Between Seasons: Buffy Season Ten speculation

Last time, I spent a long time recapping the end of Season Nine, finally freed from the shackles of avoiding spoilers. Now that I’ve wrapped up the season and put it behind me (at least, until the final trades come out), it’s time to look ahead, carefully consider what has come before, and be completely wrong about the future. This is just part 1 – my speculation got so out of hand it’ll be split across two articles. For now, I’m going to focus on what creative teams and series will be present.

Left to Right: Scott Allie, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg, Joss Whedon, Nicholas Brendon, Andrew Chambliss, Ruth Gage, Christos Gage, Victor Gischler

The closest to any concrete information we have right now is the Season Ten Writers’ Summit (see picture). This was the meeting where they determined the direction that Season Ten would take, and I think it’s safe to assume most, if not all, will be writing for the next season.

My first reaction is that Christos Gage is coming back. He’d confirmed that on Twitter way back in April, if not earlier, but concrete proof is good. Angel & Faith was easily the best series in Season Nine (like I’ve never shut up about), so while we don’t yet know what he’ll write, just the fact that he will be is a positive (in my dream world, he’d write it all). If he was announced as writing the main Buffy series, my opinion would go from “I’ll read it, I guess” to “Have to read it!” immediately, but I won’t get my hopes up too much.
Victor Gischler was a surprise to me. Yes, he was a part of the previous season, but I didn’t know that the Spike miniseries was well enough received that they wanted to make sure that he came back. That’s not to mean that I don’t want him to come back, I just don’t know what to think about it quite yet. (Notably, Jeff Parker, who wrote Willow: Wonderland, is absent.)

Jane Espenson, Andrew Chambliss, and Drew Z. Greenberg were also present. I’m not surprised, but not happy. It’s no secret that I hated the Billy storyline, which was written by Espenson and Greenberg. The main Buffy series was a bit of a mess in general, and most of it was written by Andrew Chambliss, so this looks bad all around. They’re not bad writers, they’re TV writers, and that doesn’t translate directly to comic writing. I wouldn’t have a problem with them being to help with story (which is obviously the main reason Joss and Scott Allie are there), especially since Espenson has been around since the second season of Buffy, but their track record with the comics doesn’t leave me with an abundance of optimism.

I’ll be back to the picture in a moment (I know that everyone wants me to mention one specific thing), but there is one (at the time of writing) recent announcement that might have an effect on this season. Georges Jeanty has been announced as artist for a Serenity series (I’ll talk about that once there’s something concrete to talk about), so I don’t know for sure if he’s going to be back for Season Ten. Given that he’s been drawing the comic for the last six years and seems to love it, I doubt he would, but it’s still a possibility.

Okay, I’ll finally talk about the elephant in the room (though he’s not that large): Nicholas Brendon. Anyone who’s seen the series will recognize him as Xander, and that’s what makes this so interesting. The comics (well, some questionably canonical ones) aren’t strangers to having actors help with writing (Amber Benson and Juliet Landau wrote comics that involved their characters), but their quality is debated at best. Nick does have some experience writing comics, specifically a web comic called Very Bad Koalas (which I admittedly haven’t read), but his presence is already controversial before having written anything, which is just par for the course as fandom goes.

This does lead into the other thing that I want to talk about with Season Ten: the structure. After Season Eight lasted forever, going off on tangents (and off the rails) that left everyone confused by trying to shoehorn everything into a single series, they divided Season Nine into two series running simultaneously with occasional miniseries along the way. That seemed to be a success, and I’m assuming that they’ll do something similar this season as well. The question is, what series are they going to do this time?

The reason that relates to Nick Brendon is that implies a miniseries focused on Xander (something on the scale of the Spike or Willow series), which I wouldn’t have expected based on the comics alone. Yes, they did a lot with his character and I want to see what they do from here, I just didn’t expect that based only on the comics.

The most obvious prediction is that there will be a Buffy Season Ten comic. That is not a question at this point – there will be something with Buffy as the central character, given that she’s the namesake not only for the series, but also the entire universe (it is called the “Buffyverse”, after all).

I’m also going to assume that there’s going to be an Angel series as well, not just because of an Angel spin-off being the status quo, but also the ending of Season Nine. Angel is going back to basics, helping the helpless, and him starting over in London would be a good place to start a new series (more on that later).
Besides that, I don’t know if they could make a third main series for the season. There’s the possibility, but I feel that most everything would work as recurring characters in one of those series or miniseries along the way. Now, why do their stories fit that mold better? What are those stories going to be? I’m saving that speculation for the next article, where I participate in even more baseless speculation.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) knows that it’s likely things are going to be Jossed, probably as soon as the first issue of the next series comes out. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Review: Angel & Faith Volume 4: Death and Consequences

Just a note upfront – shortly after issue #18 was published, Robin Sachs, the actor who played Ethan Rayne, died of a heart attack. That made this story arc slightly awkward to read, especially since it involved his dead body being reanimated by a demon.

Postmortem awkwardness aside, this story arc returns to the resurrection storyline after the minor distraction that was Angel visiting his son’s wonderful childhood home. In Death and Consequences (written by Christos Gage, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs), Angel sets out to finish collecting Giles’s soul in his enchanted nipple ring after discovering where the rest of his soul would be located.

Something that strikes me is that a lot of this arc is a retcon of things that happened as far back as Season Two of the series. In some places, it does slow the story down a bit in order to explain away how things happened before, but it does that for the sake of actually improving that old story and opening up possibilities. I was always bothered by the way that the show handled Eyghon all the way back in Season Two – for a demon that was supposedly so powerful and spent twenty years tracking down Giles and his cohorts, he sure went down easily. No, there wasn’t really a flaw in the logic that the demon in Angel managed to kick Eyghon out, but the idea that he was so much more powerful as to kill him felt wrong, so I was glad to see this retcon, especially with the story possibilities that it opened up.

Nadira is also a major character in this arc, and she’s one of the few good characters created specifically for the comics (interestingly, they’re almost all in this series), showing that they can actually make characters for the comics that people will like (unlike, say, Billy). When I first read this, I had almost forgotten that she learned about Angel working with Faith before the previous arc, and I didn’t really know how she was going to handle it. From the beginning, they made it obvious that she wasn’t exactly going to be forgiving towards Angel for what he’d done as Twilight (if it was him, or not, or whoever he was – it’s really confusing, and they lampshade that here), but I expected the conflict to bubble over at a later point inthe series, not this early. Even though it’s obvious given the context (especially the name of the series) that he wasn’t going to die this early, it still felt like she was actually going to kill him if he didn’t cooperate.

There’s also Spike, who comes into the series here for a short time. Throughout the entire run of Buffy and Angel, Spike’s banter and general disdain for Angel was great to watch, and it continues here. Until now, there’d never been any on-screen interaction between Spike, Angel, and Faith at the same time (this is technically on a page, not a screen, but my point is the same), and they all have a wonderful chemistry together. As I’ve said before for Christos Gage, I can hear the actors saying his dialogue for the characters, and Spike is no different. His introductory line to Angel is, well, perfect for Spike, and if you don’t read it in James Marsters’s voice, then something is wrong with you.

For the first time in this series, Rebekah Isaacs illustrated one of the issues that’s a multiple of five, and I’m glad she did. Even though they tend to be one-shot issues (#25 wasn’t, but the others were), the change in art was jarring and distracting more than anything else. For this one, we finally have continuity and the characters look like I’m used to them looking by now, which make a contribution to that issue, Spike and Faith. Now, a lot of people have big problems with this issue, and while I agree that it’s not one of the stronger ones in the series, I don’t think it really deserves that hatred. The story was a little thin for an issue and it’s obvious that they were waiting for the beginning of the next arc, but the characters sound like themselves and it has some really fun banter between them so, even though I’m not going to say it’s one of the better issues, I don’t think it’s the character derailment a lot of fans treat it as. Taking it apart and going into why would take a whole other article that I’m not going to write, so don’t bother holding your breath.

Best cover in the series.

On the subject of extra features, I think I want to see all of Rebekah Isaacs’s sketchbooks. This isn’t as robust as some extra features I’ve seen in other trades, but the thing I love is that it allows you to really get inside her head. She explains a lot about what she draws and why she made the decisions that she did, including showing older design sketches and telling us exactly why they didn’t work (for example, her first sketch of Eyghon looked too much like “guy in a suit”, so she made it more grotesque and demonic), which manages to take what would otherwise be just a series of pictures and manage to tell a story out of the making of the story. I love these extra features, but best of all, it ends on the variant cover for issue #20, which is easily my favorite cover in the series.

Overall, another good story that I recommend, even if the last part is a little bit shaky. It’s worth the $17.99 cover price, though if you don’t care about the special features or don’t need the nice looking trade paperback, you can always buy the individual issues in physical or digital form, but I really think it’s worth it to get the trade.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) wishes this arc was called “Angel extracts a man’s soul from his enchanted nipple ring”. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Review: Angel & Faith #25

Oh wow, this is going to be difficult. I love this series, and it’s coming to an end. Angel & Faith #25 (written by Christos Gage, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs), the final issue of the Angel & Faith miniseries and second last issue of Buffy Season Nine. I hate to see it happen because I love the series so much, but since it had to end, I’ll take the one they gave us over any other one I can think of.

There’s not much I can say about the plot, given that it’s the end of the series. There are events in this issue that are going to have a huge impact on Season Ten. There’s no restoring the previous status quo, which was never really a fear of mine but still a possibility. Many important things happened in this series, and they’ll all have an impact on the future. While I don’t want it to end, it is going to have an impact on the future, so while I believe that a good story should be able to stand on its own regardless of how it fits into any kind of continuity, the fact that everything will have a lasting impact can only be a positive for a series this good.

It also wraps up all the different character arcs running throughout the series. It manages to feel like a real ending and not just the point where they decided to stop before telling the next story. In the case of this miniseries, it really does work pretty well as a standalone – while the setup of the universe might require some prior knowledge, that manages to be filled in throughout, and the series as a whole stands up on its own well enough that I could tell anyone, even without knowing the Buffy universe, to read this series, and I trust that they’d be able to get it and get a good, satisfying story out of it.

The art continues to be great, but you knew that already. We’ve seen pretty much everything the book has to offer so far, but one thing that I want to bring up because I never did before was the effects that the magic leaking had on regular civilians. A decent part of this book is spent with people like that visible, and this is one of those areas where the shift to the comic medium has been a help to the series. While these kind of effects were pulled off in the show on a pretty regular basis (the vast majority of the demons were people in prosthetics and makeup), they tended to be either full transformation or just different enough to be unsettling. All of these designs look like just having fun with trying to make humans look fully human while still being quite different – I somehow doubt that the effects of a person having wings would’ve played out well on the show, for example.

At this point, I don’t know what else I’m able to say about this issue without just telling you I definitely recommend you buy it. Don’t expect a revisiting until the trades come out, though – need some real time to digest this series and everything that’s happened in it. Though I’m still getting over the fact that one of my favorite series is ending, it’s the right ending for this series. I’m unable to think of a better way for it to end, so even though I don’t want it to end, they pulled it off. Just go out there and pay $2.99 for it already. I’m already looking forward to when it comes out and I can read the entire series again beginning to end in one sitting. And if you’re obscenely late to the party, there are three trade paperbacks and all the other single issues that you should buy. You can read it even if you don’t know the Buffyverse, and if you like having the entire story all at once, now is the time.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is now going to spend his time waiting to figure out what exactly Christos Gage is writing in Season Ten, hoping that announcements come soon. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Review: Willow Wonderland TPB

After Buffy Season Eight took four years to end, Season Nine took a different approach, being made up of multiple miniseries running concurrently. In theory, this was a great idea, allowing them to cover more ground in a shorter amount of time, allowing each series to feel more focused than the sometimes schizophrenic Season Eight, and giving nostalgic fans a sense of similarity to Buffy and Angel airing concurrently on TV. Of course, this idea only works as well as the individual series themselves, so how exactly does Willow-Wonderland (written by Jeff Parker and Christos Gage, illustrated by Brian Ching) stand up on its own merits?

I previously mentioned my general dislike for this miniseries, though I didn’t go into much detail and was slightly off on how I remembered it (in my defense, it had been a little while since I’d read it). The biggest thing that I mentioned was the problem with the way that Willow talked; she’s not just an incredibly powerful, mystical witch, she’s also a woman in her mid-20s who grew up in California in the late 1990s. I’d said that second element was missing from her character, but it wasn’t entirely accurate to say that. Both of those elements are there – except that they’re separate. She seems to go back and forth between mystical goddess and Season One Willow (remember that, from all that time ago?) without any real in between. It seems to get better as the series progresses, coinciding with, no surprise, when Christos Gage joins in the third issue. It causes the story to get off on a bad foot and leaves a bad impression that lasts the rest of the series.

The next problem, however, cannot be fixed by better dialogue or characterization. The story, while not as bad as I remembered (and plugging a couple of plot holes in the last issues of Season Nine), is chaotic and has almost no attention span. Willow goes from being focused on bringing magic back to Earth to joining some magical lesbian orgy coven, to trying to deal with her dark side (which I thought she dealt with between Seasons Six and Seven, when she was reunited with everyone early in Season Seven, again at the end of Season Seven, and probably even more times), and it just keeps on going in what feels more like a series of events than a really cohesive story. Willow on a quest to bring back magic could’ve easily been the only story going on here with everything serving that purpose, but it seems to get lost in the chaotic events surrounding her and the supporting characters.

Let’s talk about those supporting characters, starting with Aluwyn, Willow’s love interest. Willow’s love interests have had a track record of not being liked when they’re introduced, mostly because they weren’t the character people wanted to Willow to be with, but Aluwyn really takes the cake with this. She’s a trickster demon witch who pretended to be Willow’s spiritual guide during astral projection, then later sent Buffy to the far future where she was forced to kill future Dark Willow, and told Willow that she could bring her back but couldn’t look at what was going on in the future, probably making sure that Willow wouldn’t realize how badly she could go dark and ensuring that she would, causing the bad future. While Willow doesn’t realize all of this, she knows most of it and should know that Aluwyn shouldn’t be trusted, yet we’re supposed to believe that the two of them are deeply in love and that we should want them to be together. Aluwyn continues to deceive Willow openly in this series, and yet that never really changes. We’re supposed to be supportive of a relationship that is absolutely terrible for Willow, yet she never realizes it? It’s like the writers never learned anything from Kennedy in Season Seven, since they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

The other supporting character to focus on is Marrak. I’m going to overlook the fact that he is rather single-minded in his search for power, since while it takes away some of the possible layers to his character, he’s supposed to serve as a foil to Willow. Having a simpler character serve as a foil is actually a help over the short term, so I don’t mind that he’s like that. The problem is that he’s a character that we already know (spoiler warning): Rack, Willow’s magic drug dealer. It’s not just the fact that this is reminding me of one of the more clumsily handled storylines from the show, but it’s a continuing trend that points towards a much larger problem. By bringing this character back, we’re washing away the tangible consequences of Willow’s rampage at the end of Season Six. It almost feels like they’re trying to protect Willow from herself, which brings up the ultimate problem with this series.

Willow Wonderland #1 Variant Cover

This story is absolutely in love with Willow. It’s not that I don’t like Willow or think that she’s a good character. I like Willow, but they’re presenting her as some sort of perfect human being. The best part of Willow’s character is that she’s extremely flawed — her girlfriend’s death caused her to go on a rampage where she killed two people rather gruesomely and attempted to destroy the entire world before she was stopped by a yellow crayon, all of this coming from the rather naive wallflower we were introduced to in Season One. She’s so interesting because of that, not because she’s some sort of really powerful, perfect witch. It’s like the worst kind of fanfiction white-washing of a character, taking an interesting, complex, and flawed character and reducing her to a caricature of the “cool” part of her character (incredibly powerful witch, sexy lesbian). Even in its attempt to try and point out that her dark side is just a part of her and not a separate persona, they end up making her seem a little too perfect and like that’s a phase that’s behind her now.

For a complete sense of whiplash, I absolutely love the art, both interior and cover. There are a lot of new characters with interesting designs, all of which were designed to be as strange and different from each other as possible. Plus, almost the entire series is set in alternate dimensions meaning that there are many interesting looking locations. Then there’s the cover art. Megan Lara drew the variant covers, which tended to be less stylized and closer to reality (her issue #1 cover looks almost like a photograph of Alyson Hannigan), but everyone pays attention to David Mack‘s covers. Honestly, they’re the best thing about this series. They’re highly stylized but focus on Willow’s mystical side, and there’s nothing more I can say about them, you just need to see them to get what’s so special about them. Unfortunately, outside of his cover for issue #5, they’re all buried in the book, so if you want to see and display the covers, you’ll want to find the single issues more than the trade paperback.

I also need to mention the “special features”, one of the main things that draws me into trade paperbacks. There are a ton of sketches and concept art, showing the evolution of the new designs and the thinking that went into them. There was obviously a lot of work that went into developing the design of everything from Willow’s clothing (which I wasn’t a huge fan of, but that’s a small thing) to the witches in the supercoven. I honestly feel a little bad for Brian Ching having put all this work into the design of characters that weren’t served well by the story and characterization.

Ultimately, I don’t think that this is worth paying $17.99 for. If you really like the art, then buy the single issues so the cover art can actually be displayed. The story does plug some of the plot holes in the end of the Buffy series, but unfortunately the rest of the plot doesn’t really hold itself together as a standalone series.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is demoralized by this and the imminent end of Angel & Faith with no news about Season Ten in sight. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Review: Angel & Faith #24

Despite my disillusionment with most of the Buffy comics (check out my review of the most recent Buffy comic if you want more detail), Angel & Faith somehow manages to break through all of that. Whenever I get a new issue, I have a combination of nervousness and excitement over what I’m about to read. I’m not nervous because I’m afraid that the same thing will happen to this as happened to the Buffy comics, but because I’m legitimately invested in the characters and am afraid of that fact that I know some of them are going to be killed. When reading this, I really want them to prevent the end of the world because I want this universe to continue to exist. All of that is there to lead into Angel & Faith #24 (written by Christos Gage, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs), where the end of the world seems imminent, and things are somehow getting even worse.

Until now, this series has had a very steady pattern. Each arc was 4 issues, with a fifth issue being a one-shot story. I was expecting for this issue to wrap up this storyline and the next to start dealing with the fallout, which is also the way that Season Eight ended, but it doesn’t. Instead, this story arc is continuing into the next and final issue, allowing for more character development in places you might not expect. In fact, most of the focus is on characters whose names aren’t in the title, which goes a long way towards making me care about the world not ending.

Most of this issue involves the characters trying to track down and control the magic orb that started causing mayhem and destruction at the end of the last issue. It’s not a single-minded hunt for the orb, however. Instead, the characters take on tasks that are more fit to their skill sets, reminding me of how The Avengers handled having different characters of very different abilities. This makes much more sense than everyone trying to do the same thing and that’s even pointed out by a couple characters, who decide on their own to take a slightly different tactic to deal with this dilemma.

A big part of the character development is that I never would’ve expected how much I like Giles’s great aunts, but those two characters are great and even manage to steal the show in this issue. They’ve been used mostly as the comic relief so far, but they’ve been given some more serious development, which they’ve gotten quite a bit of in this arc. They’re probably the best of the characters who have been introduced in the comics so far (they were created for a spinoff that never happened, so I can’t say that they were created for the comic), which admittedly isn’t that stiff of a competition, but I actually like them and enjoy that they have some greater depth than just being vain comic relief.

Looking at the art in this issue, I finally have the chance to talk about Whistler’s true demon form, which debuted in the previous issue but I didn’t want to talk about for the sake of spoilers. It’s very much what you’d expect for a demonic form, but the face manages to look a lot like Whistler and still have the entire range of emotions that someone would need to show, which he really gets the chance to show throughout this issue. I know that it probably seems like such a little thing, but it adds so much when the Big Bad of the season is humanized. That bit of the art adds more than I can really get across with just words, so you’ll have to just trust me, or take a look at how much Rebekah Isaac’s art has relied on facial expressions in previous issues to do subtle but significant character work.

This probably sounds like I’m not quite excited about this issue as I have been about others in this last arc. That’s not because it’s not good, it just hasn’t had me quite as excited as the previous ones in this final arc. It’s still really good and I recommend it just like all the others in this series, so if you have any interest in this series and $2.99 you don’t absolutely need for something else, buy it. This is your last chance to jump in before the series ends.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is saddened by the fact that this series is ending soon, but does have the encouragement that the creative team will continue to work in this universe. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Review: Angel and Faith #23

It should be no surprise to anyone who reads my reviews that I loved Angel & Faith #23 (written by Christos Gage, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs). That makes these reviews difficult to write, as it’s difficult to say why I find something to be so good without going into details and spoilers. Whenever I read an issue, I’m so drawn in that it takes multiple reads to really see it with a critical point of view. But I’m nothing if not willing to read until I see the flaws, so here goes.

This issue picks up right where the last left off, starting the apocalyptic battle against Whistler, Pearl, and Nash. While the previous issue was the calm before the storm, this one is pretty much constant action, so if you wanted to see more action in this series, this will deliver on that promise.

Gage promised that two characters would not survive the end of the series. The first of those deaths happens in this issue, though I won’t say who. This is where I have my biggest problem with this issue. It’s very abrupt and a little jarring, which is almost normal for this series. With that quick death, however, there are a lot of questions brought up that aren’t answered or even acknowledged. The lack of answers here does leave it feeling unsatisfying, but at least acknowledging what happened in a future issue would give some closure that’s lacking here. Those events are surrounded by a different character’s internal monologue, and while I understand why it’s here, it doesn’t quite have the impact I was hoping it would.

I was afraid that, with a battle this big and few characters being capable fighters, Faith and Angel would be the only ones in the spotlight in spite of all the battle planning in the previous issue. It doesn’t play out that way at all, and everyone plays a role in the battle without anything feeling forced. Their contributions don’t make it easy, and the situation only seems to get worse as the battle rages on. I’m not entirely sure where they’re taking things from this point. It doesn’t yet feel like they’ve written themselves into a corner, but the situation is pretty dire, and will be difficult to get out of. I trust this team to get it right, though, and not take a cheap or easy way out.

The art continues to be great, though I find it difficult to explain why yet again. The problems I have are the same as before: we’ve seen almost everything before, and the few new designs would be spoilery to talk about in any detail (in general, they’re not overly original, but there’s nothing wrong with them). The only thing I can say, and it’s not specific to this issue, is that I’m starting to see these designs as the characters more than the actors who portrayed them. I know it’s not very specific, but I think it says a lot.

I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I give this issue a strong recommendation for the $2.99 cover price despite all the small flaws I kept pointing out. I’d even be willing to pay more for it, for any of the issues in the series, really. Once again, I’ll just ask that any Bufy fans who don’t follow this series check it out, as it really is worth it, and captures the feeling and tone of the show as well as any of the comics have.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is dutifully writing this instead of being out on the beach. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as he tends to not like beaches and sun much in the first place. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.

Revisiting Angel & Faith #22

I had to write this post – the review was one thing, but I had to write more. I have to talk about this in a context where I can spoil what happens. And I will – this is about the climax that they have between building to since the beginning of Angel & Faith, without any of the misleading or half true comments that are required in writing reviews without spoilers.

Where issue #21 ended, the spell to resurrect Giles was being cast when it was interrupted by Whistler, Pearl, and Nash. The spell was still going, and the issue ended on an ambiguous note, unclear whether the spell would work or not. When it picks up again, they desperately attempt, one last time, to get it to work. That is not the spoiler, as it’s all in the preview pages, but what comes next is (FINAL SPOILER WARNING DON’T CLICK ON THAT IF YOU WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS):

Giles is brought back… in the body of a twelve year old.

I… Just… Wow. Every time I read this issue, more than a week after reading it for the first time, I still have this huge smile on my face. I had expected a simple, probably underwhelming resolution – he was brought back, or he wasn’t. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, since the show never exactly took the simple way out (see the climax of Season 2 for a particularly devastating example), but this still caught me off guard, probably because it’s so far outside of what I would expect to happen – I don’t know how much time it would’ve taken me to come up with this idea, or even if I could’ve, and I love seeing stories that go in a direction that unexpected.

But the real genius is that they made this funny. Angel is best known for his incredible brooding skills, so making redemption for one of his worst crimes (which is arguable, but that’s how he sees things) into a comedic situation is both ridiculous yet inevitable. In an interview, David Boreanaz suggested a similarly ridiculous ending to the series: Angel finally has his humanity restored, and as he walks out into the sunlight… he’s hit by a truck. Something about that felt like the perfect end to his story. Here, Angel has undone his worst crime, and not taking it deathly seriously feels oddly like the perfect tone.

Does this fit with the established rules? It’s taken as fact that someone can’t be brought back from a natural death, and having your neck snapped is not overly supernatural. To preempt the arguments, go back and reread the first volume of the series. Angel’s argument about how he can collect Giles’s soul and restore his body are quite persuasive, even though it does sound like he’s trying to convince himself more than anything. I didn’t even think of this problem until more than a day after I read the issue, and there are good arguments for how it works, so I don’t have a problem with it bending the rules slightly.

Now what about the fact that he came back in a twelve year old body? This is what I never saw coming. The logic is interesting – his aunts, who were very steeped in magic, pictured him as the boy he was when they inadvertently showed his magical potential – but he’s slightly older than that. Giles says himself that he could feel it coming and resisted, which mostly explains it, even though the logic is a little weird, especially considering that they had his adult body there and intact. That doesn’t bother me much, though. Like I made sure to emphasize multiple times, this isn’t just a joke. There is a very fundamental change in Giles and his relationships with others and what he can contribute, even though he retains his memory and personality from just before he was killed. In the Buffyverse, they’ve bent the rules before if it told a better story, and I think this is just a continuation of that. We might not see it all here, but if they’re going in this direction, it’s because they have some story to tell. At this point, let the blind speculation begin.

I get the feeling that Giles will be a major part of the next season. He could be a major supporting character in one series, or even get a series of his own. Either way, this puts him in a place where a lot of interesting stories can be told. One of the reasons that he was killed in Season Eight was because his character didn’t work in the comics the way he did on the show. Buffy didn’t need a father figure anymore due to character development, and Mr. Exposition doesn’t work as well in comics as on TV. He’s not that person anymore, even though he has all the memories, and this new dynamic could add to many different stories. I’m not sure which ones yet, as that would require knowing what happens at the end of the season and knowing who survives, and that is far from certain. Christos Gage has said that two people aren’t going to live through the finale of this season, and while I can speculate until the cows come home (and then I can speculate about the cows, or something like that), I can’t tell you with any certainty who I think they’re going to kill (please don’t kill Faith – sure, they’ll probably make that story good and I’ll eventually come to terms with it, but please don’t make it come to that), but as long as they don’t kill Giles, which would be a huge letdown, he’s likely to be a major part of the next season.

Now we know what the title of the arc means. It’s an inversion of the usual cliché, and I was quote interested in exactly what it meant for where the storyline was going. But now we know – Angel brings Giles back because of his guilt, and Faith got so caught up in wanting a father figure (they even had an arc called Daddy Issues – I may hate that term, but it’s a legitimate description of Faith’s problems) that they completely ignored everything else to go all in with the resurrection.

Yeah, that means that the resurrection is not the end of the story this season. Even though the season long arc has finished, there’s still Whistler’s plan to bring back magic to worry about. In a way, this reminds me of “Primeval”, with the difference being that I like this issue a lot more than that episode: even though the ostensibly main plot is over, there’s still one more thing to deal with, explicitly because of the characters’ actions. Faith and Angel have been ignoring Whistler, and now they have to deal with him when they could’ve possibly stopped him before he was capable of doing so much damage.

Speaking of Whistler and the imminent final battle, Nadira is now joining the battle after having been absent. Her absence felt a lot longer than it actually was — she was last in issue #19, but because issues come one month apart, it felt like she had been relegated to the background. I didn’t immediately recognize how important she was. Back in issue #1, Nadira told Faith that she was going to kill Pearl and Nash, then she was going to kill Angel. The final battle of this season involves those three on different sides of the battle, so I honestly don’t know what her effect will be in this battle. Her character has been established enough that she can believably take either side for emotional or logical reasons, which is very impressive for a side character first introduced in issue #1, but has made the most of the little time her character has had to develop and gain complex emotional motivations that I can’t quite untangle.

Looking over all this, I notice that I’m being oddly positive. I’ve spent a lot of time gushing about this issue and its rather bizarre twist. However, equally weird things have happened in the Buffy series that I have reacted to with puzzlement (the Twilight storyline from Season Eight) or frustration bordering on anger (Buffy thought she was pregnant but was really a robot. Yes, that was a thing that happened). I also spent a lot of time speculating about what might happen in Season Ten, assuming that they have a very good reason to resurrect Giles and a plan for following through. Thinking about it, I might not be this positive if I was talking about something in the Buffy series. Yes, it’s probably bias speaking, but the fact that the writing has been so much better in this series means that I’m willing to give them benefit of the doubt – I reacted to the weird and insane direction this comic went with unbridled enthusiasm, yet was more hesitantly enthusiastic for the less weird direction that the most recent Buffy comic went. If there’s anything to learn here, it’s that doing good work in the first place makes people more enthusiastic about anything you might do.

And for one final thing, this would cause some really interesting fanfiction if people actually wrote it using the comics (they don’t). There are several moments making a joke of a Faith/Giles pairing that would be perfect for shippers to grab onto and extrapolate from, and fanfiction is known for not caring about age gaps or any age-related weirdness. Making some guesses about their ages and the timeframe of the comics, Faith is 25, while Giles is in his early 50s but in the body of a 12-year old.

With that disturbing final thought, goodnight everyone.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) had no idea how to end this article, so you’re left with that disturbing conclusion. Follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings, which shouldn’t be as disturbing most of the time.

Review: Angel & Faith #22

I love the Angel & Faith series, but even by that standard, issue #22 (written by Christos Gage, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs) floored me. I’m flabbergasted by this issue in the best way possible. I get the feeling that it’ll be polarizing, but put me firmly down on the side of loving it. Problem is, I can’t say why – everything past the first three pages (previously released as preview pages) is a huge spoiler, and you want to go into this blind. It’s hard to even explain why it’s so good without spoilers (there will be another article soon with spoilers), so I’m telling you here: if you have any interest, go and get it right now.

The last issue ended with the resurrection spell being interrupted by Whistler and crew attacking. This issue deals with the aftermath of the spell being interrupted… and it’s funny. They take it in an unexpected, humorous direction for what really is a very serious situation, but it’s not just a joke. They didn’t spend an entire season setting up a punchline, instead going for the mix of wit and situational humor familiar to fans of Buffy and Whedon’s work in general, something that the comics have been hit and miss with so far. To clarify without spoiling, the tone reminds me of “Tabula Rasa” from season 6, without feeling like a ripoff of that episode.

Onto other topics talking vaguely around spoilers, a character who’s been absent for a little while comes back into the story, and their presence greatly complicates the situation. It’s good to see this, as it has the potential to pay off something set up back in the first issue of the series. Even if you recognize that fact, this character’s effect on the story isn’t entirely clear quite yet. I’ve loved the writing in this series so far, but we haven’t yet seen it over the long term. We’re starting to see that even somewhat small and possibly forgotten story points and characters are going to pay off. It’s also great economy of writing – everything I’ve talked about in this paragraph came from two panels and no dialogue, letting just the visuals tell the story.

That economy in storytelling was not just specific to that scene. The pacing is basically perfect, managing to mix moving quickly with not rushing past things before they can sink in. I had to check to make sure that this was not more than the standard 22 pages (it’s not) because so many important moments happen that it felt longer than it was in the best way possible.

There’s no direct crossover with the Buffy series. I didn’t expect there to be (that rumor was debunked a while ago), but they do maintain continuity. The big events currently happening in the Buffy series have a subtle but tangible effect on the action in this issue, distracting and possibly costing the characters some time in a very serious situation. This type of crossover is one of my favorites, as it’s a bonus for those who follow everything but doesn’t detract from understanding if you don’t.

Rebekah Isaacs’s art continues to be good for all the reasons I’ve mentioned previously. Something in particular caught my attention in this issue: rooftops. Dialogue heavy scenes usually take place on rooftops because they allow for interesting visuals, and Isaacs always delivers on that point. There’s only one such scene here, but it sticks out as a rather long and character heavy scene. It could easily be just talking heads, but the view from the roof adds just enough detail to make every panel interesting while not distracting from the characters. She also provides a really good interpretation of someone else’s art, which I did not expect to see here and need to give credit to, even though it would be a spoiler to reveal what exactly it is.

Overall, I cannot recommend this issue enough. It’s definitely worth the $2.99 cover price. Even though it’s late in the arc, I think it’s actually accessible to people who aren’t big followers of the comics, and though you won’t get the full depth of the character work, it should still be accessible, so even if you’re not already following the series and this has piqued your interest, just buy and read it already.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is a staff writer for the Red Shirt Crew, and is at a loss for words. Follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings to find out when he gets them back.

Review: Angel & Faith #21

Angel & Faith #21 (written by Christos Gage and illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs) is the first comic in the final arc of Season Nine of the Buffyverse comics. It’s also impossible for me to look at from a neutral point of view. I’m a huge fan of Joss Whedon and his work, and Faith is my favorite of all his characters in all his projects. As such, I’m a little biased in favor of this book. On the other hand, if they do something wrong, I will know, it will bother me, and I will make a point out of it. So far, this series has stuck out to me as the best of Buffy Season Nine, and this issue only reaffirms my stance on that.

The art, as usual for the series, is great. I have one small complaint though, which is that Giles’s aunt, Lavinia, looks a bit too much like Faith, which makes one scene a little confusing at first. That’s nothing new, however, and I’m glad that it’s basically my only complaint about the art. It stays in that great sweet spot where the characters resemble the actors but are just abstracted enough to be visually distinct and take on a life of their own. I’ve loved this style since I started reading this series – it is a little difficult to adjust if you haven’t been reading the comics up to this point, but it’s not too hard to get used to.

Many people, myself included, took issue with issue #20, feeling that the characterization was slightly off (I even saw someone on Twitter tell Christos Gage to never write Spike again), and I think that might have put people off from continuing with this series. If that was something that bothered you about the previous issue, don’t worry; all those problems are fixed in this issue. Everyone sounds like themselves again – every line sounded like something the characters may have said on the show. Gage hasn’t lost his grasp on the characters – if you never liked the way he wrote them, then you’re out of luck, but everyone who did will be happy that it’s back on track now.

There are a couple of story issues that I’ll talk about in the abstract here so I don’t spoil anyone.

There is a small crossover here between this series and Buffy, including one story point that may be a little confusing if you didn’t follow the previous arc (issues #16-20) of that series. Anyone familiar with the mythology of the show could probably figure out what is happening, but it’s not immediately obvious.

Since the end of Season Eight/start of Season Nine, they haven’t been completely clear what the loss of magic actually meant. Each series has allowed some magic, and this issue finally addresses that with as good an explanation as they’ll probably ever give. While the rules are still flexible and ambiguous, they give an explanation for why. This seems a little late to explain the consequences of the previous season’s climax, but I guess it’s better late than never. They do use the ambiguity of the situation to set up a large cliffhanger at the end of the issue, so be aware of that — it is both frustrating and leaves me desperately wanting to read the next issue.

Overall, if you have any familiarity with the Buffyverse, this comic is definitely worth the $2.99 cover price. If you’re unsure about jumping in this late in the series, go back to issue #1 and see what you think. If you’re reading the Buffy series but not this one (and the sales numbers show there are a lot of you), pick this up too — you have no reason not to.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is a lowly newbie writer here. Follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings to read his thoughts in bite-sized pieces when he actually has any worth sharing.