Review #272: Buffy The Vampire Slayer #20
A couple of years ago the Buffy television series continued on in comic book form, picking up a short while after the TV series ended as “Season Eight”. Just like the show, the comic follows a larger story arc with some stand-alone stories thrown in. This latest issue is one of the self-contained stories that borrows from the never-really-produced Buffy Animated Series. A lot of comics and cartoons in the nineties used the stylization of characters popularized by Bruce Timm’s designs of Batman in his animated series, and the Buffy cartoon followed suit in it’s character design. As far as I know, only a short promo was produced and the latest issue of the comic book uses the plot from that short story.
Buffy, tired from demon slaying, falls asleep and has a dream which is, in essence, the cartoon complete with direct quotes. Since the comic book takes place about ten years after the cartoon, Buffy fumbles around with not revealing too much about the future, like Willow’s lesbianism and Xander’s missing eye, and delights in changes that have not yet happened, like her mother’s death. She ends up fighting a dragon rather than getting to go to a party with her friends. Then she wakes up. The message is that while things seemed so simple when she was young, it’s only hindsight and her life was always complicated.
I enjoyed the use of the cartoon story. It never really had a chance but here it’s used to illustrate another aspect of life in the multifaceted Buffyverse. That cartoony art style gets tired really quickly when put on the printed page, working much better on the screen. The longer storyline in Season Eight has been rather weak so far with some of the shorter story arcs and standalone stories like this being more entertaining.
Here’s the animated promo: