Comics Interlude

An addendum to the brief retrospective of Buffy and Angel.

Buffy and Angel both managed to live on in comic format.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer was continued in 'Season 8', set 1 year after the end of Season 7, presumably to allow for fleeting references to Buffy that were made in the final season of Angel, which ran in the year after Buffy the TV series finished.

Buffy is in charge of a worldwide army of Slayers. Besides the occasional feud with local vampires and side-trips to Tokyo, Tibet and New York, the Big Bad of Season 8 is a masked superhuman called Twilight. Regular characters are present, with Buffy's enhanced gang of Scoobies represented by Dawn, Xander, Willow, Giles, Faith, Andrew and Kennedy. A lot happens in this series, and as it is still going I am reluctant to comment in too much detail on the events of the series. Where Buffy in comic format excels is in doing crazy, big-budget things: the far future, exotic locales, teleporting a sub, 3 gigantic goddesses, Dawn becoming a giant, a centaur and finally a porcelain doll, flying, super-speed, the madness is frequent and breathtaking. The character dramas haven't stopped either: Buffy's fling with one of her Slayers, a romance between Dawn and Xander, Willow's ongoing worries about her power levels, Giles going rogue on Buffy before being accepted back into the fold. A lot happens, and is still happening in this season, so much so that it feels like a 'season and a half'.

Angel: After The Fall takes place the second after the TV show finishes, in a back alley with our heroes confronted by wall to wall monsters, intent on killing the hell out of them. Things get much worse quite sharpish, with all of LA turned into Hell. Like Buffy's Season 8, After The Fall benefits from its limitless budget, with dragons in the sky, LA's skyline turned hellish, a floating telepathic fish, and a talking T-Rex demon. After The Fall feels a lot more balls-to-the-wall insane than Season 8. True to the Angelverse, few of the characters have really entered Hell-LA unscathed: Gunn's vampirised, Illyria/Fred's slowly losing her mind, Angel's human, Gwen's electrified again, Wesley's shackled by contract as a ghost to Wolfram & Hart.

Some of the crew are doing well for themselves: Lorne's running Silverlake as a Demon Lord, Connor and the Groosalugg are doing very well for themselves and Spike is accompanied by a scantily clad gang of kickass women.

After The Fall is accompanied by a series that explains every character's first night in Hell. When After The Fall wraps up, LA returns to normal, with the one exception that now Angel is a celebrity. The mock-official movie adaptation 'Last Angel In Hell', based on the in-universe film made by hack Hollywood scriptwriters in the wake of LA's return to normal, is absolutely hilarious. Its missed beats should be no surprise to anyone who's seen their favourite comic mangled by Hollywood. It makes me wonder whether the Angelverse Jon Peters produced 'Last Angel In Hell'.

Angel is also still continuing, and I'd say more but my wallet only allows me to catch up with so many trade paperbacks a month.

In tone and approach, both comic franchises continue their TV counterparts admirably, even upping the scales, with bigger effects and a bigger cast. If you've been pining since the cancellation of both TV shows, you could do worse than catch up with the comic series.