Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight books 6 & 7

There were opportunities and difficulties in continuing Buffy as a comic series, and there are all kinds of interesting effects both from those and from putting a TV writer in charge of something that used to be a TV show.

He has grabbed one obvious opportunity with both hands: Buffy never had a huge budget, and the restrictions were painful in the last season in particular. This actually links in to one of the problems set by the end of the TV series: Buffy and her team had driven back the first, ultimate evil; and had magically given every potential slayer on Earth their full powers. This meant that he had to come up with something for whole squadrons of slayers to deal with next, and to work on this new scale. Fortunately, as has been said many times, comic books have an unlimited special effects budget – it’s no more costly to have spectacular monsters that don’t have to be cheap CGI or blokes in rubber suits, or massive magical effects, or spectacular transformations, than to have some girls talking in a basement. We’ve had Dawn as a giant and a centauress before these volumes, and here we have vast army-scale battles featuring huge Oriental gods and torpedos and werewolves, plus new superpowers for Buffy. So he uses the problem and the opportunity together, one solving the other.

Another problem is of story scale, not just scale of spectacle: what can follow the ultimate original demonic evil? He manages to pull off (with cavils for the moment) creating a threat that is both new and very personal, and builds the implications to universe- and soul-threatening levels, particularly in book seven of the series, where the identity of the enemy and what is happening mostly comes out. There is one more volume, which I must grab very soon, ending ‘season eight’, and it has a bit of work to do explaining some of what has gone on, which is where my remaining qualms lie, as it is less than clear that there can be a good explanation.

The fact of this being a continuation of a TV show is an interesting point too: the sense of direction and pacing here are different from most comics. Volume 7 collects up to #35 of the comic series, and it’s been as focussed on one epic story as most of the TV seasons were – this is almost unheard of in comics, with rare and often pretty special exceptions. I guess if the whole thing is eight books, that makes each book the equivalent of maybe 3 TV episodes, something like that? I guess they feel like two-parters in how much happens and the amount of conversation and so on, but there is far more of the spectacular action that couldn’t be funded on the TV show to extend the stories here.

Does it maintain the quality of the TV show? Well, with Whedon writing some and overseeing all, and with some of the best TV writers (like Espenson) returning, the writing seems very comparable in quality, as imaginative and funny and exciting as on the show, always spot on as regards character. Brad Melzer maintains this standard, although he gets a bit heavier on the agonising and soul-searching stuff, perhaps necessarily for this part of the story – I’m probably too ready to criticise him after hating his Identity Crisis.

The art is less satisfying. Jeanty isn’t a bad artist, but it is frustrating when you aren’t told who a character is and you can’t recognise them – Oz is on the cover of volume 6, so I did wonder inside if the man they met was supposed to be him, and I couldn’t think who else it could be in the circumstances, but I couldn’t even really convince myself that it was so much as an attempt to draw Oz. Otherwise, he does okay on expression, on quiet moments and huge action scenes, though there are always a few panels that look a little slapdash or rushed.

Despite the remaining doubts about how some parts of what has happened will get explained, and my less than complete happiness with the art, I am enjoying this a lot, and looking forward to reading the final book. Are we getting a season nine, does anyone know?