Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #18

September 12, 2008

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #18 (Dark Horse Comics)
By Joss Whedon, Karl Moline & Jo Chen

Trapped in the future, Buffy breaks the cardinal rule for time-travelers — she tries to look up info about her own future. What’s even more depressing, though, is when she discovers that she didn’t make the books. The legend of Buffy Summers was never written. Time to kill some vamps to make up for it. Gunther, meanwhile, gets a visit from Fray’s brother. Back in the present, Willow may have found a way to rescue Buffy, and Dawn and Xander continue their flight, with plenty more requisite innuendo. I can’t be the only one at this point who thinks Whedon is hinting at some sort of relationship between these two… after all, in this time frame she’s got to be 18 or 19, while he’s probably 25-ish. It’s not really that unthinkable. And if that’s not the plan, then Whedon is throwing a heck of a lot of red herrings out. But it’s not all sex — we’ve got some new monsters here, which Moline provides a great visual for, and the Willow story is getting more and more intense. This title continues to be a great continuation of the Buffy saga.
Rating: 8/10

 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #17

August 9, 2008

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #17 (Dark Horse Comics)
By Joss Whedon, Karl Moline & Jo Chen

A disturbance in time has hurled Buffy forward to the distant future, where she counters the girl called Fray, the first slayer in centuries. As Buffy tries to acclimate herself to the strange world she’s emerged into, back home Willow tries to find her while Xander and Dawn come under attack. Whedon is doing something unexpected with Xander and Dawn here, and while I’m not 100 percent sure where he’s going, I’ve got my suspicions. The interaction between Buffy and Fray is fun, and while Whedon tries a little too hard to whip up some future jargon, he doesn’t go far enough that it becomes confusing. Karl Moline, artist of the original Fray miniseries, is right at home both in the future and the present. I’d be a little concerned that people who haven’t read Fray could get confused by this issue, but Whedon does a decent job of getting you up to speed on all the players. And the end of this issue, of course, is one of those gut-punch cliffhangers he just loves to pull on us. The further we go into this series, the more I love it.
Rating: 9/10

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #16

July 6, 2008

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #16 (Dark Horse Comics)
By Joss Whedon, Karl Moline & Jo Chen

Joss Whedon re-teams with Karl Moline, artist of the original Fray miniseries, for the character’s return. As Dawn’s transformation takes a new form, the Wiccan squad in Manhattan detects a strange temporal anomaly, a sort of “reverse-echo” bouncing back to the present day from some point in the future. As Buffy and the gang investigate, Buffy finds herself face-to-face with a warrior girl from a different time. The Fray miniseries (which featured a slayer from the distant future) was a fan favorite, and seeing her return here in such a way as to interact with the rest of Buffy’s world is a lot of fun. Dawn’s storyline continues to be intriguing, and there’s a strange bit of progression for Xander here as well. I must say, I’m not really certain where Whedon is planning to go with this character, but as the series approaches the halfway point, we can expect things to get a lot stranger before they calm down. This series continues to feel like a strong, natural way to progress these characters, even as Whedon and company take advantage of the comic book format. We probably never would have — or could have — seen this story on the TV show, but it certainly feels like it belongs to that universe.
Rating: 4/5