After the dimension-hopping events of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eleven,” it’s time for a new Big Bad and a new status quo. How does the latest adventure of the Scooby Gang square up with what’s come before? Well…
Cover by Stephanie HansStory by Joss Whedon and Christos Gage
Written by Christos Gage
Illustrated by Georges Jeanty and Karl Story
Colored by Dan Jackson
Lettered by Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy BetancourtIt’s one year later, and the lives of Buffy and the Scoobies haven’t been too eventful for a while–at least as far as fighting demons and the forces of darkness are concerned. But that’s all about to change when Dawn and Xander’s housewarming party is interrupted by some familiar faces bringing news of familiar foes from the future. Can you say Harth…and Fray?
Joss Whedon has long been waiting for the opportunity to go full Chris Claremont with the Scooby Gang. The influence of the prolific writer’s iconic ’70s-through-to-’90s run on “X-Men” was as formative on the plotting, humor, and character-based drama of the Buffy show as it was on Whedon’s own “Astonishing X-Men.” Freed from the constraints of network notes and television budgets, the comic book “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has skewed increasingly Claremont-esque. Its sprawling scope reaches far beyond present-day Sunnydale, and its action takes its cues more from superhero comics than wuxia kung-fu films.
At this point the Scoobies have travelled the world, crossed dimensions and, most recently, travelled into the far future. It’s following a team-up with Fray, the Slayer of the 23rd century, that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 12: The Reckoning” #1 picks up. After a glimpse at some nasty business going on in the far-flung future (read: Fray’s evil vamp brother doing a Biff in Back to the Future Part II, pinging back to the past to defeat the Slayer using history books as his battle plans), Whedon and scriptwriter Christos Gage settle us into a new status quo reasonably well.
The cast has relocated to San Francisco, which was the setting for much of “Season 11.” Dawn and Xander have had a baby (and if you already thought that was an icky coupling, well, it gets worse here), with the whole gang gathered for their housewarming. Buffy is considering a job as a police consultant on all things vamp-y. She and Spike have broken up again. Giles has been returned to his normal age.
Gage has a good handle on the characters and their distinct voices at this point, having helmed much of the show’s comic continuation. That said, with almost as many of these comic book adventures published now as seasons of the TV show aired, the cast is a fair distance from their small-screen personas. Perhaps that accounts for Georges Jeanty and Karl Story’s artwork, which rarely attempts to capture the likenesses of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anthony Stewart Head et al.
It’s a little jarring to crack Stephanie Hans’s painterly, familiar rendition of Buffy on the cover and be faced with Jeanty’s pencils and Story’s muddy inks. Jeanty has worked on these “Buffy” continuation books more than any other artist, yet his work with Story isn’t…great. The future-set prologue includes some striking use of silhouette and shadows, especially in a panel of this arc’s (presumed) Big Bad, Harth, hissing and red-eyed, staring directly at the reader.
Jeanty’s pencils and Story’s inks rarely gel as well in the rest of the book. In fact, I quickly flipped back to the credits at the start after getting past the prelude, unconvinced this was the work of the same team. An establishing image of Xander and Dawn’s new home is rendered entirely two-dimensionally, a cartoonish abstraction whose flatness jarrs with everything that surrounds it on the page. Not only is the style wildly inconsistent, but characters vary in height from panel to panel, their proportions yo-yoing from realistic to bobble-headed.
In fairness to the art team, the writing is often not up to snuff, either. Where Gage has an ear for dialogue, he is sorely lacking in the plotting and pacing stakes (ahem). That 23rd century prologue sets up the titular “Reckoning,” the “Last Stand of the Last Slayer.” What reads as foreshadowing for something that will slowly unfold across the course of a couple dozen issues turns out to be anything but. Angel turns up to warn the gang of some bad stuff about to go down. On hearing the bad guy’s intel is coming from “the future,” Buffy immediately intuits that Harth is involved; any suspense is immediately deflated.
Continued belowIn the age of decompression, the creators’s eagerness to accelerate “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 12: The Reckoning” #1 from enigmatic prelude to near-instantaneous pay-off in a single issue is curious. After we’re shown a glimpse of this “Last Slayer’s Last Stand” in the opening panels, we’re only a few page turns from witnessing the event itself. And it’s a dud, with a completely unsatisfying and disappointing return for one of the show’s best villains.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 12: The Reckoning” #1 crams too much into one issue, and its weak foundations can’t hold it. Gage’s pacy script races through his plot, feeling not only messy and unplanned, but completely contrary to the whole point serialised storytelling; but I suppose that makes the writing an ideal bedfellow for Jeanty and Story’s art, which is similarly all over the map.
Joss Whedon (and Gage, and Jeanty, and Story) may have wanted to go full Claremont, but Claremont’s “X-Men” was everything this book is not. It was often deliberately paced, over-the-top and a mite silly — we’re blessed that Gage keeps the flowery caption boxes to a minimum here — but the sense of consistent momentum, satisfying completion of mini-arcs within larger stories, and a confidence in the team steering the ship are almost entirely missing here.
Final Verdict: 3.7 – A weak introduction to a new arc which will leave few excited for what comes next, coupled with profoundly poor artwork where ugly characters drown in ink.
