Joss Whedon, et al, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon’s Season 8 (Dark Horse, 2007- ), monthly, $2.99.
By Tyler Curtain
Yes, in fact, this will be another review
that sings the pleasures of Joss Whedon’s unkillable,
undead franchise. There is a lot of pleasure in the
revivification of Buffy in graphic novel form. I recognize, too,
that there is some skepticism about Buffy as Queen of All
Media. The move from movie to TV show, and then from TV
show to graphic novel, isn’t “synergy,” however. The
“Eighth Season” of Buffy is something different than the
media saturation technique where a story reaches every eye
or ear by blanket bombing books, radio, TV, and the
internets, all in service of a film’s release.
Buffy’s
bleeding over into comics is,
rather, a type of wandering. Forced off the large screen,
the story and its characters found that they thrived on the
small. The tone and tempo of the hour-long format provided
just the right beat, just the right rhythm to tell the
tale. Cancelled on one network, it forged onto another.
Slashed from that line-up, the ashes were barely cold
before it picked itself up, dusted another vamp, and
started all over again.
So consider its pleasures sung. I won’t attempt to
recapitulate the major and minor plots, though all of the
rudimentary elements of the characters and their arcs
currently in Season Eight’s pages were present in the final
moments when Sunnydale, California, finally imploded at the
end of TV’s Season Seven. (I like to think that Sunnydale
was driven under by the sheer, dark weight of the arch and
droll banter of its drama-comedy stylings.) A slew of new
slayers join Dawn, Willow, Xander, and Buffy, with pop-up
appearances by various characters, major-ish and minor.
Some are love interests, and there is a lot of free-style
lesbianism in these pages. There is something mathematical
about a Whedon product. He knows the cultural calculus to
figure out just what a long-time fan will look for and just
what might hook a new reader. The dialogue/writing is
pithy, punchy, snarky, and, well, perfectly placed. By that
I mean Whedon and scriptor Drew Goddard can hear the rhythm
of their dialogue. It’s calculated. They understand just
when to punctuate an interchange with a quip or an arch
word, and just how much sentiment to to use to leaven a
scene. The plot is well paced, though I will say more about
its pacing in a bit. The visual pleasure is in a style that
is both comic and realistic—comic realism? However
outlandish the visual—the only truly irritating development
so far is a gargantuan Dawn, making a too-easy allegorical
point, feels awkward, uncomfortable, and outlandish—George
Jeanty’s pencils and Andy Owens’s inks link what we know
about the characters through the actors who played them to
the two dimensional figures on the page. The colors are
equally thick and interesting. Michelle Madsen’s colors are
wonderful—a waxy, melted crayon feel to the richness of the
page. Lines, colors, forms, layout, dialogue. A thick,
heavy line gives Buffy a heft that as much as the TV show
lends itself to three-dimensional storytelling. Pages are
calico rather than single-tone or sepia. This kind of
quilting technique for images and dialogue is skillfully
deployed. Whedon and his collaborators take advantage of
nesting scopes: though, unfortunately, the box is rarely
interrupted to spill out over onto the page. It is,
however, never difficult to follow the story.
This is all to say that the pleasures of the graphic
narrative are the pleasures of the TV show—they are
built-in. The amusement, joy, excitement, and interest are
often triggers of previous associations. This isn’t so much
a criticism, though it sounds like one. How else would one
expect to tell an on-going story in another form? The show
itself had transmogrified over the course of its run.
If Buffy started out as a modern morality play
with all the allegorical machinery that made that machine
run, it ended up as a soap opera. The show morphed into
melodrama with its language of formalized gestures, actor
portraits in 3/4 head shots, Significant Looks, half-toned
and chiaroscuro emotional cues. (Not to mention very-late
last season ‘Passion of the Spike’ histrionics:
exaggerated, theatrical, and calculated actions for
emotional effects.) Which is to say, it started taking on
the elements of graphic narrative long before it appeared
in print. Season 8 on the page isn’t so much inspired as it
is inevitable.
There are problems, however, but they are problems that
Whedon is, in fact, a genius at solving. (Witness his
experiment in how a story warps, cracks, breaks, and
re-makes a genre in his now on-going Dr. Horrible’s
Sing-Along Blog.) For instance, what type of bodies do his
characters have? In many ways, the graphic novel portrays
the idealized bodies that the series could only hint at and
that aging actors could not portray well beyond their high
school and college days. The artists of Season Eight use
the tricks of a street portraitist to bridge the gap
between the actors and their fictive counter-parts. It’s
not that Sarah Michelle Gellar can never escape
type-casting as Buffy. In fact, I contend, she will age
away from the character and slip out of the bond. Buffy,
though, can never escape Sarah Michelle Gellar. Allyson
Hannigan’s visage is seared onto Willow’s face. Season 8
has made sure that behind Xander’s eyepatch is Nicholas
Brendon’s brown eye.
What difference does the sameness make? That’s hard to say.
I do believe that Whedon can overcome the strictures. The
graphic novel may at some point untether itself from the
actors’ outlines. I suspect that when it does it will also
return to its allegorical beginnings. The engine that
powered the original series was a simple and striking
literalization: high school is hell. The metaphor shattered
with the destruction of Sunnydale High. Like the
post-graduate plot of the TV series, the graphic novel has
no simple allegory. The mythos took over a long time ago.
This is, in part, what makes the Angel off-shoot so
exasperating. All mythos, little allegory. Mythos is fine
for the initiated. Allegory opens up the tale to the world.
But pleasure? Yes, in fact, the comics are a pleasure. The
highest praise that I can offer for the
Whedon/Goddard/Jeanty achievement is that it is deeply
pleasurable to think about. The worth of a good graphic
novel like any serialized form is in the wanting more. I
love reading these books, thinking about them, and I can’t
wait for next month’s installment. I want more.
