Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine Volume 4: Welcome to the Team

I wasn’t kind to Volume 3 in this series, but it deserved it. Let’s not look at that, instead focusing on this volume. Buffy Season Nine Volume 4, Welcome to the Team (written by Andrew Chambliss, illustrated by Georges Jeanty), builds up to the inevitable final battle in the last arc, and manages to tell a pretty good story along the way.

Interestingly, this is the first time (that I can recall) something that started on Angel crossed over into the main Buffy series, referring obviously to Illyria. In spite of the novelty of that, it’s difficult to look at her presence as anything except a plot device for Simone and Severin’s plan. Even though they tie it in a bit more by the end, she seems to be there just because she’s the only character with the possibility to turn back time. Also, writers? Just because we didn’t like how Season Eight ended doesn’t mean that you need to be so literal about attempting a retcon.

Unfortunately, Billy is still here, but he’s been relegated to background character by this point, and he’ll soon be out of the series completely, which cannot happen quickly enough.

The marketing for Season Nine focused on returning to what made the show great, specifically the character-driven storylines rather than the other way around. Despite my negativity about this series in general, this arc balances the character and plot pretty well, making sure that everything that happens is rooted in the characters, and that the characters’ motivations have tangible effects on the plot.

The storyline of Dawn fading from existence starts in this volume. Many fans have issues with this storyline, which surprises me as most hate Dawn. I’d think any possibility they might kill her would be embraced, but that’s not the case. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum in these reviews (only two more Season Nine publications and I can put this to bed), the way magic works here is wonky. At the end of Season Eight, Warren died instantly when the seed was smashed, as he was being held together by magic, and back in Volume 3 of Angel & Faith, Connor’s fake family’s fake memories went away at the same time. Given those examples, a lot of fans argue that Dawn should’ve started to fade or disappeared completely the moment that the seed was smashed. The fact that she’s fading at all doesn’t make that much sense, as it seemed like she became fully human earlier in the series, but I’m willing to let logic go for a good story.

What really sells me on this volume is Xander. In exchange for saving Dawn, he teams with Simone and Severin, betraying Buffy. Looking back from the perspective of seeing the end of the series, the biggest flaw was the lack of big character moments. Most the characters stayed in the same place throughout the season even though they should have been evolving, but Xander manages some real development here. Sure, it might be pushing him in a direction that people don’t want to see, but this is what I find most interesting in characters: being pushed to do things they never want to do and think that they never would by circumstance. It shows a lot more dimension to a character, and adds the possibility of later conflict that could make things really interesting, which is exactly what they do with Xander here.

Willow returns after her excursion to Wonderland, but the main trio isn’t reunited quite yet. Plus, she doesn’t do much here, so talking about her in any detail doesn’t really make sense until the next trade, when she’s a big part of the story again.

Looking at the extras, Georges Jeanty meticulously keeps his sketches in a way that reminds me of what I see in Rebekah Isaacs’s books, and I’m glad because I love extra features. He especially loves brainstorming ideas for variant covers, to the point that he’ll come up with eight for one issues and they need to cram them all onto one page, making them too small to see much, but you can still see the main idea behind his unused covers. It has a script page with his highlighting and layout sketches, which really helps you get into his head and understand how he goes from words to images. As I’ve said before, I love getting into the heads of the creators, and while the notes were written by someone else, they still give insight that I wouldn’t get from just reading the comic.

Overall, I give this a tentative recommendation. I’m tentative because I know where this is going and I don’t want people to get too invested, but taken on its own, there’s nothing really wrong with this volume and enough right that it’s pretty good on its own. The $17.99 cover price might be a little bit higher than the individual issues, but add in the extra features and the fact that trades just look better on a bookshelf that individual issues, and I think it’s worth the extra money. If you’re interested in the story but don’t want to pay all that, you can buy the physical issues individually for $2.99 each, and there’s a digital bundle of all five issues for $8.99, and if nothing else, it gets a definite recommendation for that price.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is a little surprised at the fact that he’s recommending this, but if it works, it works. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings or check out his personal blog.

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.