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.
The Red Shirt Crew Blog and Podcast Network 