Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1: The Long Way Home

I admit, I was nervous about Joss returning to Buffy. Not because I haven’t been eager for his return to the Buffyverse, far from it. But I didn’t really love Angel (too campy, too many cheap-looking sets, too much soap opera, too much focus on sunlit fantasy instead of gloomy horror) and didn’t know which Joss we were going to get here.

It turns out that Season 8 holds up to the best of the original series and is substantially better, in pacing, theme and tone, than the last few seasons. We jump forward in time (apparently about a year) from the 2003 end of the series, find out how much of what we thought we knew about Buffy’s fate from the final season of Angel was true and immediately plunge into a new saga that both spins out of what’s come before and stands alone as something new and different.

The dialogue is letter-perfect, as it should be, the art is almost perfect (Jeanty, strangely, can’t draw a recognizable Andrew, and it took a phone call sequence for me to figure out who he was supposed to be) and Joss uses the unlimited special effects of comics to give us otherworldly menaces with nary a rubber suit in sight.

The worst part of this TPB is that the wait for the next volume will be so long. But that’s a good problem to have.

Unreservedly recommended to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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