And so it came to pass that several decades after Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 9 launched, I didst sit upon mine writing stool and pour forth upon the page mine thoughts as to the worth of Volume One of... Season 8.
Yeah, I'm slow. What of it?
First things first, let's just get out of the way the fact that a) I'm an unapologetic gusher of superlatives (or I would be if I knew any; my thesaurus has disappeared) when it comes to the writing of Joss Whedon, and b) Buffy The Vampire Slayer is, in my opinion, one of the greatest television shows of it's, or any other, era. That said, I'd like to think I can put aside any lingering hero worship and read this material with my critical faculties intact.
IT WAS AWESOME! Ahem.
Season 8, for those who don't know, is; or was, since it's long ended and it's successor is in full flow; an official, canonical continuation of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, picking up shortly after the events at the end of the 7th and final season of the TV show. Clue's in the name really.
The worry was that, for all the protestations from the publisher and Joss Whedon, who was on board to plot the 'season' and write pivotal issues, it wouldn't be real Buffy. Tie in comics rarely, at least in my opinion, achieve the true feel of the source material, and there is always the stigma of, 'if it's not on TV it doesn't count.' Hopefully Whedon's involvement would counter the first point, but the second would be harder to tackle; being, as it was, a perception ingrained in the reader for many years. Just ask the Star Trek TV writers how much they worried about contradicting the print stuff.
Luckily, we needn't have worried. At least as far as the first five issues are concerned; that being the material collected in this first volume; the feel is pretty much spot on. Characters sound like their TV counterparts, with all the laugh out loud moments of dialogue that come along with that, and while the storyline is on a much bigger scale to that of the TV show, it's in a way that makes perfect sense, given the way the show ended. After all, when last we waved farewell to Buffy, she'd just saved the world at the head of what was essentially a Slayer Army.
The events depicted in this book could never have happened onscreen. Casting logistics alone; a lot of old faces show up in rapid succession; would cause them problems but the budget... The very first scene in the book is of Buffy leading an assault team of Slayers, by sky diving from a helicopter. Yeah. Oh, and it also features dialogue about Nick Fury, which made me chuckle, given a certain modest little movie Whedon has just released.
We get a lot of plot in amongst the witty dialogue and the action scenes. A couple of old villains show up to cause trouble, another old villain cashes in his chips, the US military make their presence known in a much more overt way than The Initiative ever did and we get a few hints that none of them are going to be the main villains of the piece, when all is said and done. Because that would just be too easy, wouldn't it?
Oh, and Dawn is a giant. Just because.
Artwise, the interiors (by Georges Jeanty) offer work in which you always know who it is you're meant to be looking at, without ever seeming like exact likenesses of the actors. I'm sure there's probably a name for that, but I know nothing about this stuff so... The covers of the individual issues, though (by Jo Chen), all of which are included, are incredibly lifelike paintings, very obviously based on the cast's likenesses and in some cases creepily accurate.
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