A few pages into Issue 26 of Buffy Season 8, I was rubbing my head as if I had a headache, or wanted one. Then I had to check if I had missed any issues, because the story seems to have jumped into third gear out of nowhere. We went from random blunderings and an issue dedicated to Dawn becoming a little wooden girl, to Buffy and the Slayers running around all over the place for no real reason while being hunted by armies of demons with tanks. A lot of Slayers seem to die, though that’s not clear either, and then everyone’s on a sub. While I welcome the story finally getting into gear, after wasting who knows how many issues on Fray, Buffy’s lesbian fling and Harmony, along with all the other junk, but it’s a little like someone waking up at the last minute, grabbing whatever’s handy and running off to school. Jane Espenson is occasionally funny, but it’s hard to buy the new revised world in which Keith Olbermann is discussing vampire slayers on his show, funny as the idea might be. Issue 26 seems like it should have been more than one issue, there’s too many things going on and too few of them make much sense.