, Firefly. It would be three freaking hours of Whedony goodness and the birds would sing and the sky would be ever blue and peace would reign over all the land …

However, we do not live in a perfect world and so Buffy’s “season eight” has arrived to us instead as a comic book. It is very good...and slightly strange.

First, the “very good” stuff. Tone-wise, creator Joss Whedon picks up exactly where he left off with the television series. The humor, pop culture references and spot-on quirky characterizations are all on vibrant display. Immediately, there is also a sense that the story unfolding is just a chunk of a larger whole—you know there’s a roadmap, and that Joss is leading in a direction that will be followed by the other writers on the series. On the art side, penciler Georges Jeanty pulls off an amazing job. He’s clearly a comic book artist, so he knows how to lay out a page and capture motion. Yet, he can also draw a Xander that actually LOOKS enough like Xander to BE Xander, if you catch my drift. He wisely doesn’t even try to capture a photorealistic look for his faces, instead relying on more of a “squint and you’ll recognize them” approach...and I mean that in a very good way. He brings these people to life not as drawings of actors and actresses, but as fully-realized comic book characters in their own right.

Now for the “strange.” There’s something subtly undermining this effort simply because it’s a comic book and not on television. Geeks have been so fiercely trained that ONLY the moving picture version of our favorite franchises is “canon” and the rest only really matters so long as the auteur at the heart of the enterprise doesn’t piss all over it on the big or small screen. It’s like my mind can’t embrace that this Buffy comic is really the next chapter in the Buffyverse mythos just because it’s a comic. I realize on some level that since Joss is writing it, it carries the authorial weight of full “canon.” Incidentally, I realize just how ludicrous it is to use the word “canon” in reference to the adventures of a vampire-slaying teenager’s adventures, instead of the work of a major composer or novelist. I just can’t get my tiny, geek brain to accept that we’re really seeing season eight realized. A minor and small-minded quibble, perhaps, but a quibble nonetheless.

This is a great comic book and both Whedon and Jeanty are on top of their respective games. With talents like Brian K. Vaughn, Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard waiting in the wings to pen future issues, it looks as though we’re in for quite a ride. It’s definitely a comic book and it definitely feels like one, so if that isn’t what you were hoping to get from Buffy season eight, you might feel a pang of disappointment. Yet short of a miracle that replaces all the soul-sucking network television executives with men and women who prize talent and creativity over pimple cream commercials, this is the best we’re gonna get, so we may as well enjoy it.