Buffy Season 8: Long Way Home

Buffy Season 8: Long Way Home (#1-#4)
Script: Josh Whedon
Pencils: Georges Jeanty
Inks: Andy Owens
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letters: Richard Starkings & Comicraft's Jimmy

I just finished this. And I have only one thing to say; wow.

Before I start to talk about the comic, a brief monologue on the background should be in order; Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, created a spin-off Angel which ran five seasons till 2004. Apparently TV-film about yet another character would be currently in production and come out sometime next year.
The show was ground-breaking in many ways; and to this day many of the more popular shows use plot-points and characters created here; Veronica Mars and Chloe Sullivan (Smallville) come readily to mind.

Background
The premise is pretty simple; the world is full of evil things, and vampires are pretty much the low end as far as the threats go. Slayer - always a female - who is armed with super strength, damage resistance and combat skills was created to keep humanity safe. When she falls (usually only after few years), a new Slayer awakens somewhere to continue the mission.

The TV-Show
Buffy is the Slayer. During the TV-series she and her friends went thru the education system (high school, university), had few relationships, tried to find their place in the world,, grew to be adults and finally got things working pretty well for them; at least as well as things can go when people around you die more or less frequently.
The thing that made the series great was in showing how mundane supernatural is when you are forced to live in the middle of it year after year. Even the demons have bars and have to sleep and get money somehow. And it might not be very good idea to go to the graveyard during night-time. Oh, and a looming apocalypse more or less annually, usually around May. Better leave the calendar open.

The Comic
It has been few years since the season seven ended. And as Buffy notes, the problem with changing the world is that once you do it... the world is all different. You have more responsibility, and there is nobody to tell you how things should be done. Because everything is new. The book has a nice balance between returning to the characters of the TV-show and telling how they are doing after we last saw them. And even as we follow combat training and assault to military installation, there is still time to catch on how the characters personal lifes have been going, why Lando Calrissian's outfit bode bad for the future (Ewoks!) and wonder who in the cast was harbouring true, unrequired love towards Buffy..


The goodness
If you didn't guess, I'm a huge fan of Buffy (and I don't use that word lightly), so I was a bit unsure how to aproach the comic. On the other hand, it doesn't have the facial expressions, background music or other techniques available in television, and on the other there also aren't any budget limitations for what you can and can't show.
And then there's the one limitation I was most worried off; 40 minutes of TV every week isn't the same as 22 pages of paper once a month. On top of it all I was quite worried about the deconstruction; the style of the later years to tell as little though text as possible to give more space for the art. The books look amazing, but you also read them in five minutes. This isn't the case here; text fills the space, confident that it's needed. And when a truly shocking sight comes up, it is given the space necessary. But all in all, the pages are used very economically, with only few boxes carrying minutes of conversation.
And speaking of the art; there's a certain amount of talent required to make the characters look like the actors that once did the roles, without making the art look stiff and unnatural. Save few panels with Andrew (above), the artist has avoided this in an excellent manner. Good old-school art with realistic yet simple style; no photorealism and no manga, both of which would probably ill-suit the series.

All in all; Buffy is back. With new direction and without the limitations that seemed to strangle the show sometimes during the later seasons. I confidentially wait for the new issues and the TPB's; the first one should come out in just few days.

I'll be waiting for it at the door.