Reaction to the first two S8 comics.
So. About the S8 comics. Now that I've dealt with them in fic (in drabble form, anyway), I feel ready to talk about them.
This is not so much a review as a discussion of my own personal reaction, but it has review-like qualities as well.
I think that my biggest problem with the comics, really, stems from the whole "are they canon?" debate. Which is probably silly. I mean, why does it matter? There's tons of BtVS pro novels out there which I have ignored, and various other comics, some of which I've read and some of which I haven't, and there's the original movie too for that matter, and it's not like it's hard to tell which of these you're talking about, if you're talking about one of them. You could always distinguish between movie canon and show canon, for example (not that anyone ever seems to bother with movie canon-though doyle merges movie and show canon rather nicely in her short fic Once in a Lullaby, a really cool story in the "Normal Again" verse!). So it's not like it's going to be hard to say "show canon only" or "comics canon" to make clear what you're talking about.
And yet. The idea of the comics as canon bothers me, and it keeps coming up in RL discussions with my friends. Specifically, my Buffy-loving comics-fanboy friends. They take the position "Joss wrote them, therefore they're canon" and I try to argue with them, and ... I think they just like getting me riled up.
It's not really an argument that can be won, one way or the other. Points in favour: Joss wrote them; Joss says they're canon; Joss is God. Points against: it's a dramatic shift of medium, style and mood; Joss wasn't the only person resposible for creating the show, and the contributions of most of the others are missing from the comics (most notably the actors, who I would argue had a pretty big part in bringing the characters to life and making them who they were).
The problem is, I'm invested in the idea of "canon" in a way that my friends aren't. The difference is, I write fanfic. Canon is the starting place, the solid foundation for all our flights of imagination, our games of "what if?", our speculations about what happens next.
When you get right down to it, my first and biggest problem with the comics (if they're considered canon) is that I had thought canon was closed. The curtain had fallen and it was all up to us, the fanfic authors, to continue the story ... and for years I've been reading and writing stories, imagining what happens after "Chosen," and some of those stories were amazing and some were forgettable, but they were all equal in the sense that they were all equally true, and equally false. But now these comics come along, and it doesn't matter whether I like them or not, they're the new, privileged truth-relegating all other imaginings to AU status.
The thing that bugs me the most about the comics (as canon), actually, is the way they mess with the actual canon-show canon. I do not like the ret-conning. During S5 of AtS, we were thrown a few little crumbs of information about what was up with the Scoobies: Xander was in Africa looking for Slayers, Willow was in Sao Paulo and/or Rio de Janeiro partying with Kennedy, and Buffy was in Rome, dating the Immortal. That was all we had, and so we worked with it.
The Xander-in-Africa idea was pretty damn cool, in fact, and I've seen some amazing stories dealing with the concept. A couple of my favourites are Not Noisy Or Excited by savoytruffle and Lonely on the Mountain by speakr2customrs; both of the authors have actually lived in Africa themselves. Xander-in-Africa is far too rich a source of stories to give up for Xander-playing-Nick-Fury-in-Scotland.
Buffy dating the Immortal was ... stupid, really. But it was canon, so we worked with it! A lot of writers (me included) just skipped her quickly past it (rebound fling, over it now) but some writers actually managed to flesh out the Immortal and make him an interesting character (shapinglight did it in Vampire Winter, for instance, though it's primarily a Buffy/Spike/Angel story). So it was, frankly, irritating to read in the first few pages of the first S8 comic that, yeah, that wasn't real. Just a decoy, and Andrew's sense of humour.
That's why when I wrote my little S8 prequel yesterday, I devoted the first of the two drabbles entirely to establishing that Xander, Buffy and Willow were exactly where Andrew had said they were. It may not make it real or canonical, but it made me feel better, at least!
So, yeah, that's really the core of my personal issues with the comics. I don't like them messing with my canon! Beyond that, I have other complaints, but there are also things that I like. For instance:
I really like the fact that people are writing and talking about the comics. My flist is more lively with Buffy-centric discussion than it has been in ages!
I don't like the artwork. Specifically, the characters. Arrgh. (Thus the bit in my second drabble about the characters' likenesses being based on blurry surveillance photos. Heh. Makes me feel better!) It's a tough thing, really, drawing recognisable comics versions of real people, and I'm rarely satisfied with the results when artists try. Maybe I should be more generous and just overlook it, but it does bug me-in fact it's a major reason why I haven't consistently sought out other Buffy tie-in comics (though I have read them when they've crossed my path).
I like the nifty little bits and pieces of dialogue. We all try to evoke the feeling of Buffy-speak in our fics, but Joss does Joss better than anyone else (and no wonder)! Like, when the two military guys are in the elevator (well, the one military guy and the one civilian, whatever his role is) and they have their little exchange:
"Yeah, okay, that's gonna get us noticed. Then indicted, then hung."
"Hanged."
"Neither really works for me."
Hee! (I'm such a sucker for a grammar joke.)
I don't like the fact that the Initiative seems to have been reborn. Didn't we already play out this storyline? In S4? (Actually, if the comics made specific reference to the canonical Initiative, that might even warm me up to this incarnation; at least it would feel more like it was building from canon, instead of just backtracking and rewriting the entire series.)
I don't like Buffy playing damsel-in-distress in her skimpy little nightie, but I do hold out hope that the kiss idea is going to play out in some creative, twisty way. I mean, even when Xander and Amy were doing their little expository back-and-forth, while Amy was explicitly setting forth the rules and boundaries, it seemed like there was a mood of "this is silly, isn't it?" about the whole thing. Plus, what an ineffective curse! Given that in Amy's experience, Buffy's pretty much always had a boyfriend and/or one or two other guys pining after her, it seems like she would've come up with some harder condition to meet. But then again, this just makes me think that Amy's holding something back.
(Oh, and also, I did do the break-the-spell-with-a-kiss thing myself in a Spike/Xander fic I wrote three years ago: Unintended Consequences. Heh. That was my utterly self-indulgent "Seeing Red" fixit.)
I don't like the fact that many of the characters seem to be stuck playing themselves as though based on one-paragraph summaries from a Wikipedia cheat sheet: Giles drinks tea, Andrew tells long irrelevant stories about Star Wars, Dawn whines, Xander wears an eye patch and makes comic-book references.* (*I kind of cribbed this point from ruuger, btw!) But then, it's only been two issues, which feels like the equivalent of, I don't know, maybe ten minutes of screen time. I'm willing to be optimistic here: Joss is still in the scene-setting stage, so he's saying "look, here they are, the characters you remember" (it has been a while, after all, especially for anyone who hasn't been reading/writing fanfic or obsessively rewatching the DVDs) and soon he'll let them start to grow and change.
I do like the beautiful sunset and/or frowning guy with a monacle. By which I mean, I do like Buffy and Xander joking around and not taking it all too seriously, even though they're all hard-core and wear combat gear now.
I didn't mind the Buffy/Xander moment as much as a lot of people seem to have, though I'm still unclear as to whether it was supposed to have any basis in reality at all. Was Xander's lecture about treating Dawn right actually supposed to be a part of the cursed dream? But in any case, I could see Buffy and Xander having an awkward, let's-not-mention-this-again sexual encounter sometime after "Chosen." I mean, it's probably better if they didn't, but if they did, no biggie. It's a thing people do.
I don't like the undifferentiated army of Slayers. I'd much rather spend a few pages getting to know one or two of them as people, rather than the big battle scenes that tell me nothing.
I don't like the Slayers' annoyingly spelled-out accents. I mean, showing some differences in dialect is one thing, but I really think Joss has gone overboard with the spellings.
I do, on the other hand, like the Scottish zombies. Hee! Scottish zombies! In kilts! (I wonder if they're supposed to be the Jacobites from the Battle of Culloden or something?)
You know, if I could just be allowed to think of the S8 comics as fanfic (by Joss! Hee!) I think I could enjoy them more ... or at least, focus on the stuff I like, and not worry overly about the rest. So pretty much, that's what I'm going to do. I just need to stop letting my friends bait me about it!
This is not so much a review as a discussion of my own personal reaction, but it has review-like qualities as well.
I think that my biggest problem with the comics, really, stems from the whole "are they canon?" debate. Which is probably silly. I mean, why does it matter? There's tons of BtVS pro novels out there which I have ignored, and various other comics, some of which I've read and some of which I haven't, and there's the original movie too for that matter, and it's not like it's hard to tell which of these you're talking about, if you're talking about one of them. You could always distinguish between movie canon and show canon, for example (not that anyone ever seems to bother with movie canon-though doyle merges movie and show canon rather nicely in her short fic Once in a Lullaby, a really cool story in the "Normal Again" verse!). So it's not like it's going to be hard to say "show canon only" or "comics canon" to make clear what you're talking about.
And yet. The idea of the comics as canon bothers me, and it keeps coming up in RL discussions with my friends. Specifically, my Buffy-loving comics-fanboy friends. They take the position "Joss wrote them, therefore they're canon" and I try to argue with them, and ... I think they just like getting me riled up.
It's not really an argument that can be won, one way or the other. Points in favour: Joss wrote them; Joss says they're canon; Joss is God. Points against: it's a dramatic shift of medium, style and mood; Joss wasn't the only person resposible for creating the show, and the contributions of most of the others are missing from the comics (most notably the actors, who I would argue had a pretty big part in bringing the characters to life and making them who they were).
The problem is, I'm invested in the idea of "canon" in a way that my friends aren't. The difference is, I write fanfic. Canon is the starting place, the solid foundation for all our flights of imagination, our games of "what if?", our speculations about what happens next.
When you get right down to it, my first and biggest problem with the comics (if they're considered canon) is that I had thought canon was closed. The curtain had fallen and it was all up to us, the fanfic authors, to continue the story ... and for years I've been reading and writing stories, imagining what happens after "Chosen," and some of those stories were amazing and some were forgettable, but they were all equal in the sense that they were all equally true, and equally false. But now these comics come along, and it doesn't matter whether I like them or not, they're the new, privileged truth-relegating all other imaginings to AU status.
The thing that bugs me the most about the comics (as canon), actually, is the way they mess with the actual canon-show canon. I do not like the ret-conning. During S5 of AtS, we were thrown a few little crumbs of information about what was up with the Scoobies: Xander was in Africa looking for Slayers, Willow was in Sao Paulo and/or Rio de Janeiro partying with Kennedy, and Buffy was in Rome, dating the Immortal. That was all we had, and so we worked with it.
The Xander-in-Africa idea was pretty damn cool, in fact, and I've seen some amazing stories dealing with the concept. A couple of my favourites are Not Noisy Or Excited by savoytruffle and Lonely on the Mountain by speakr2customrs; both of the authors have actually lived in Africa themselves. Xander-in-Africa is far too rich a source of stories to give up for Xander-playing-Nick-Fury-in-Scotland.
Buffy dating the Immortal was ... stupid, really. But it was canon, so we worked with it! A lot of writers (me included) just skipped her quickly past it (rebound fling, over it now) but some writers actually managed to flesh out the Immortal and make him an interesting character (shapinglight did it in Vampire Winter, for instance, though it's primarily a Buffy/Spike/Angel story). So it was, frankly, irritating to read in the first few pages of the first S8 comic that, yeah, that wasn't real. Just a decoy, and Andrew's sense of humour.
That's why when I wrote my little S8 prequel yesterday, I devoted the first of the two drabbles entirely to establishing that Xander, Buffy and Willow were exactly where Andrew had said they were. It may not make it real or canonical, but it made me feel better, at least!
So, yeah, that's really the core of my personal issues with the comics. I don't like them messing with my canon! Beyond that, I have other complaints, but there are also things that I like. For instance:
I really like the fact that people are writing and talking about the comics. My flist is more lively with Buffy-centric discussion than it has been in ages!
I don't like the artwork. Specifically, the characters. Arrgh. (Thus the bit in my second drabble about the characters' likenesses being based on blurry surveillance photos. Heh. Makes me feel better!) It's a tough thing, really, drawing recognisable comics versions of real people, and I'm rarely satisfied with the results when artists try. Maybe I should be more generous and just overlook it, but it does bug me-in fact it's a major reason why I haven't consistently sought out other Buffy tie-in comics (though I have read them when they've crossed my path).
I like the nifty little bits and pieces of dialogue. We all try to evoke the feeling of Buffy-speak in our fics, but Joss does Joss better than anyone else (and no wonder)! Like, when the two military guys are in the elevator (well, the one military guy and the one civilian, whatever his role is) and they have their little exchange:
"Yeah, okay, that's gonna get us noticed. Then indicted, then hung."
"Hanged."
"Neither really works for me."
Hee! (I'm such a sucker for a grammar joke.)
I don't like the fact that the Initiative seems to have been reborn. Didn't we already play out this storyline? In S4? (Actually, if the comics made specific reference to the canonical Initiative, that might even warm me up to this incarnation; at least it would feel more like it was building from canon, instead of just backtracking and rewriting the entire series.)
I don't like Buffy playing damsel-in-distress in her skimpy little nightie, but I do hold out hope that the kiss idea is going to play out in some creative, twisty way. I mean, even when Xander and Amy were doing their little expository back-and-forth, while Amy was explicitly setting forth the rules and boundaries, it seemed like there was a mood of "this is silly, isn't it?" about the whole thing. Plus, what an ineffective curse! Given that in Amy's experience, Buffy's pretty much always had a boyfriend and/or one or two other guys pining after her, it seems like she would've come up with some harder condition to meet. But then again, this just makes me think that Amy's holding something back.
(Oh, and also, I did do the break-the-spell-with-a-kiss thing myself in a Spike/Xander fic I wrote three years ago: Unintended Consequences. Heh. That was my utterly self-indulgent "Seeing Red" fixit.)
I don't like the fact that many of the characters seem to be stuck playing themselves as though based on one-paragraph summaries from a Wikipedia cheat sheet: Giles drinks tea, Andrew tells long irrelevant stories about Star Wars, Dawn whines, Xander wears an eye patch and makes comic-book references.* (*I kind of cribbed this point from ruuger, btw!) But then, it's only been two issues, which feels like the equivalent of, I don't know, maybe ten minutes of screen time. I'm willing to be optimistic here: Joss is still in the scene-setting stage, so he's saying "look, here they are, the characters you remember" (it has been a while, after all, especially for anyone who hasn't been reading/writing fanfic or obsessively rewatching the DVDs) and soon he'll let them start to grow and change.
I do like the beautiful sunset and/or frowning guy with a monacle. By which I mean, I do like Buffy and Xander joking around and not taking it all too seriously, even though they're all hard-core and wear combat gear now.
I didn't mind the Buffy/Xander moment as much as a lot of people seem to have, though I'm still unclear as to whether it was supposed to have any basis in reality at all. Was Xander's lecture about treating Dawn right actually supposed to be a part of the cursed dream? But in any case, I could see Buffy and Xander having an awkward, let's-not-mention-this-again sexual encounter sometime after "Chosen." I mean, it's probably better if they didn't, but if they did, no biggie. It's a thing people do.
I don't like the undifferentiated army of Slayers. I'd much rather spend a few pages getting to know one or two of them as people, rather than the big battle scenes that tell me nothing.
I don't like the Slayers' annoyingly spelled-out accents. I mean, showing some differences in dialect is one thing, but I really think Joss has gone overboard with the spellings.
I do, on the other hand, like the Scottish zombies. Hee! Scottish zombies! In kilts! (I wonder if they're supposed to be the Jacobites from the Battle of Culloden or something?)
You know, if I could just be allowed to think of the S8 comics as fanfic (by Joss! Hee!) I think I could enjoy them more ... or at least, focus on the stuff I like, and not worry overly about the rest. So pretty much, that's what I'm going to do. I just need to stop letting my friends bait me about it!