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.

I had forgotten I had taken this...

"Happiness"

Taken at Loch Lommond, during late May. I'm so satisfied with it that I actually gave it a name.

I wish that will be me in 40 odd years.

About religion

Boing Boing-post that shows the unbelievable stupidity of humanity. On the comments there is this line, the reason I wrote this post;

But why is it so hard for people to accept that maybe, just maybe, the people who compiled the Bible and told stories over six thousand years ago were possibly trying to just figure it out, just like we are today?

It is attributed to AndrewJC, who is the author of post #19. This pretty much sums my views on religion, and thus deserves a post of its own. It's far better said than anything I did in the Jehova's Witnesses-post a while back.

Buzzing in my mind

I have so many things I would like to write about, but can't seem to get anything together! I'm going to throw them up here, and if I ever develop them further, change them into links. How does that sound?

Comics Festival.
It's great to meet new people and old ones, but it's so hard to make people stay in contact afterwards (because of the whole "your a girl and I'm a guy and I kind of like you.."-factor). Which is a bugger, because not all the girls I like talking to I would like to bed.
Also; the hectic timetable and not sleeping enough.

Instant messaging etiquette.
1.) When you start talking to someone the first time ever, after greeting establish where you know each other from or where did you get the address. There's lots of idiots out there and you can't expect the other to do research to identify you.
Also: the person to start the conversation also has to establish the topic.
2.) If you are going to leave the computer, you are doing something else and can't answer - let the other party know. It's not nice to wait five to fifteen minutes for answer to a question or to carry on the conversation - IM's are not just about keeping boredom at bay. It's also legitimate way of conversation, and you have to take precautions for the fact that the other person is giving you his undivided attention.
3.) When the conversation ends, let the other one know - don't just leave it hanging.
4.) Remember, when you IM, you are talking to another person and not to a computer with limitless patience.

The connection between personality and the work the personality creates.
You love somebody's art, stories or jokes, and then find that your political views are almost opposite. Does it make the creations any less likeable? Many people seem to think so..

Facebook.
Unlike MySpace, it rocks.

Graduation paper
My "maturity sample", what I'm going to create to graduate from my "University of Applied Sciences". I was mostly thinking logistics, software, piracy and how copy protection is a see-saw between limiting too much and too little.

How organizations survive
Thinking about comics festival. None of the original founders are around anymore, but somehow it's still the same event. Why? Because of the same name? The feeling? Or just that it has been "passed on", like set of dinner plates, from one one generation to another?

11th of September 2001

It was about 15:30 when my mother called me away from computer to tell that WTC had been hit in New York. At the time I was only vaguely clear of the whole existence of the Twin Towers. Even so, after watching the news broadcast only few minutes, I got tired of it and returned to computer.
Not long after, my mother called me back - another tower had been hit.

I don't think I understood then what that meant.

I didn't understand it well the next day either. A friend of mine - who made a point of being anti-American - said something about them asking for it.

Now, six years later, it leaves me wondering. I wasn't terribly taken by USA myself. I had learned of the contras and the toppling of democracies not long before, and couldn't quite grasp the difference between nation as an entity, the person at the helm of the state ship and the people who voted him to power. It all blurred together, into a fairy tale creature called America who didn't care about the rest of the countries and was on pollution spree (Bush had not long before announced of not taking part in Kyoto).

During the following months and years, USA launched two wars, openly ridiculed Europe and threw away all the credits they had gotten in the tradegy. Carrying stuff thru airports became more difficult - they still didn't find the Swiss army knife forgotten in the backpack, but now you couldn't carry any water and I had to remove shoes before getting to the tax free zone. I read about USA abusing records of EU citizens when they entered on American soil and stories of a reporter who got jailed at JFK for a week and then turned back because ten years earlier she had overstayed her visa by a day.

I begin to realize the difference administration does to a country, and how well Clinton arranged his foreign policy.

I feel like something is happening, now. Something monumentous, something with a solid date that starts a new era. It is often so that every decade has an event that characterizes the following decade; WTC, Berlin Wall, invasion of Czechoslovakia and Apollo 11...

I feel something like that is coming. I don't know what, and I might be wrong, but somehow it all seems so very omnious. And, as so often these days, it has something to do with USA. And I don't think it's anything joyous, like Apollo 11 and Berlin Wall was. I think it's still becoming worse.

I'm scared. At some point future changed from something that one looks forward to to something you are vaguely scared of.

And back in September 2001 they had a moment for silence for the people who died, at 10 o'clock, in the beginning of the history period. I was late for the class and while sitting down I wondered why everyone was silent and what the hell was going on. In a way, I'm still wondering.

You take things for granted and..

I was quite happy just a hour ago, surfing net, reading comics. Then I checked my Inbox and found mail from my dad, who is currently vacationing in Mexico and living with a friend of his;

Hi,
I was the weekend, till Saturday, at San Antonio, where the heat was 40 degrees. Then we drove to Durango through Piedras Negras. We had to change our course, when we found a burning lorry in front of us (100m). We waited a while, but when the driver came by and told that he was shipping 22 tons of dynamite.
They springled water over the lorry and the fire seemed to be under control. We still decided to leave for safety's sake, and while we were eating 5 km's away we heard a loud explosion; 30something died and 70 got hurt. The group included firemen, police, reporters and inhabitants of nearby houses.

The crater was 4m deep and 10m wide.

We drove the motorway through the night to get here. Tomorrow we are going to Mazatlan to beach vacation, where I'm going to teach Jaime to fish.

I was quite disoriented after reading this, but decided to check if maybe there was something about this in Google News. This was the first entry with the searchword "dynamite";

Mexico Dynamite Truck Explosion Kills 34

By JUAN MONTANO – 3 hours ago

PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico (AP) — A dynamite-laden truck exploded after colliding with another vehicle on a busy highway in northern Mexico's coal country, killing at least 34 people, including three reporters at the scene, state and federal officials said.
[...]
Shortly after the crowd arrived, the wreckage caught fire, and the dynamite exploded, sending a ball of fire into the sky that consumed nearby cars and left a 10-by-40 foot crater in the concrete, said Maximo Alberto Neri Lopez, a federal police official.

He said more than 150 people were injured.

My dad was there. He could easily have been one of the 150 people, if he wouldn't have wandered off (mostly out of boredom, I would say, more than from safety.. but I may judge him too harshly). It doesn't make it much better that the email starts with a nice tidbit about weather and ends in the plan to teach fishing. Like this incident was nothing..

I might be in shock. It's 1:15 and I should be sleeping, but my heart is racing. I wonder how the other people in my family will react, when they check their Inboxes.

I sent dad a reply and told how happy I was that I still had him. You take these things for granted. And I can't think that last Wednesday, the last time I had proper time to spend with him, I dismissed him to go watch telly...

Some songs I've been listening to

Three songs that I have played quite often on my iPod recently.

The first one is from a free concert in Helsinki in -92, and that is the genuine choir, and not some pretenders. This is the version of the song I most like;

Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir - Knocking on Heaven's Door


Juice was a groundstone of Finnish pop/rock for decades till he died a year or two ago. He had (among other things) very bad diabetes, and his living habits left much to be wanted. It's a surprise he lasted as long as he did.

Juice Leskinen - Musta Aurinko Nousee


Some Swedish band that was the representative of the previously mentioned country in Eurovision Song Contest this year. I heard this song at local music TV while idly waiting for something to happen.

The Ark - Prayer for Weekend


Listen if you care to.

Glasgow

I spent little over four months in Paisley, about 30 kilometres from Glasgow. It was great time, not only because I made new friends and (I think) learned something new about life and institutions..

While I was there, I felt myself somewhat caged in how everything possible was barred off, making many streets into labyrinths, where you could only move to one direction hundreds of metres without chance to turn left or right. When streets went like that to every direction, you started to get a bit claustrophobic. Even though the civilization-free hills were always on sight, in practice Paisley - and by extension, Glasgow - were like maps in first person shooters, the hills being unreachable background decoration.

The food was expensive even by Finnish standards. I disliked the crowds, the social injustice, and some aspects (such as the glorification of past military victories and the fact that sometimes the city looked more like a giant gravestone) quite disturbed me ...

..but I notice that, even after all those things, I miss it.
I miss the small alternative cafes where I felt like in a friend's living room.
I miss those small speciality stores in the very centre of the city.
I miss how people dressed more sharply than in here.
I miss those abandoned spaces in the middle of the city which everyone has forgotten.
I miss gardens that were built hundreds of years ago and relentlessly tended ever since.
I miss the fact that it was always chilly enough to wear a nice warm coat, but never so freezing that you wouldn't go outside without it.
I miss the feeling that Glasgow mattered, that it was worth of special notice compared to Helsinki or (ha ha) Kerava.
I miss the freedom to choose between many quality papers and some really trashy yellow ones.
I miss the donuts in grocery stores.
I miss the friends I left behind.

I miss Glasgow.

I think I might very well be homesick. Only four months there and I'm homesick. Will it ever rub off?

What I watch now

I wrote this last October. Since then I have discovered new shows and abandoned old ones. Lets see where we are, maybe you will find this interesting or not. If you are hooked on good shows like I am, it might be interesting to drop names and recommendations.

OLD SHOWS
Shows that have been cancelled, ended or otherwise will not be returning, but I will always keep close in my heart
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER - You know the drill. Beautiful blonde girl in the graveyard during night time. Vampire attacks. But the girl had a stake ready. Nice mix of comedy, horror, soap opera (I like my shows with soap) and good plot and acting. I tried to watch this years ago but left with impression of cheap morning action for teenagers. I couldn't have been more wrong. The show is about vampires in the same way as, say, police is about issuing speeding tickets. The hostile list goes from military to nerds and from witches to cafeteria workers.
Seven seasons long, it's a coming-of-age story where the main characters personalities develop and plots run their courses over years. I would maybe say this is very similar to X-Men/Spider-Man circa 1985, with added humour and no masks. Surprisingly, the series was very good (and sometimes amazing) from beginning to end. The worst parts were, imho, large chunks of the first and some of the fifth. But even at it's worst, it's still very interesting.

ANGEL - Buffy spin-off. Where Buffy is about building your own life, Angel is about getting your life back together. When Buffy lives in a world where everything is black and white, Angel is about shades of grey. About group of people who try to do good when they don't really have a reference point where to belong to - be it a goody vampire, failed demon researcher, street thug or former cheerleader-turned-office manager. Rather grim, the main characters betray, cheat and kill each other without much warning.. And still succeed in being likeable people.
Detective-series which morphed into heroic fantasy series and again into corporate politics series. The first two seasons were very good, the third season good, the fourth...well..watchable.. and the fifth is amazing.

FARSCAPE - When experimenting a new type of shuttle for inter-solar system flights, astronaut John Crichton flies through a wormhole to another part of the universe, where he is stuck on a living cargo ship with three escaped criminals. The show is very original Star Wars without epic "let's destroy the Empire"-plot. Most of the series is (at least in the beginning, I'm still in the middle of this show) about travelling from planet to planet and the developing relationships between the main characters, with the main characters trying to find a way home.. but without having any maps.

FATHER TED - Three Catholic priests are exiled to Craggy Island near the coast of Ireland. One for being demented, hostile and alcoholic, another for being unbelievably dumb ("He-Man is a fictional character?") and Father Ted for embezzling church-funds. The show is half-an-hour comedy about interaction with other priests, with their parish - most of who seem to be insane - and their personal differences.

HARVEY BIRDMAN - ATTORNEY AT LAW - Birdman was a hero of Hanna Barbera-animation in the sixties. D-class at best, he is now an attorney in a law firm which represents Jetsons, Flintstones and other Hanna Barbera-characters in lawsuits. Very funny in crazy "WTF is wrong here?!"-way.

JUSTICE LEAGUE [UNLIMITED] - Superman, Batman and other powerful heroes of the DC-Universe band together to fight battles that they wouldn't win alone. Exellent animation, this show had nice humour and the feeling of epic things going on.

VERONICA MARS - in Neptune High, the student body are the children of millionaires and their servants. Veronica Mars is the daughter of the town's former sheriff-come-detective, and focal point and go-to girl when things go wrong and you need someone to put things straight, even if that something involves hidden mics, video, stalking, scamming etc. Good plot, good acting and a sense that things are going somewhere. I once dismissed this as uninteresting. I am happy to be wrong. This would probably have been coming-of-age story, but it was cancelled after three seasons.

Shows I have dropped during the past year
HOUSE - Unlikeable, but genius doctor solves medical problems too complicated to anyone else. He is the guy to whom specialists turn to. The first two seasons were excellent, and I quite liked it. The third and most recent one were quite disappointing. Apparently the network moved off many of the writers of the shows and replaced them with new ones, maybe figuring that once established, show doesn't need as much talent as to launch it. The end result was that the mysteries didn't make any sense and that the character of House himself turned from sarcastic and unfriendly to hateful and unpleasant.
The show is retooled for fourth season, but I guess I will not be watching it. I might take a look at the first episode to find out how they changed it.

SMALLVILLE - Superman as a teenager in a small town. This is basically dumbed down Buffy without the character development, good plot or direction. I stop watching this every year, and then check the few episodes that are relevant to my interests. Every season is about 70% crap, the sixth less than the earlier five.

Shows that I will continue watching once the season starts
AVATAR - THE LAST AIRBENDER - Aang is the Avatar, who is tasked to keep peace in the world with his elemental powers. He is also 12 years old and can't take the responsibility. He escapes and is stuck in ice for hundred years. When he wakes up, one of the nations has taken over the world and is fighting against the remnants of the others. He has to set things straight.
This show has an epic plot, good characters and the third season should tie most of the plot points. It amazes me how this children's animation (look, I have no illusions) really encompasses the term "for all ages" in the original meaning, and not in the "suitable for kids"-way.

DOCTOR WHO - The third season was AWESOME. The first season was very good, and the second was almost as good as the first, but the third one? Awesome. I had a vision how the Doctor should act, which often came short in the second season... I mean, we are talking about character who -given time- can do almost anything, but chooses to limit himself to make things more interesting. The third season really nailed this side of the character, and I can't wait till the show returns.

EUREKA - In a secret government think-tank town, where everybody is a genius and holoprojectors, robots and virtual reality is part of the everyday life, the new average-IQ sheriff has to solve town problems and regular doomsdays due to careless research and button pushing.
TORCHWOOD - Immortal man heads a task force of specialists to stop alien/supernatural things from affecting daily life too much. Spin-off of Doctor Who, for adults. The first season disappointed me repeatedly, but I'm still hoping that the creators will push the concept through next season. It has much potential.

THE IT-CROWD - A very succesful company where the toilets are unisex, clean and well decorated, the view from the windows is amazing -- and it's all owed to the unapriciated tech-support, which works from the basement, answering repeated calls that go along the lines of "Your computer doesn't work? Have you tried turning it off and on again? Are you sure you have it plugged in? It works now? Great." From the creator of Father Ted. This is an UK-show, currently broadcasting it's second season. US-version is in the works for January.

HEROES - People find they have super powers - what happens? The characters are more or less international, and on background there runs premonitions of hellish futures, mass deaths and goverment conspiracies. The first season was good, it would have been amazing if not for the fact that some of the plot-points were spinned to spin-off comics series you could download from the show website. The comics were regularly pretty amateurish and contradicted the show itself, leaving a bit skitsofrenic feeling.

FUTURAMA - This should be pretty self-explanatory. The show gets 13 new episodes/four tv-movies next year.

NEW SHOWS
That I will quite possibly love..I hope
BIONIC WOMAN - After very bad accident that left her without legs and right arm, eye and ear, Jaime Sommers is given new military, top secret prostethics that let her run 60 miles an hour and other very nifty things. What will life be like now? A reworking of a 70s series, with promised new plot-direction, this should be interesting at least.

CHUCK - A nerd who works in a department store's tech help. Then he unwillingly absorbs (in a MacGuffin-way) all the information of NSA and CIA databanks, just before the databanks and their backups have been destroyed. Suddenly he's very important, and he notices that his customers often have guns hidden under jackets and earpieces on ears... Basically James Bond/Mission Impossible action on nerd-habitat. Should be interesting.

TERMINATOR: SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES - Name says it all. Takes place after T2, and I quite think that T3 is no longer in continuity. Good riddance. This can't help but be awesome, no matter what.

PUSHING DAISIES - A fairy tale like show about very introverted piemaker who can bring dead back to live, but only for a minute or somebody else has to die. Suppliments his income by giving hints on murder cases. Think the film Series of Unfortunate Events, but less grim.

REAPER - A 20something slacker finds out that his parents have sold his soul to the Devil. If he wants to keep it from being collected, he has to work as a bounty hunter for souls that have escaped hell. The gick gomes with mental powers, insight about supernatural and regular chatting sessions with very charming and pleasant (but ruthless) Lucifer himself. A Kevin Smith series.

Shows I will not be watching
FLASH GORDON - A reworking of a concept from 30s (50s, 70s and 80s) this very low-budget scifi-series lacks everything that makes it Flash Gordon.