The Time of Your Life, Part 4
I ain't gonna spoil Batman for ya. I'm gonna spoil Buffy.
Issue 19 is not the best issue of the comic series so far, but it's the issue where the comic became great - not great as in superfantasticwondertime!, but the other great, the great of scale, and purpose, and power, and meaning. And if it didn't damn well happen when Buffy had to kill her best friend, it sure as hell happened a few pages earlier with something as simple as Gunther saying "surf" where the rest of us woulda said "turf." Like my own personal Giles told me a few times back in the day, it's in the words. It's in the language.
It's a sloppy piece of comic bookery, three months too late and obviously drawn in a hurry, but damned if it ain't the piece of the story where, sorta somehow kinda, Joss and his folk proved to me that this whole Season 8 thing actually needed to happen, after all. That it isn't just an also-ran, and that it isn't just a piece of the story, but that it actually has the capability to be something a bit more. That it had to happen here, not on a TV show and not in a movie, but right here in the funnybooks, to be the thing that it needs to be.
Think about what we've had so far that could only ever have happened in paper and ink:
- Giant Dawn fighting Giant Mecha Dawn in the streets of downtown Tokyo
- Willow's power, and where it comes from
- The final, anguished moments of Renee's life, told from her fading point of view
- and, of course, Sarah Michelle Gellar getting her lesbianic freak on with her first, best lieutenant.
And then sweep all that aside for a 4-issue mini arc in the distant human future when the entirety of our characters' actions has been shown to be a trivial blip in an otherwise uninterrupted ongoing churn of regular, mean-spirited old life; think about the last thing Willow says in issue 17 - "only time" - ; and sorta shiver a little bit, when Erin is cradling Fray in her arms on an unchanged rooftop on the last page of issue 19.
This story takes some fucking chances, man.
p.s. is Xander in love with Dawn?
Comments
Definitely so far season 8 has proven to be one of the best seasons of Buffy to date, with some really powerful stuff and there's still a lot left to come. :)
Also I'm glad Whedon didn't wipe out the Fray timeline, as it's a world that I hope we will see more of one day.
The story is definitely wider in scope and doing things they couldn't have done in another medium. The short animated clip of the never produced Buffy cartoon that leaked to YouTube, showed that at it also would have done a lot of things that were not capable in the tv show. However, while the cartoon would have been really fun I don't think it would have ever reached the maturity of the comic.
However, one complaint I do have of the comic, is times like the big reveal of the traitor. Was that a Riley or a badly drawn Andrew? And only got confirmation looking up online. That scene could have helped with someone calling him Riley.
Since I though Twilight might have been Riley, I need to make a new guess on his identity. So I'm going back to one of my original guesses of Ethan. Sure, he died early on in Season 8, but could that have been him tricking Buffy so she wouldn't connect the dots between him and Twilight. Because it needs to be at least a regular for the final reveal to have any meaning and not sure who else in the Buffyverse fits the bill.
Posted by: Matthew Fabb | November 27, 2008 1:00 PM
I still think the connection between "Dawn" and "Twilight" is going to have to be further considered. :)
I had no problem identifying Riley from the image, but it was a near miss. Georges Jeanty had his own problems with likeness but Karl Moline's overall likenesses seem a lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I am really glad Moline came back for this arc (no one draws Fray like he does) but there are some pretty funky character models in those 4 issues.
Posted by: tederick | November 27, 2008 2:01 PM
No doubt about it, if it's Fray I would like Karl Moline to draw it because he helped create that world. However, he's definitely not the greatest at drawing actors. Then again, not many comic book artists are, as it's really hard job to work with characters based on real actors.
It would have been cool to have had seen Jeanty draw the Buffy parts of the arch and Monline draw the Fray side of things. However, I wonder if Monline would have been insulted at that kind of suggestion.
Yeah, the Dawn and Twilight thing sounds like a good idea, but I just can't see how it would come together. However, if Whedon is playing his cards right, none of us should be able to see how it all comes together. :)
Posted by: Matthew Fabb | November 27, 2008 10:14 PM
The other possibility, of course, is that Twilight is a mega-grossing teen vampire movie about the importance of sexual abstinence.
Posted by: tederick | November 27, 2008 10:33 PM