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.
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