Buffy Seasons Eight and Nine Thoughts
I was waiting to get every issue of the final arc so I could marathon the whole thing at once. But in typical me fashion, I forgot about it until the other day, when I got an email titled, “Buffy Season Nine #1 now available for pre-order.” I realized I needed to finish Season Eight so I could figure out what the story was with Season Nine. (IE, is Whedon involved, or is it gonna be bad fanfiction like Angel: Aftermath?)
And after the previous arc, I assumed I’d want to write some kind of ramble or review for issues #36-40. But I’m not going to do that. All I really have to say is, “Well, that was pretty good. They salvaged that craziness into something cool after all.” Instead, I’m going to talk about all these new (to me) franchise comic developments. There will be a few spoilers, in case you’re actually further behind than I am.
So I definitely want to keep reading into Season Nine, but this Angel and Faith spin-off also sounds very promising. As if poor Angel hasn’t been through enough already. But Faith is the perfect person to help him get back to his normal levels of broodiness. And not that I want to “ship” them, but I’d be shocked if there wasn’t any romantic stuff. We haven’t had any of that since like 1999, so it would be something fresh after all these years.
But speaking of Angel, all of this led me to discover that IDW lost the Angel license. I liked that the two TV series each had their own thing, but this makes things much easier for the sake of continuity and occasional crossover. I wonder if Dark Horse could work with Brian Lynch? I loved all the Angel writing he did. And if so, I wonder if he could still use Betta George? But I also wonder if any of these Dark Horse Angel comics will acknowledge any of the post-After the Fall events, or if they’ll be conveniently ignored or retconned. I hope it’s the latter, mostly so I don’t feel compelled to read any of that stuff.
On that note, I also discovered that IDW did a Spike miniseries that tied into the plot of Season Eight… and it was written by Brian Lynch! Apparently it just finished last month, too. I wish I’d known about this sooner, or I would have subscribed to the series and collected the issues as they were released. At this point I’d be better off just buying the two collections, and I even have a coupon I could use towards that.
Season Nine itself has a lot of potential, though. According to Whedon’s letter in Season Eight #40, he wants to go back to basics, and I think that’s a good idea. Things were getting so over-the-top and crazy that if not for the dialogue you could forget it’s Buffy. I still don’t know how to feel about the whole Dawn and Xander thing, but I’m sure it will end in misery and horror after a while. And what will they do with Willow? I don’t care that much about the Kennedy breakup either way, but I’m sure plenty of people are dancing in the streets about it. Then of course Buffy herself seems like she’s ready to clean up the mess she made.
So I look forward to reading all these new comics, and I plan to be better about reading them promptly. Don’t want to miss anymore promising spin-offs or other production developments.