Title: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight Publisher: Dark Horse Comics Writer(s): Joss Whedon (primary), Jeph Loeb, Brian K. Vaughan,Brad Meltzer, Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Drew Greenberg, Stephen S. DeKnight Artist(s): Georges Jeanty (primary) Projected Publication Date: March 15th, 2007

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight Preview

B ack in May of 2003, the world said their farewells to blond vampire slayer Buffy Anne Summers, as the finale of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER's seventh television season was also its last. High hopes and internet rumors kept fans hoping for some kind of continuation of the series, be it in the show's spin-off series ANGEL, another spin-off series focusing on little explored characters (rogue Slayer Faith, played by Eliza Dushku was the front runner for a lead character on most internet boards), a series of TV movies, or even a theatrical release (hoping, of course, that people would forget about the excrebale BUFFY movie that started it all, starring Christy Swanson... but that is another story). Unfortunately, ANGEL was cancelled almost exactly a year after BUFFY ended, having addressed almost none of what may have happened after the sun went down for the last time in Sunnydale, the fictional California town in which BUFFY was based, and the other projects never solidified into anything other than rumors (Eliza Dushku reportedly turned down a Faith spin-off to take the lead role in TRU CALLING, which lasted only one season. Tru-ly a bad Call). So that, then was that. Even the most hardcore of fans had given up hope.

But as any fan of the shows know, Buffy isn't that easy to keep killed. Fast forward three years to July of 2006, when it was announced that Buffy would once again return from the dead. However, it wasn't in a form that anyone expected. Dark Horse Comics is going to be publishing BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON EIGHT in a monthly comic book series, written by none other than Joss Whedon himself, the man who created Buffy so very long ago.

Originally the series was set to debut in October of 2006, but now it seems that it will actually be "sometime in 2007" according to e-mail responses from Dark Horse. According to the website Hellmouth Central Dark Horse editor Scott Allie told them that the series would be debuting in March. But the when doesn't really matter (so long as it is relatively soon!). The real question is "what". As in what happened with Buffy and the Scoobies after Sunnydale sank into the bowels of the earth?

Story details are being kept under wraps for the time being, though certain details can be gleaned, both from hints released by Dark Horse, from the BUFFY series finale and from the little that we heard about Buffy in ANGEL's final season. Let's look at what has been released about the comic specifically.

The only thing that has been released about the comic itself is that it takes up very soon after Season Seven ended. Buffy is nolonger the one and only Slayer, and is instead a kind of general in charge of an army of Slayers. Hundreds, if not thousands of Slayers now roam the earth, they've gotten organized, and the balance of power has shifted towards the good guys for once. But we all knew that couldn't last. An "old enemy" soon resurfaces to make life a tad more difficult for our beloved heroine, though of course no one is saying who the big bad is at this point. The only other thing that has been told for sure by the company is that Dawn, Buffy's pseudo-sister (it's a long story) is experiencing some "serious growing pains". As to what that means, exactly, your guess is as good as mine.

As for hints left over from the end of the TV series, there is not much there. Sunnydale is now a big crater, and the "Hellmouth is officially closed for business", as it was so eloquently stated at the end of the show. Gile's quip that there is another Hellmouth in Cleveland can be written off as a joke (or at least I think it can). Other than that and speculations about who may be in the comic based on who lived and who died, that's all we know from the series finale.

Now on to the facts that we were able to glean from ANGEL's final season. Firstly, we shouldn't expect to see Angel or Spike, as they were busy elsewhere during this time period (to say the least), and because the comic book rights to all characters from ANGEL are owned by another comic company, IDW. Beyond that,from the one ANGEL episode (ANGEL SEASON FIVE, EPISODE 20: "THE GIRL IN QUESTION") we know that Buffy was in Rome during at least part of this time period, dating a shady character called simply The Immortal, who was on bad relations with both Spike and Angel. Little is known about The Immortal, other than the fact that he is... well, immortal, and he lives in Rome. We also know that The Immortal is incredibly wealthy, walks a fine line between good and evil, is some kind of celebrity among the supernatural and those connected to them, and is exceedingly physically attractive. Buffy and Andrew (a comic relief screw-up ex-villain wannabe, now a Watcher in training, for those who may have forgotten) are staying with him at least part of the time while they are in Rome. From another ANGEL episode (ANGEL SEASON FIVE, EPISODE 11: "DAMAGE"), we know that the Watcher's Council is being rebuilt (almost all the Watchers and their records and mystic tomes were destroyed in BUFFY SEASON SEVEN) with Giles as their new head. They are going around and gathering up all of the once-potential-Slayers-now-just-Slayers scattered all over the world and organizing them into a force to be reckoned with. Buffy, of course, is the leader of these Slayers. Andrew also fills Spike in on the whereabouts of the Scoobies: Xander is in Africa, Willow and Kennedy (her new Slayer girlfriend) are in Brazil, Buffy and Dawn are in Rome, and "everyone else" mostly hangs out in England. By "everyone else" he must mean all the other potentials and Giles, and possibly Faith and ex-Sunnydale High principal Wood. And that's just about all one can extract from the ANGEL episodes that pertain to Buffy.

There is, however, one more source from which we can extract information about the future of BUFFY, and that is FRAY. FRAY was a eight issue comic book mini-series written by Whedon and published by Dark Horse starting in July of 2001, with the last issue coming out in August of 2003 (about three months after BUFFY's last episode, for those of you who were paying attention). FRAY takes place in the 24th century, and focuses on a thief named Melaka Fray, the first Slayer to be called in nearly three hundred years. I won't go into all the details here, but merely hit on the points that may lead us to clues about BUFFY SEASON EIGHT's plot. Firstly, we learn from a neutral (meaning not-quite-evil-not-exactly-good) Demon named Urkonn that sometime in the twenty-first century "a Slayer, possibly with some mystical allies, faced an apocalyptic army of demons. And when it was done, they were gone. All demons, all magicks, banished from this earthly dimension". This Slayer, since there was nothing left to slay, was the last to be called. As to whether this referred to Buffy and her friends we are left to speculate (if so, the "apocolyptic army of Demons could we the one unleashed by Wolfram and Hart in the ANGEL series finale). In addition, Urkonn gives Fray the bad-ass mystical scythe wielded by Buffy in the last three episodes of the show. How the scythe was lost to Buffy and the Watcher's Council, and how a Demon got hold of it is never explained in FRAY. We can also deduce from the fact that Fray is the one-and-only Slayer that when the scythe was used to turn all the potential Slayers into actual Slayers that it only effected the potential Slayers at the time when the scythe was used, not future generations. Either that or in the three hundred year interim between the last Slayer and Fray, the bloodline "reset" back to the way it was before Willow used the scythe to empower the potentials. Whether or not BUFFY SEASON EIGHT will address any of these questions remains to be seen.

As you can see, Joss Whedon is no stranger to the world of comics. Besides FRAY, he is currently penning Marvel Comics ASONISHING X-MEN. wrote a three issue mini-series for Dark Horse bridging the gap between his tragically cancelled sci-fi/western TV series FIREFLY and its theatrical denoument SERENITY, written individual issues for Dark Horse's TALES OF THE VAMPIRES and TALES OF THE SLAYER anthology mini-series and some issues of IDW's ANGEL comics, amongst others. As for this series, Whedon's writing responsibilities will be for the first four and the last four issues, with a heavy supervisery role for the issues in between, much like he did for both BUFFY and ANGEL. Dark Horse hasn't announced who will be writing the issues in between Whedon's. The art in the first four issues will be done by Georges Jeanty, with negotiation for more once those issues are complete (a common practice in the world of comic book artists). Other artists have yet to be named. Jeanty's work can be seen in Marvel's GAMBIT mini-series and in Wildstorm Comics' THE AMERICAN WAY. The series is expected to run for "more than 20 issues", most likely a two-year run of twenty-four monthly comics (which as anyone familiar with comics will tell you will most likely to take a LOT more than two years to actually be published in it's entirety, as evidenced by the fact that FRAY's eight issues took two years to publish, due primarily to Joss Whedon's incredibly busy schedule).

Well, that's all we know for now. We'll pass on any updates as they are released. But as you can see, there is a lot to get excited about for fans of the Buffyverse.

Update: February 13th, 2007

From a late-December article over at Wizard Magazine's online site, we find out that Joss is going to write the first four-issue mini-arch, called "The Long Way Home", and that the art for those four issues will be done by George Jeanty, all of which we more or less knew, other than the title. However the article goes on to reveal the amazing collection of writers that he's managed to gather to pen the episodes he isn't doing himself, who are an impressive collection of both comic book writers and long-time BUFFY scribes from the days when BUFFY was still on TV. Brian K. Vaughan (EX MACHINA), Brad Meltzer (JUSTIVE LEAGUE OF AMERICA) and one of my personal favorites, Jeph Loeb (ONSLAUGHT REBORN, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN) round out the stable of comic writers. Over in the BUFFY court we have Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Drew Greenberg and Steven DeKnight, who between them are responsible for some of the greatest BUFFY episodes of all time (especially Espenson, who was responsible for "Pangs", "Amends", and "Graduation Day Part One and Two", amongst others, which are some of my all time favorite episodes). Other than this awesome news in terms of the writing staff, the article doesn't say much about the actual storyline that we didn't already know.

But the biggest news, and the biggest SPOILERS come from a December 2006 interview that Joss gave to tvguide.com (of all places). I can't link directly to the interview due to some black magic voodoo coding that they do, apparently to keep people like me from linking to the site, but I will do my best to reiterate what was said. There Joss said that there will be 20 to 30 issues, with Joss writing the first and the last four for sure, and most likely other story arcs to be determined later, but that he will be overseeing the whole project, much as he did with BUFFY and ANGEL when they were on TV. The other writers will be working off of a master mission statement that Joss has created, and everything has to pass muster through him.

As for the story itself, Joss is pretty tight lipped about it, other than the fact that it will eventually focus on the core characters from the TV series, and that the world has changed drastically as a result of the army of Slayers that came about at the end of Season 7. Buffy is still more of a General to the Slayer troops, with serious responsibilities, but still has her fun and quippy personality at the core. There will be several familiar faces beyond the ones that we can expect, such as Willow, Xander, Giles, and so on, but that there will be a lot of new characters and villains introduced as well. Two faces that we can't expect to see a lot of are those of Angel and Spike, since they belong to IDW publishing. While Joss retains the creative rights to use them if he wants, he doesn't want to be unfair to the deal that he has with IDW. On top of that, he says there is a reason why Angel had his own separate show, and that the romance between the Slayer and the souled vampire works best when in small doses. That having been said, he says there is the possibility that Spike and Angel could show up in some capacity if it works for the story. And he does want Spike, especially, in the story.

He believes that the series will have at least a two year run, and promises that there won't be any ridiculously long delays between issues, as had been a problem with FRAY (the last issue of which was a year late).

Now for the big time spoilers. At the end of the interview they included the first four pages of the first issue, and they show and tell us very little, but what they do tell us is pretty cool. The images show Buffy, armed with some kind of rifle, and three other Slayers (only one of which is named in the four pages; a redhead named Leah) jumping from a helicopter wearing black covert-ops gear. They seem to be infiltrating some kind of crumbling European-style church on a cliff above a cemetery. And honestly, that's about all the four pages show. But throughout these images is a text-over soliloquy by Buffy. She says that since they awakened all the potentials as full-blown Slayers they've tracked down about eighteen hundred of them, five hundred of which are working with Buffy and her crew in ten different squads. There are even two Slayer decoys of Buffy herself, set up to help protect her from anyone who might try to take her out to weaken and demoralize her forces. One is living literally underground, while the other is partying quite publicly in Rome with some guy named The Immortal as her supposed boy toy. She mentions that this last part was Andrew's idea, and that he insisted it would be hilarious (obviously he did this to mess with Angel and Spike in the ANGEL Season Five Episode "The Girl In Question", who were being ridiculous and needed to be knocked down a few pegs). This makes a lot more sense than the seemingly decadent life in Rome Buffy was supposedly living in ANGEL's last season. That's all we learn other than the fact that she is feeling overwhelmed, there are still plenty of demons, and that Giles is still with her. And that's all the new stuff.

If any more info comes up I'll post it here, but since the first issue is supposedly coming out in about a month, chances are the next time we'll talk about this series is in the review of the first issue. Here's hoping it remains as promising as it seems right now.

Update #2: March 5th, 2007

Massive Friggin' Spoilers! Don't read if you don't want to know what is coming up... Seriously!

If more info shows up, I'll tell you about it. But now I'm so excited for this series that my cranium might explode. March 14th can't come soon enough.