This week's big new launch, for once, comes from Dark Horse.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8 has reportedly been selling much faster than stores anticipated.  Presumably they've been trying to use the sales of regular Buffy spin-off comics as their starting point.

But this is a different series, since Joss Whedon is endorsing it as a legitimate "season 8" to add to the seven years of television.  The Buffy fans, who aren't nearly completist enough to bother themselves with mere spin-offs, seem to be turning out in force for this one.

Retailers might also have been wrongfooted by the creative team.  While Joss Whedon is a big name writer in comics, Georges Jeanty is hardly an A-list artist.  But that's a smart choice on Dark Horse's part.  The sales potential of this book lies in reaching Buffy fans who don't normally bother themselves with comics.  Hot artists are useless when you're aiming at readers who've never heard of them - especially considering that plenty of the big names in comics couldn't carry a story in a bucket, and most of the rest are outside Dark Horse's financial reach.  For this book, and this readership, you need a solid, experienced storyteller. 

Going by those criteria, Jeanty is a fine choice.  Adaptations of TV shows are never easy.  The likenesses are almost invariably slightly off; the subtleties of body language and performance are missing.  Only the very best artists have the skill to truly evoke an actor's performance.  Jeanty doesn't quite manage it, but it's a tough goal, and otherwise the art is more than up to the job.

So what about the story?  Well, strictly speaking it's not really the lost Season 8.  A real eighth season of Buffy would have come out alongside the final season of Angel, and those episodes already covered some of what the Buffy characters were up to.  So season 8 actually picks up some time after both series ended.

Now, I have my doubts about the need for an eighth season of Buffy.  For one thing, the TV show would have been well advised to call it a day after Season 5.  For another, the final episode was a good, decisive finale.  The in-built problem with Buffy is that the early seasons work in large part by playing on the magic stuff as a metaphor for growing up.  This works very well when Buffy and her supporting cast are at school, but thanks to the limitations of using real live actors, you can't keep them there indefinitely.  By the closing seasons, Buffy had drifted miles from the original premise - unavoidably so - and hadn't been able to replace it with anything equally compelling.

So what we have here is Buffy as leader of a worldwide network of Slayers, with Xander as a quasi-Watcher, Dawn still hanging around, and no Sunnydale whatsoever (because it was blown up in the final episode of the series).  Rather than trying to recapture the original format which he so comprehensively dismantled in the closing episodes of the TV show, Whedon is instead trying to write a sort of sequel based on Buffy's new set-up. 

And this is a good introductory issue for that, clearly establishing where the characters are, what they're up to, and where the main threat is coming from.  It relies a bit on prior knowledge of the characters - especially for the closing reveal to carry any weight - but for this book, that's probably a fair assumption.  Reassuringly, the pacing here is much more brisk than the lethargic Astonishing X-Men, and suggests that his grip on the medium is improving.

Still, it's got many of the same problems as Seasons Six and Seven - it's not really what I'm looking for in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer story, in the same way that Buffy with a load of teenage slayers in her cellar just felt like the programme had lost its way.  But unlike the later TV episodes, this does seem more in touch with the character and rhythm of the show at its peak.

Not perfect, then - but as good a debut as you could expect from this book.

Rating: A-

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