I am – Hercules!!
I’ve been a bad bad Hercules. Issue four of Dark Horse’s new “Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight” series has been on the stands since Wednesday, but all sorts of last-minute stuff – mounting piles of pilots and Galactica and Jericho and Veronica – kept me out of the comic-book stores until a few hours ago. But I’ve now read and digested the wonderful “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” 8.4, which successfully concludes writer/mastermind Joss Whedon’s excellent initial “season-eight” arc.
Here’s what doesn’t happen in 8.4:
* Dawn Summers, 60 feet tall since season’s start, doesn’t shrink. Not an inch.
* We don't meet a thricewise.
* We don’t definitively learn which true love woke Buffy with a big wet one.
* We don’t learn where Rupert Giles is.
* Andrew Wells is not glimpsed, nor is he reunited with skinless fellow nerd of doom Warren Meers.
* A familiar character is not introduced on the final page.
Here’s what does happen:
* Dawn beats up an entire castle.
* We meet some of Willow Rosenberg’s newer friends.
* We get another hint of what happened with Kennedy.
* Xander Harris has a line on page 10 that to my ears sounds suspiciously like, “Winifred Burkle. Go.”
* The action moves to two miles south of Sunnydale and doesn’t move back.
* Another face from season one returns.
* There’s a couple of payoffs to that Ethan Rayne business.
* We learn who this season’s symbol-happy big bad is. (Highlight invisotext for more specificity.) It’s us!!
Whedon writes one more issue – focusing on the Italy-based Buffy-double introduced in the antepenultimate episode of “Angel” – before handing the season off to other writers for a while. Freshman “Lost” staffer Brian K. Vaughn writes issue six, which deals with what Faith the Vampire Slayer has been up to.
Herc’s rating for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” 8.4?
*****
In comic-book shops now.
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