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.

Buffy has always had a problem with turning minor side characters into the main attraction. The series did it with Spike, they did it to some degree with Anya, but Buffy the comic book manages to do it with Harmony. Harmony was always a one shot joke, and the series knew that keeping her mostly in the background. David Fury did a good job sketching her into an Angel episode, but with a turnaround demonstrating that she was evil. Then the disastrous 5th season of Angel felt the need to drag Harmony back as a non-evil Vampire secretary and built one episode around her being framed for drinking someone.

This time around Jane Espenson pens Harmonic Divergence, the 21st issue of the rapidly sinking Buffy Season 8, and probably the worst and ugliest issue of the season to date. Which is pretty much what you can expect from Jane Espenson, since Marti Noxon apparently wasn’t available to do something even worse. Like Harmony it’s a shallow, annoying and completely empty issue with an ugly touch that sees the pointless death of a Slayer, and pushes the whole storyline way outside reality.

We begin with Harmony, back to being evil again, and getting her own Reality TV show after getting caught drinking Andy Dick’s blood outside a nightclub. This turns into an MTV reality show, and when a Slayer who struck out on her own tries to kill her, Harmony kills her instead, leading to CNN reporting on the evil army of Slayers. There’s lots of glib satire in there, but mostly it’s hard to believe that the world is suddenly ready to accept the existence of vampires, after Buffy was dedicated to the premise that the world wasn’t. And would that same world which saw Harmony drinking blood on TV really believe the vampires are the good guys? Satire may be satire but this is pushing against the boundaries of plausibility. Sure if you substitute terrorists for vampires, the metaphor can sort of work, but then again if terrorists turned into demons and drank blood on TV, they’d still be the ones with the PR problem, except maybe in Berkeley and the UK.

Buffy Season 8 was chock full of problems before, and another Far East issue which seems to be coming up next, is certainly not the solution. Still Issue 21 is a clear low point. It’s not just the return of George Jeanty, whose Harmony is virtually indistinguishable from Buffy, because neither of them look recognizable at all. It’s a storyline that discards all the continuity of two series’, in order to make a few jokes about a one joke character, that never connect.

After a giant robot Dawn, Dawn turning into a giant and then a centaur, Buffy turning gay and then not gay, going to the future, killing an evil future version of Willow, and all the other jump the shark moments of Season 8, an issue where Buffy has a dream in which she’s in the animated series that never really aired, almost makes sense by comparison. Jeph Loeb scripts this one, and there’s not much that can be said about it. I never saw the appeal of an animated series, particularly with Dawn in it, and Buffy Season 8 Issue 20 After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back does little to change that.

The idea of Buffy flashing back mentally in time to high school when things were supposedly easier sounds like a good idea, and it might have been, but the animated version isn’t just a cartoon, it’s cartoonish and silly, and just grates on you for page after page, with ugly art and cartoonish versions of the characters without any of the complexity. The idea of it does remind you of how far Buffy has gone from the premise, but that was a problem for years even when the show was still running. It’s an even bigger problem now when Season 8 has gone all out and jumped the shark so many times the shark has a pounding headache.

For anyone who really needed a tribute to a show which never aired, an exclusive club that is probably limited to Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, and that creepy guy who has a restraining order out against him, After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back is it. But the best thing about it is the cover, and it never gets any better than that. Season 8 has regularly run these stand alone stories to interrupt the general arc, and it’s a nice idea, and Joss Whedon has done them pretty well. The Chain for example took a risk but worked. After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back though is all but pointless.

After a long break Buffy Season 8 Issue 19 Time of Your Life Part 4 stumbles in out of the rain and boy is it a mess. It’s appropriate that Time of Your Life wraps up on the same day that Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP wraps up, because they have something big in common, they’re both fumbled messes. Buffy specifically is big on the action but bad on the making sense. Time of Your Life had that problem from the convoluted flashback ridden launch in Time of Your Life Part 1,but elements were brought in that made it interesting.

The return of Fray to the Buffy universe was high on the list, but Fray seemed oddly willing to listen to evil future Willow, despite knowing that she was tied to Harth and his army of Lurks, and knock out and tie up Buffy. Meanwhile evil future Willow’s plan seemed to come down to getting Buffy to kill her, and while that is a powerful moment, as Buffy kills Willow in the future only to be rescued by Willow in the past, it seemed like that needed much more of a reason to tie it together, especially since future Willow unrolled a complex plan when all she needed to do was hurt some innocent bystanders enough to make the case for her own termination.

Meanwhile over on the home front, centaur Dawn and Xander and a bunch of forest creatures battle the incorporeal and then corporeal demon army sent by Warren and Amy at the behest of the mysterious masked guy known only as Twilight, apparently with the help of Angel, which really makes this old home week, though if Angel is evil now, that is really playing a bit too much havoc with the Buffyverse.

So far we’ve had two sets of four issues based on gimmicks, Buffy goes to Japan, Buffy goes to the future, in which the basic storytelling has been neglected, in favor of Dawn fighting a giant robot in Tokyo (ha ha because that’s just like a Japanese monster movie), Dawn as a centaur, the return of more old characters, Buffy in a lesbian storyline as a not too subtly calculate attempt to get attention (which succeeded) and Buffy killing future Willow. And meanwhile the thread of Buffy Season 8 that was actually interesting has slipped away, this time on Joss Whedon’s watch. What a surprise.

At this point in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 it can be a little hard to tell the comic story from the wildest fanfic. There’s the quality of the writing, with Joss Whedon writing the script no imitators can quite compete, but at the same time the increasingly wacky Season 8 has gone well into Manga territory. Sure Buffy in its later seasons had gotten a bit wackier and unmoored from the grounding that Buffy’s high school years had, but while Buffy Season 8 started out with Buffy leading an army of slayers against a mysterious enemy, as it progressed we got a giant Dawn, the return of half a dozen Buffy villains, Dracula all but joining the team, a giant Robot Dawn battling a giant Dawn over Tokyo, Dawn as a Centaur and in Issue 18 alone we get the Dawn centaur, we get Buffy in the future on a flying car, and what looks like a bad manga with a naked Willow and a snake woman with a prominently featured and suggestive tail end.

It’s not that Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #18 Time of Your Life Part 3 isn’t fun, there is the ultimate spoiler alert as Buffy reads bits about what happened in the past in Melaka’s Watcher’s diaries, though it doesn’t mention Buffy’s slayer armies, which makes you wonder if they’re going to retcon the whole thing out the narrative. Then we’ve got Xander riding Centaur Dawn with more innuendo running into some forest spirits and ridiculing them in classic Joss Whedon style. And then of course there are the flying cars and Manhattan turned into a gated community and a future insane Willow who feels she’s earned it even as present day Willow is warned not to look ahead.

What’s the not so good? Predictable friction between Buffy and Fray, and apparently Fray’s willingness to do what Willow says even when she knows Willow is linked to her vampire brother and his plans. Though apparently whatever Willow showed her was convincing enough to get the job done. With the cover of Issue 19 focusing on future Willow and the portal opening tonight, it seems like a safe bet that the showdown between two Willows is likely to hit the next issue.

Buffy Season 8 Issue 16 threw us directly into the fray, pun intended. so Issue 17 confuses things a bit more by taking a step back to show us the larger picture around the sides of it, flashing back to what Melaka Fray was doing before the future interruptus and the reaction of Willow and the New York Slayerettes and the Scotland Slayer teams, with a little of the aftermath and a revelation of Buffy’s future enemy. Who as it turns out is the same Big Bad as at the end of Season 6. Yes Willow. Or future bitter Willow with some facial scarring who might be a bit insane around the edges.

The Twilight story seemed clear enough but Joss Whedon has made it a bit schizophrenic with the diversion to the future. Not that it isn’t fun revisiting Fray’s world, Fray herself, the Lurks, Hathar and the flying cars. The original Fray story never actually resolved or wrapped things up in any useful way and unsurprisingly Buffy and Fray don’t get off to a good start and don’t get along together that well. While crazy future Willow suggests that Vampires in numbers strengthen each other, while Slayers in number weaken each other, it does bear up the Faith-Buffy and Kendra-Buffy experiences, on the other hand Buffy and her team of world slayer police haven’t done too badly out of it.

I can’t say that I’m too crazy about turning Willow even again. The whole magic equals evil storyline, one of the dumbest aspects of Season 6, and considering how bad Season 6 was that really is saying something, was mostly dropped since then. These days Willow does magic and stays okay, but somehow she ends up centuries old, insane and bent on using Buffy’s visit to the future to somehow destroy magic and the entire Slayer line. Assuming that Willow isn’t Twilight, though it would explain the mask, but from what we’ve seen of Twilight he’s big and masculine, we’ve got another fork in the magic destruction road but the last two issues of Buffy Season 8 have confused way more than they’ve explained.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 returns with Issue 16 that takes Buffy from Scotland to New York, sees stuff blown up big and sees Joss Whedon back at the helm. There’s a basic difference you can see right from the start when Joss Whedon is doing the scripting and that comes through in Buffy Season 8 Issue 16 Time of Your Life Part 1 right from the opening page. That isn’t to say that Buffy Season 8 #16 is perfect by any means. Karl Moline sometimes gets it right but he actually pulls off even worse depictions of Buffy and Willow than even George Jeanty managed to. The Dawn goofiness continues as Dawn turns into a Centaur, regular sized, apparently her magical transformations come in sets of three and I’m sure there will be a hell of a payoff for the third, though the centaur thing does need work.

Buffy Season 8 Issue 16 begins with the temporal anomaly that causes Buffy and a demon that Fray is fighting in the future to switch places in time, or maybe that’s a side effect of it. The anomaly itself was presumably caused by a missile with candles and evil signs launched by Warren and Amy at the behest of Twilight, possibly, which impacted the Scottish castle, again possibly. As you can see I’m hedging a lot because I’ve got a lot to hedge about because Issue 16 really doesn’t clarify a whole lot.

Buffy and Willow, on a tip from the late great snake woman, head to New York City to find the Scythe which is apparently missing, the operative word being that it’s probably missing somewhere in time. Or something. You know how temporal anomalies make for confusing storytelling and all, and now that we know Twilight may be responsible for the end of magic or something, to bring Fray’s future in line with Buffy’s, it all has to be sorted out, but aside from turning Dawn into a centaur, more jokes about Buffy being gay and Joss Whedon’s own special brand of dialogue, Issue 16 of Buffy Season 8 really doesn’t sort out much or offer a whole lot except the comforting vibe of a show that a lot of people have gotten used to.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #15 Wolves at the Gate 4 wraps up the whole Japan storyline and thankfully Drew Goddard’s run too. Wolves at the Gate 4 isn’t all bad, it’s a mixed bag, but much of that bag is filled with cheese and once the giant robotic Dawn shows up, the issue jumps the shark into complete senselessness. I get that giant monsters are the default Japanese Tokyo joke. Granted it’s the one that requires the least imagination, which I guess is why we have the clan of Japanese vampires building a giant robotic version of Dawn for no apparent reason except comedy, as opposed to say a giant robotic scorpion or Buffy.

The opening page does come packed with a real punch showing her death from her perspective. It’s a powerful moment and one you can be certain won’t be repeated in the issue, which instead is a chaotically told story of the takedown of the whole deslayering project and whose highlights involve Dracula rather than Buffy, who spends much of the issue dealing with the whole lesbian thing. It’s a very poor balance of comedy and action and while there are good moments, such as Buffy and Willow’s list, it feels off, particularly considering that Slayers are dying around them.

We do learn some more about the snake woman Willow was with and the implications that there will be still more to it. Dracula and Xander share some nice scenes, though again Buffy working with Dracula shows that some of the worst of the Marti Noxon era of Buffy has yet to be flushed. Overall Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #15 Wolves at the Gate 4 does better with comedy than it does with paying off a four issue arc and it feels like a wackier version of the later seasons with no real rhyme or reason to it.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #13 Wolves at the Gate 2 is Drew Goddard’s second issue and while there’s no question that it feels like Buffy, it feels like Buffy Season Seven. In some ways Buffy Season Eight had managed to recapture a lot of what was good about Buffy and less of the bad, Buffy Season 8 Issue 13 though and really Issue 12 dives right back into a some of the bad, from the suspension of judgment, the faux cutesy banter attempts by other writers to badly duplicate Joss Whedon’s dialogue and the really bad decisions from Buffy in full control freak mode.

Wolves at the Gate #2 begins on a high note with Dracula coming off as a more offbeat character than he did in the turgid Buffy Season 5 opener that arguably was when Buffy jumped the shark. But we’re right back to the later seasons Buffy universe in which the Scobby Gang doesn’t seem to really worry about saving people and just hangs out with the demons. Case in point Dracula kidnaps and kills a little boy, Xander doesn’t seem to care much. Neither does anyone else. All the jokes about Dracula riding a motorcycle and going to help them hunt down the Anime vampires are funny, but we’re back to the Buffy with no moral center again.

Meanwhile Buffy has decided to empty the castle and take all the Slayers to Japan. This is pretty stupid and smacks of Season Seven again, especially since she’s obviously walking into a trap. The Anime Vampires meanwhile have won Dracula’s powers in a game, one of them may be a witch and they’ve got a ring gadget that when combined with the ax removes a Slayer’s powers leaving her just an ordinary girl again and easily killed. And just so Buffy’s agent who took out a number of powerful Kabuki demons is easily killed by a vampire in a Tokyo alley. Making it all too obvious that Buffy has brought her slayers into a trap.

Well it’s Drew Goddard’s first issue. I can’t say I was a huge fan of his work back on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (aside from Conversations With Dead People) or Angel and based on issue 12 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, I can’t claim to be much of a fan of his work on the comics version either. Granted the point of the issue is a pretext for getting Buffy and co to Japan but this issue reminded me of a lot of what was bad about Seasons 6 and 7, the pointless jumping into bed and the lame attempts at comedy.

Yes Issue 12 kicks off with Buffy having had a lesbian encounter with Satsu. Is this an attempt to turn Buffy Season 8 into a manga, even before we head to Japan? Probably at least a tip of the hat. Is it an attempt to appease the Willow-Tara demographic still pissed over Tara’s death. Almost certainly. Is it a desperate attempt to play to the 18-34 teenage male audience? Yup, got it in three.

Either way it’s awkward and makes no sense after Issue 11 where Joss Whedon just had Buffy explain that she’s not interested. And then having everyone crash in on Buffy which lets Drew Goddard rip off the beginning of Not Another Teen Movie.

Finally must Buffy Season 8 drag back every single subsidiary Buffy character and villain? Alright, we had Warren and Ethan and Amy and we could have called it a day. Did we really need Dracula back? Considering the Dracula episode was when a lot of people think Buffy jumped the shark, I’d argue the answer might be no. Yet it’s the end of Issue 12 and Dracula is back and my patience factor with this is surprisingly low. I wasn’t really happy with some of Brian K. Vaughn’s work but Drew Goddard is terrible. All the previous issues, even when they weren’t up to snuff, managed to bring in some nice character exploration moments and shake up the series a little and keep it real. Drew Goddard’s Issue 12 though is just bad jokes and a ridiculous enemy topped off by Dracula and out of Season 8 it’s the clear smelly pooch of the litter.

If one shots like The Chain and Anywhere but Here and Brian K. Vaughn’s Faith diversion in No Future for You took a bit of a break, A Beautiful Sunset might be a one shot but it brings back the main story with a vengeance. I’ve said it before and throughout Buffy Season 8 I will probably find myself saying it many times, but it’s surprising how familiar that Buffy voice is that Joss Whedon managed to capture and how its absence was missed and it makes you wonder what the later seasons of Buffy would have been like had Joss Whedon stayed on top of his creation, metaphorically speaking of course, unless he’s being really creepy.

A Beautiful Sunset features the return of Twilight, his first confrontation with Buffy and the suggestion that he may be human after all. The combination of the flashback to Buffy’s finale at the beginning and Twilight’s line about remembering that move and the final revelation where he appears to be human, seems to suggest it might be Caleb. But considering what a lame character Caleb was, it would be a pity if Twilight was just Caleb with superpowers. Of course since Joss Whedon already brought back Amy, Warren the Rat and of course a certain chaos worshiping Brit named Ethan Rayne, Caleb’s return is far from impossible.

A Beautiful Sunset also reveals who’s in love with Buffy and the answer is one of the slayerettes in what’s possibly an apology by Joss Whedon to Buffy’s lesbian fanbase demographic. All told it’s a good issue though, still mired of course in the usual Buffy doldrums that were really overdone in the later seasons, and that too is part of the problem. Buffy started out as a teenage girl trying to balance her need for a life with her destiny. The dramatic power came from the contrast and from her ability to call on those reserves, but by the later seasons mopey was Buffy’s default mode and while A Beautiful Sunset is good, it’s still the one note guilty miserable Buffy in the end.

Well after the long reign of Brian K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon returns with Anywhere But Here Issue 10 which really feel like it belongs somewhere in Buffy Season 4, the TV one of course. If you’re expecting a lot to happen here, don’t, but it does reveal some tidbits including what Willow has been up to behind the scenes and how Buffy has been funding the whole Slayer army bit and no there’s no mysterious donor involved, more not to mysterious bank robberies.

Basically it’s one of those pre-finale type Buffy episodes where secrets tepidly come out and arguments sorta almost kinda happen. Willow’s revelation is somewhat powerful, but it’s a question of where it’s going to lead to. Meanwhile there’s some cute attempts by Buffy and Willow to fantasize while flying and more involving actors and actresses, (though Buffy apparently was one of the few people to sit through Reign of Fire) including Tina Fey. This is one of those issues that dances perilously close to becoming a manga with a naked Willow in a lesbian embrace with some sort of snake woman, which shows that Joss Whedon can top the wackiest of the shippers when he wants to.

There’s not really much to say about Anywhere But Here, as the title itself reveals it’s basically a one shot and a quest for knowledge, it puts Buffy and the Slayer army in between a supposed showdown between human forces trying to bring Twilight and the end of magic and the demon armies ready to fight it. Except as we saw last issue, it seems to be a demon in actual charge of things. The results are interesting but lack any real juice.

Well it feels like a lot longer than it really was but the end of Brian K. Vaughn’s run on Buffy Season 8 wraps up with the conclusion of No Future For You. If the previous three issues of No Future For You were padding and in-jokes, Issue 4, 9 of Season 8 overall delivers with a bang as Faith faces down Lady Genevieve and Giles faces down the Warlock, the second showdown here is a good deal better than the first with Giles reverting back to Ripper to bring him down. It’s a cool scene and really the only cool scene up till now in Vaughn’s run.

There’s a nice opening flashback to Faith’s time with Mayor Wilkins and Issue 9 is paced and filled with content in a way that the previous three parts of No Future For You should have been. Faith as Pygmalion is discarded in favor of the old Faith, the old Buffy vs Faith rivalry is back and as always toward the conclusion of a Buffy season, the villain’s plan seems to involve splitting apart her friendships before moving in for the kill.

Warning Spoilers

We do learn the meaning of Twilight, it’s the twilight of the age of magic, which the demon type figure behind the attack who can hover in air, is aiming for. His targets aren’t just the slayers but magic altogether and that apparently is the agenda of those in the US military who are associated with him.

Well Faith’s little story arc is all but set to wrap up as Issue 8, the penultimate, next to last issue of the arc debuts. Issue 8 has some of the style of Buffy and the art is a little better, though Faith and Buffy still look nothing like the way they are supposed to look. Issue 6 brought Faith in the heart of Roden and Lady Genevieve’s operation. Issue 7 set up the assassination of Buffy. Issue 8 features the actual showdown between Genevieve and Buffy, but Buffy never really has a problem with her making the whole thing anticlimactic, with the real showdown unsurprisingly taking place between Buffy and Faith. It’s the one panel in the issue that’s genuinely dramatic and if I was still doing Hubs, it would be the one to go up, as Faith holds Buffy underwater.

But Genevieve is such a poorly drawn character that it’s hard to relate to Faith’s empathy for her or why Faith rescues her. Part of the problem is that Brian K. Vaughn likes to write about people in other countries but has no real clue about them. Whether it’s Japanese, Australians or Israelis or Russians or in this case Brits, the results are just embarrassing and make you wince because when Brian K. Vaughn does other countries, he does them Ugly American style. So Lady Genevieve likes Amy Winehouse and she also tells Buffy to bow to her superior and calls her a colonial. Nobody under 70 goes around calling Americans colonials. Seriously. Had Brian K. Vaughn actually turned Genevieve into a British version of Faith all the way, as the bathtub scene suggested, it might have been interesting, instead she’s gullible and schizophrenic and only the final panel with its cliffhanger really makes her interesting.

With No Future For You set to wrap up next issue, presumably Roden represents a larger conspiracy and though Faith might want to redeem Genevieve seeing something of herself in her, I expect that she will end up biting the dust.

George Jeanty’s pencils still continue to be the very worst thing about the adventures of Faith. Bizarrely enough he manages to draw a plausible enough Buffy in the final page of Issue 7 but the opening pages featuring a flashback to Buffy and Faith’s fight is some of the worst art ever, leaving both Buffy and Faith looking 80 and completely unrecognizable.

Brian K. Vaughn’s writing has improved somewhat and is closer to the Buffy style now, the plot though could still use work because we seem to have gone from major threats to a rather silly one. Faith taking out two gargoyles is pretty cool but do we really believe the new slayer is a real threat to Buffy?

The flashback over to Scotland for giant Dawn’s talk with Willow is semi-cute as is the idea that the Scooby Gang, majorly expanded, now faces threats on multiple fronts, from the military, a rival slayer backed by royal power and a mysterious conspiracy. Still Issue 7 feels all too lightweight to be satisfying.

With Issue #5 of Buffy Season 8, we come to the last Joss Whedon issue in a while as Brian Vaughn will follow afterward with a Faith mini-arc. Before that in the balance comes The Chain, a one shot issue, a one time story about a dead slayer we never met. The Chain reminds us of what Joss Whedon does best, tell the small stories, the personal stories and connects them to the bigger picture. That was at the root of the success of Buffy and that is what The Chain encapsulates, the life and choosing of a single slayer, her fight against evil and her death without us ever knowing her name because her fight takes place in the shadow of another name, that of Buffy Summers herself.

Where Buffy was once the young girl on the run, struggling to get through High School, make it back home by climbing up the tree and through her window before curfew and patrol and fight vampires, she is now an icon, the leader of an army of Slayers and the bearer of the weight of being the epitome of Slayerness (a word I can safely only use in a Buffy review.) And that’s the big picture now and it’s what Buffy Season 7 was about and what Buffy Season 8 is really about, Buffy as the lonely girl struggling between human connections and her duty, between her role as a newer and greater Chosen One and her own needs and wishes.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 - Issue 5 - The Chain

The original Slayer was a tool, a way for men to fight evil without ever really defeating it. The Slayers fought and were sacrificed and died and new ones arose in their place, always maintaining the balance. Buffy shattered the balance by raising a Slayer army and now many of those men want to put that balance back to where it was all along. At the beginning in the Joss Whedon penned, “Tales of the Slayers” the First Slayer was viewed as a demon, driven from villages and inhabited areas, growing wild and mad in the process. Buffy now faces a world that does not want her and her Slayers any more than it wanted the First Slayer.

With Issue Four, Buffy Season Eight is clearly drawing out a larger playing field, larger than the show’s scope ever allowed. On the one hand this kind of X-Men storytelling is somewhat of a cliche, particularly in the aftermath of the Marvel Civil War, which has probably served to beat the Superheroes vs the Government and people with extraordinary abilities storyline deep into the ground. On the other hand it’s also the only inevitable place for Buffy to go.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 4 - The Long Way Home Part IV

Season 8 Issue Three , has Willow proposing a plan to anonymously kiss Buffy by having the one who truly loves her, step forward to give her a kiss. It isn’t shown who kisses Buffy, but Xander appears to quickly step back when Buffy wakes, however Willow also stands close to Buffy and Buffy’s first words are addressed to Willow. Buffy also appears to taste cinnamon buns– a little clue that may help reveal the party in question.

Buffy’s dream and Xander’s centrality throughout all three issues thus far suggests that Joss Whedon may finally be ready to make Xander’s dreams come true– now that he’s somewhat matured enough for it and move along a romance between Buffy and Xander. If the kiss did come from Xander, that would strongly suggest the development of such a potential romance is moving further along. However if the kiss came from Willow, that may raise a whole other range of questions instead.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 3 - The Long Way Home Part III

There’s plenty of moments in Issue Two that really remind you that is Joss Whedon and that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is back. Sometimes it’s the little things like Xander bursting to the rescue into Buffy’s room, wearing his Nick Fury eyepatch and yellow pajamas with Tweety Bird on them. Or Xander interrogating Amy and sharing a riposte that brings back all your memories of the classic series with Joss Whedon nailing down the show’s trademark witty dialogue all over again. For anyone who worried, as I did, that Amy was being transformed into a ridiculous Hannibalesque villain– Issue 2 demonstrates that she’s an enemy well in the show’s tradition.

And then it’s also the big things like the solution of what it will take to wake Buffy up from her sleep again– an answer that puts a twist on an old fairy tale that is at once witty, unnerving and suggests it will open up the gateway to a whole other storyline. It’s also in Buffy’s nightmare which is no ordinary collection of horrors but chock full of symbolical and metaphorical imagery mixed with prophecy in the best tradition of Joss Whedon’s incredible work on the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 4 finale, “Restless”.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 3 - The Long Way Home Part II

Thus “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8″ begins with a world weary slayer, realizing that even in a world filled with slayers, she can’t rest or retire or have a social life. Despite the great number of slayers now populating the world and fighting back evil, not only can Buffy not take a break, but her burdens and responsibilities and isolation are greater than ever. And she’s trapped in an adult role, cut off from doing what she used to have fun doing, including relationships.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8″ continues the path Buffy has been walking in the previous seasons. In Season 2’s “What’s My Line” episode, it was suggested that Buffy had a natural aptitude for law enforcement. To some degree that is her life now. With the arrival of Dawn as her younger sister in Season 5, Buffy had been increasingly forced to take on an adult role, first as an older sister for Dawn and with the death of her mother, Joyce Summers, also a mom. With the arrival of the Slayer candidates in Season 7 as they were being hunted by the First Evil, Buffy had to become a leader. Where Fray the Vampire Slayer takes a shortcut, leading an army against the demonic invasion within days of learning her destiny as a slayer, Buffy has had to grow into that role year by year.

Read more Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 1