Looking again at Angel Only Human and comparing it to the Angel Aftermath issues, I have to wonder, what the hell happened here? The Angel Season 4 or Angel After the Fall run was fantastic and you can still see that in the issue of Angel Only Human. You have the snappy writing, the characters are right, risky choices are made and yes people look like themselves. Then there’s Angel Aftermath, which looks like it was cobbled together by outsourced labor overseas or deranged fanboys. There’s the ugly art that actually makes George Jeanty’s work on Buffy look good. Everything looks ugly, cheap and poorly done, and you have to guess which character is supposed to be which. Then there’s a ridiculous story involving angels, even though angels and the classic heaven and hell model doesn’t seem to fit into the Buffyverse. All the great work and the positive energy built up by Brian Lynch’s work on After the Fall was squandered by Kelley Armstrong in Aftermath, discarding the usual characters and surrounding Angel with third rankers we don’t give a damn about, not to mention a jaguarwoman. Angel Only Human shows what Lynch and Urru can still do. IDW would be doing the series a favor by dumping Angel Aftermath and avoiding any disasters like that again.

It isn’t the actual end but it feels like it might be one, as Gunn’s plan has come to fruition, Illyria is back to her old self and tormented by the contradictions of her own existence and Fred’s memories claiming part of her identity, is getting ready to wipe out the world, or the entire universe. Which apparently Gunn thinks might still be a good idea. Stopping Illyria isn’t easy what with her being the size of the old Wolfram and Hart headquarters with giant tentacles and a generally bad attitude. But the old human emotions are still there.

After a whole lot of arguing, during which Gunn kills Connor, and Angel nearly kills Gunn, timeslips to the future apocalypse in which Angelus is fighting on the side of evil against good, Angel finally has the fish fill Illyria’s mind with memories of Fred gathered from Wesley and Spike, for some reason, resulting in an implosion that takes down Illyria and the Wolfram and Hart headquarters. Connor dies after delivering the usual sort of goodbye speech, leaving hell saved and in complete chaos.

If the events of Angel After the Fall actually stay true, something I doubt, then disposing of two of the show’s more annoying characters in one issue, Illyria and Connor, alone would justify the story. But the elaborate plot made up of hinged pieces also reflects the best of Season 4. Where Buffy Season 8 seems to be crashing, Angel Season 6 is prospering, probably because it has one master, instead of multiple writers taking turns. The story isn’t over yet, but so far it has worked a lot better than all of Angel Season 5.

Angel’s extremely prolonged death finally comes to a close in Angel After the Fall Issue 14. I think Superman took less time to die than Angel did. But the climax of everything is at hand. Gunn has Illyria in Fred’s form and is ready to fulfill what he thinks is the final plan, to bring out Illyria’s form. Meanwhile Spike tries to save Angel with a dose of vampirism by turning him again, which would have made Spike, Angel’s sire, after already being sired by Angel for a truly confusing relationship. Also it would have brought Angelus back for some truly epic ugliness.

Spike however is stopped in his plan by Connor, and everyone is stopped in their tracks by the arrival of some of Wolfram and Hart’s very demonic senior partners, who are pretty much who we thought they would be, arriving on razor clawed jet planes and plotting real estate purchases in Cleveland and the restoration of Angel, who cannot be allowed to die since he is meant to bring on the apocalypse. With scenes like that and after 6 years and all the effort that Wolfram and Hart has invested in Angel, it almost seems as if he would really have been better off defeating them by staying dead.

Gunn meanwhile does his best to manipulate Illyria, only to realize that what Angel had been telling him all along was true, and he was the one being manipulated by the Senior Partners who positioned the whole thing to play out for Angel’s benefit. Angel does return to life, but Illyria gets tired of living, returns to her original gigantic demon queen form and decides to collapse time and end all of existence. Like I said, the problem just got a lot bigger.

After a long absence and the final end of Spike After the Fall and First Night, Angel After the Fall returns with Angel After the Fall issue 13. This is of course the third issue of Angel After the Fall which features a cover with a dead Angel, the last one featured a rose being tossed in Angel’s grave, a scene that had no resemblance to anything in the issue, which should tell you that the boys at IDW are overplaying this worse than the death of Superman. But that’s not to say the actual issue doesn’t have plenty of burning and crawling goodies.

We pick up again with Angel still lying dead on the floor and seeing a vision of Cordy, even as Spike heads to the rescue only to encounter Gunn’s trapped slayers. Los Angeles meanwhile is being barraged with a hellish army and Connor makes a quip about taking it to eleven that really predates him by two decades or so. Gwen, who turned out to have been Gunn’s spy dies, so does Angel’s pet dragon battling dragons, and Angel gets yet another shot at life, but not before Spike is seemingly killed and Fred slash Illyria is possibly killed as well.

Angel After the Fall Issue 13 does deliver the epic but also the confusing. One frame shows Spike getting staked by a Slayer only to turn up shortly with the Slayers in tow boasting about returning from the great beyond. About the only way this makes sense if Spike is now somehow immortal or if all this is an illusion, an idea that the issue seems to dance a little more with. Though if this all turns out to be some grand holodeck hell scenario complete with a reset button I imagine readers will be fairly pissed. On the other hand if Wolfram and Hart could set up a hell dimension where Gunn’s heart could be ripped out of his chest over and over again, all this seems like a doable way to make Angel despair and give up hope. That doesn’t quite happen this time around thanks to Connor but the issue does end with Fred getting an arrow punched through her by Gunn who indicates that this was the plan all along.

Spike After the Fall was the series whose reason for actually existing, besides Spike’s real or imagined popularity as a character, but Spike After the Fall Issue 4 wraps up the four part series which shows us how Spike and Illyria got to where they did. Spike After the Fall Issue 4 is a bit awkward and has one of those fun multiple endings we all loved so much from Lord of the Rings Return of the King (it’s over now, no wait it’s not over yet, it’s over now, nope wait a bit more) and we don’t really learn anything particularly new or interesting except that Illyria is still one very confused demon goddess girl.

I don’t quite buy the whole incredible closeness between Illyria and Spike, for that matter between Spike and Fred even, but Spike After the Fall is premised on the idea that Illyria shifts back to Fred now in moments when her humanity surfaces until Spike reinforces the idea that she’s all that matters leading to another fractured Illyria slideshow of the past and future showing Illyria with the girls at some unspecified point in the future as her old fashioned demon tentacled self and back in the 19th century with young Spike which suggests that these aren’t visions of an actual future or past as some have assumed but fractures that show what things would be like if now became the future or the past. Which should put to rest questions about Illyria’s earlier vision of Angel and Spike, in theory.

The bulk of Spike After the Fall Issue 4 is dedicated to the prolonged battle against Non, who turns out to have a shadowed demon who controls the girls and to some extent Illyria. There follows an even more prolonged and confusing sequence involving the demon, Spike and Illyria. And a final battle between Spike and Non, which ends with Non trying to siphon off energy from Jeremy, resulting in Illyria killing Jeremy ruthlessly to prevent him from being used against them. Connor does very little of anything, as we can expect. This gives us Spike and Illyria all modern and up to date and up to their necks in hell.

Well it’s back to Spike After the Fall, the part of Los Angeles that has gone to hell and revolves all around Spike or parts of him anyway. Spike is in a cellar with the rotting moaning corpses of the people he tried to save, being tortured, enslaved and otherwise abused for a month or so by female demon insectoids while Illyria is locked in a box. And if you have issues with lavishly illustrated pictures of corpses, this issue of Spike After the Fall #3 probably isn’t for you.

Meanwhile with the proliferation of Slayers, they’ve become ridiculously easy to kill. Even with minimal training Buffy was pretty tough. Meanwhile in this issue Non casually kills a slayer and Gunn takes on three slayers at a time. In Buffy Season 8 slayers do die, but they don’t die this uselessly or casually. Gunn does meet up with Non, for no real reason. Nor is there any real reason why Gunn is so formidable. Gunn the human was a decent fighter, but vampires seem to gain strength with time and Gunn is fresh. He certainly should not be able to take on three slayers at once or Non herself, who seems to be able to take on slayers, Illyria, Spike and anything else.

Overall Spike After the Fall Issue 3 has Spike hanging around with rotting corpses, Non meeting up with Gunn, Spike and Illyria taking on Non, only to have Connor show up to the rescue. Basically if we had skipped Issue 3 altogether, we would have virtually the same story at the end of Issue 2, except that this time Spike and Illyria won for some reason. It’s not that Spike isn’t entertaining, because he loosely is, but every issue of Spike After the Fall serves to remind you that it has no real reason for existing, except to serve as appetizers for the next issue of Angel After the Fall.

When last we left over Angel in Angel After the Fall Issue 16, Angel had a giant sword stuck through his chest courtesy of a vampiric Gunn. In Angel After the Fall Issue 17 it turns out that Gwen had been working for Gunn leading to a confrontation with Spike that Spike loses until a dragon named Cordelia shows up, and then Cordelia herself in what is supposed to be a vision of Angel’s death. Cordelia has been such a part of Angel that Season 5 never felt right without her, even before the only other woman on the series was killed off, and her dialogue here is perfectly pitched.

The cover of Angel After the Fall Issue 17 shows a supposed grave for Angel with some of the crew gathered around, and a rose being tossed and a cigarette by Spike. This isn’t anything that happens in Issue 17 because Angel has yet to be buried and for that matter the good guys have yet to get to his body, which is under the control of Gunn and his minions. Wesley, sort of a good guy, does show up with some startling revelations, first about Gunn’s visions and their entire purpose here, why Angel and supposedly LA were sent to hell and the prophecy that files and seals Angel’s role in the apocalypse, hint he’s the guy with the fangs.

By the time all of this rolls around, Angel has given up the fight and is ready to accept the peace of death, with Cordy, if that is really Cordelia after all. Now Wolfram and Hart has shown some of its hand and its role in this and it appears that Wolfram and Hart controls or runs hell, or maybe it’s another jail dimension like the one that Gunn found himself stuck in. Either way Angel appears to be dead, though obviously can’t be in the long run, and Angel After the Fall keeps delivering with a tightly plotted story that reminds you of the best of Season 4 and how Season 5 might have been if it hadn’t been so incoherent, even as Buffy Season 8 gets wackier and wackier, by Issue 17 Angel After the Fall is more grounded than ever.

Everyone’s coming back but none of them are coming back right. That’s the sum total of Issue 11 and what’s been going on in the hell version of Los Angeles, Angel and everyone else seem to be trapped in. It’s a concept as ambitious as anything that the original writers on Angel ever pulled off, or nearly so, now that we’re a lot closer to seeing the bigger picture.

Angel After the Fall Issue 11 also boasts one of the best covers so far setting up the showdown between Angel and Gunn, a showdown that an all too human Angel knows can only end in two ways as the demon inside Gunn rants and raves, thinking that he is Gunn and that his plan is to save Los Angeles. Too many issues of Angel After the Fall have suffered from being too diffuse and sloppy, but Issue 11 solidly delivers the goods. And it ends the way you would expect it too in a Joss Whedon production, or maybe wouldn’t expect it to, taking the story that much further to the next level.

This time out we get a little overview of Gunn’s operation, why and how he became a Vampire, and the visions that drive him and the gang, and why he needs that telepathic fish. And of course Gunn’s ongoing desire to be the hero, to be the one who proves himself, that not even being turned into a Vampire has taken away from him. But vampire Gunn is to old Gunn as Angelus is to Angel, smarter and a lot more dangerous. And more things are going wrong by the end of Issue 11 than anyone expects, including a possible reappearance by a mysterious “Her”, anyone want to bet on Cordelia or Darla?

Well the one thing you can always say about Spike is that he’s reliably entertaining, but Spike After the Fall is also a reminder of why a Spike centered TV series would never have worked, with Spike as the reluctant hero chasing after annoying humans and trying to keep them out of harm’s way, pretty much the premise of Spike After the Fall, except that this time around Spike runs into Angel’s dragon for a brief amusing diversion as Spike tries to figure out how to kill a dragon and then gives up, followed by the Lord or Lordess of Beverly Hills capturing the humans and Illyria, in her Fred mode.

Somehow the Lordess of Beverly Hills, a pixie looking creature in a tube top with a sense of humor that’s strictly 80’s and an army of demonoid amazons, manages to defeat both Spike and Illyria, apparently thanks to an energy stealing ability, enslaves and kills many of the humans and locks up Spike and Illyria in her dungeon. And from there on in it’s strictly to be continued. But then again it is Spike After the Fall, not Angel After the Fall, so expecting much to happen here isn’t in the cards. Spike unlike Angel is the entertaining, not really the brooding hero saving the world. And so Spike After the Fall is always going to be a sideline to Angel After the Fall.

Non, as the Lordess of Beverly Hills seems to be called, makes for a somewhat decently ruthless villain or villainess but since we already know how it ends, and not just because the good guys usually win in some shape or form, it’s just passing the time for Angel’s showdown with Gunn in Angel After the Fall coming soon.

I suppose with the success of Angel After the Fall, Spike After the Fall was all but inevitable. Spike was a great character, maybe even is a great character, but he’s also the character who took over and ruined two shows by becoming the center of attention, turning Spike into a dyed hair leather coated Poochy. But unlike Poochy, Spike has a sizable fanbase, maybe a bigger one than Angel, which means Spike isn’t going anywhere. So yes with Angel After the Fall, we get Spike After the Fall. Spike After the Fall Issue 1 is pretty much the enlarged Spike version of Angel After the Fall First Night that focuses on how Spike dealt with the whole Los Angeles going to hell thinking, meeting up Illyria / Fred and protecting the humans. Issue 1 of Spike After the Fall closes as Spike heads to Wolfram and Hart, meets the dragon, thinks of taking over Silverlake and a trio of strange, possibly demon women, invade the amusement park where everyone has been hanging out. There’s a few funny lines among it all, but four and shortly five issues of backstory, are just a drag. I get that this is for the people who want the background filled out, but do we need background filler that badly?

It’s snowing in hell, literally, thanks to a minor screwup by Mayor Lorne’s gang, humans are walking the streets of LA and greeting Angel by name and Spiketown is now protected by a masked Spike in a cape. Well the first part of that turns out to be an odd dream Angel is having, but the rest is part of the setting for Angel After the Fall 10 as Angel has just set up shop in the hotel only to march back forth, leaving Spike and Wesley on the premises, watching each other.

The real focus of Issue 10 though is vampire Gunn who has the slayers he’s been training his vamps on and of course the telepathic fish currently being exploited by Gunn for his plan. The multiple slayers are of course a reaffirmation that Angel After the Fall is taking place in the same timeline as Buffy Season 8, though technically since Angel ended a year after Buffy did, it should still be a year ahead of the curve, but since more than a year seems to have passed between TV’s Buffy Season 7 and the Comic Buffy Season 8, we can call it a draw.

While Angel looks for a vampire with power, little knowing that it’s Gunn and Gunn preps his plans, little knowing that Angel and Illyria are looking for him, a brief contact by the telepathic fish to Utah suggests that LA isn’t gone in the real world. Or at least LA appears to exist on TV. Which leaves us with a bunch of possibilities, ranging from a time jump to an illusion. Which wouldn’t be the first illusion Wolfram and Hart have spawned. But the final scene leaves us with Angel closing in on Gunn backed by a mighty big dragon.

It’s Angel after the Fall First Night 3, the last First Night by Brian Lynch and the issue is scrubbing the bottom of a character barrel. Between a flashback with the telepathic fish, we get 3 stories of First Nights, that of Gwen or Electrogirl who sees the sky flash, just as her powers come back and she fries the guy she’s hanging out with to a crisp. Another section titled civilians about a guy who received a TPTB message leading him to warn everyone that the end is near, only to be proven tragically right. It’s not exactly the most compelling reading around, not helped in the least by the schizophrenic art.

Finally the one that’s been saved for a while and the one people care about, Gunn’s flashback, that really picks up where the Angel series finale left off, or slightly afterward, as Angel, Gunn and Spike and co. are fighting the last battle in an alley, Angel catches a ride on a Dragon and leaves a dying Gunn behind. Gunn is vamped by Vampires who have been watching from behind the scenes in order to rescue him. The best sequence here involves Gunn slowly waking up and discovering he’s a vampire, trying to hang on to his human self and refusing to accept what he is, and lashing out at his vampire rescuers.

We don’t get a whole lot more information than that, but the vampires appear to have had an inside line into Wolfram and Hart and have been operating on their own agenda and have a larger purpose for Gunn to fulfill. Gunn meanwhile has a serious grudge against Angel for leaving him behind, but then again what’s new there. After this the usual Angel After the Fall story picks up with Angel After the Fall 9. Meanwhile Angel After the Fall First Night comes down as a mixed bag with the third bag, First Night 3 falling more than a little short.

Angel After the Fall #6 Into the Night Part 1 breaks from the crucial battle for a series of flashbacks centered around the telepathic fish and featuring what Spike, Connor, Illyria and Lorne did to get to here. Despite breaking into the battle at the crucial moment, Into the Night is welcome and almost preferred because Angel After the Fall #1 began on too disjointed a note, well after Los Angeles had gone to hell and unrolled its backstory clumsily.

Angel After the Fall #6 plotted if not scripted by Joss Whedon is really picking up a lot of those pieces and Connor’s flashback is particularly best at showing how Connor fell back into place and the arrival of Los Angeles into hell. Spike’s flashback gives us some more insight into Illyria’s transformations into Fred, which happened at a crucial moment in the fight back in Angel After the Fall #5. Lorne’s flashback is the loopiest told in verse, predictably enough and cartoony, though it actually gives you some idea of what really happened to major portions of L.A. when the demons arrived.

The telepathic fish though really steps front and center into the story for the first time, but seems to have experienced an actual arrival into L.A. which would kill the theory that they are not actually in hell, but experiencing some telepathic projected vision. Which would also explain why Buffy Season Eight never references a major city vanishing into hell. It’s unclear if Spike is still a vampire or not, he does experience a dawn with no problems. Angel After the Fall #6 Into the Night Part 1 ends with the telepathic fish again and since Angel After the Fall #8 Into the Night Part 3 will be Gunn’s story, it’s safe to assume that this will be a major factor.

Angel after the Fall 5 arrives with probably the best After the Fall cover yet. Angel After the Fall has moved much more quickly than Buffy Season 8 has and in comparatively little issues has brought Angel to a massive showdown that itself is probably the beginning of a much bigger showdown.

If Buffy Season 8 is in many ways a replay of Buffy Season 7, Angel After the Fall has no such simple allegiance. Think of it as what Angel Season 4 could have been with an unlimited budget and a really epic vision. By the time Angel After the Fall 5 reaches its cliffhanger conclusion, Angel is fighting for his life against the demon lords while his dragon takes on a tyrannosaurus rex and the human slaves watch from below.

What Angel After the Fall #5 lacks in plot, it makes up for in energy, even if much of what happens just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Angel goes out to fight the demon lords without any clear plan for beating them, which makes his actions pretty senseless. Wesley’s torture and return in time to save the day has a Season 4 vibe to it but much of what happens gets told to us in expositions. Particularly the Lorne material. Which makes Angel After the Fall #5 feel very disjointed.

As I said the issue ends with a cliffhanger that is to be resolved after the three issue First Night or just the first issue of it is out.

If there is one thing that can be said for Angel Season 6 or Angel After the Fall vs Buffy Season 8 is that it certainly moves a whole lot faster. By the last issue, Angel After the Fall #3, Angel had issued a challenge to the Lords of Hell for a fight. By this issue, we’re set for the showdown as Angel goes looking for Lorne, who has somehow become lord of Silverlake as Gunn, now a vampire, blows the hell out of the Wolfram and Hart headquarters, after first salvaging some healing gook and a photo of the old gang back when Connor was a baby and Wesley was trusted to hold him.

Angel After the Fall Issue 4 does suffer from some of the same problems as the series so far, namely Angel wandering around nearly aimlessly to encounter former friends, though Issue 5 of Angel After the Fall promises to reunite everyone. Besides the return of Lorne, After the Fall #4 also features the return of the Grusilag, my spelling is probably off though, who’s here to join the fight.

The real action though comes from the revelations. The first revelation hinted at, in the end of Issue 3, was that Angel is now human, which he is and is faking the vampirism to keep his enemies off guard, so that the entire thing may have been a gambit to get Angel to embrace his vampire side, this being in keeping with W&H’s whole routine up till now. Then there’s Angel’s suggestion that LA really isn’t in hell but a place that looks like hell and some newly emerged characters as well as a gambit by the Lords of Hell to put Angel down for good, even if he wins.

Well it’s the third issue in for Angel Season Six or Angel After the Fall and it continues following the usual stylistic pattern that seems to have been established so far, a fight scene, some brooding to be followed by a tantalizing hint that things are much more complicated than we thought. Or at least that’s the idea anyway.

Granted Buffy Season 8 does pretty much the same thing but the difference, such as it is, is style. As it turns out about half of Issue 2 and Issue 3 of Angel After the Fall was expended on a completely pointless visit to Beverly Hills whose goal seemed to be to showcase Spike and a bit of Illyria. In other words it’s the worst of Angel Season Five all over again.

Angel After the Fall #3 does redeem itself in the second half as Angel challenges all the demon lords of Los Angeles with a showdown coming in two days and a hint dropped that Angel is no longer a vampire, which raises the question of what he actually is, since he still seems to be able to absorb a decent amount of punishment.

Well after the success of Buffy Season 8, Angel Season 6 came on the scene with a premise even more extreme than Buffy commanding an army of slayers facing off against a demon manipulated US military that wants to bring on the twilight of the age of magic, as all of L.A. winds up in hell. It’s a premise that is part Strange Girl and part whothehellknowswhat but it’s ripe for exploration and while After the Fall 2 doesn’t come out of the gate roaring any more than After the Fall Part 1 did, it does set up some interesting scenes.

After killing a demon lord’s son and touching off a demon gang war in L.A., Angel flees the Wolfram and Hart headquarters, meets up with Connor and discovers what may be the real threat. All told I did not care for the Angel Five series finale or the casual way that Season Five trashed everything good about Angel’s first four seasons. But for those who want spoilers, Gunn isn’t one of the good guys anymore, he’s a vampire and possibly a slightly insane vampire. Think of Will Smith’s character from I Am Legend with fangs and a whole lot of insanity juice running through his dead veins and this is it. Personally I was a little too fond of Gunn to see him used this way but it is gutsy. The easy way out would have been to trick him out with a soul somehow.

Anyway as the cover testifies, Angel After the Fall 2 gets sucked into the same creativity crushing cliche that is Spike as Angel goes hunting for Spike and has a pointless fight with him, much like half of Season Five. As it turns out Illyria has taken over Beverly Hills and lets Spike stay there surrounded by women in bikinis. I’m not sure whose fantasy that is, maybe some of Spike’s crazier female fans. The Gunn material provides some potential, the rest of Issue 2 including the reunions with Gwen, in proper superhero costume, werewolf girl, out of character and Connor, way out of character and Illyria, Season 5’s second biggest mistake I can take a solid pass on.

I supposed Angel After the Fall could have taken the easy way out, a climactic battle and then Angel and Gunn and Illyuria begin working out of some hole in the wall still trying to help the helpless. Angel After the Fall doesn’t that easy way out though, instead it has all of LA descending into hell, literally or figuratively, with demons taking over the city and making humans their slaves. Which means that the ending of Angel Season Five wasn’t about a Wolfram and Hart attack, but about the conquest of L.A. and Wolfram and Hart’s own plans for Angel’s soul.

It’s certainly a brave start, though it’s not clear how this is meant to be reconciled with Buffy Season Eight (you’d think L.A. being in hell would have gotten some mention). The characters are all around too, Angel and his dragon are trying to save the remaining humans by directing them to a safehouse run by Connor, ElektraGirl and WolfGirl, Wesley has a contract and so may be dead but still has to serve as Wolfram and Hart’s representative the way Lilah did. Gunn is leading his own band of demon fighters. Illyria and Lorne are unaccounted for.

It’s an intriguing setting, Angel meets Strange Girl, the comic, but the delivery is jumbled, the art in the fight scenes is incomprehensible, though the characters are decently drawn. The dialogue is not quite up to spec either. Still it’s interesting and worth reading and better than the Brian K. Vaughn scripted part of Buffy Season Eight.