Fun with numbers

I’m not remotely competent to weigh in to the argument about BookScan sales figures begun by Brian Hibbs in this “Tilting at Windmills” column. But one sentence switched my mental points on to another track.

Brian wrote, “As a periodical comic book, the first issue of Buffy seems to have sold at least 158,437 copies.” That figure is icv2’s estimate of sales in the direct market (comic shops) in North America, as supplied by Diamond Comic Distributors. Now, that caught my eye, because Doctor Who Online reported this on 14 February:

Doctor Who Adventures Magazine holds onto its place as #1 Children's Magazine [in the UK]. The latest ABC figures show that the magazine's circulation achieved 154,989 from July-December 2007. This is up 44.1% compared to the same period in 2006, where the magazine's circulation was a respectable 107,577.

So, very similar numbers, then. Except that the UK is a lot smaller than North America. Using UN estimates, the population of the UK is a little over 60 million, that of the USA about 306 million, with Canada adding another 33 million; taken together, about five and a half times the size. In addition, Doctor Who Adventures was published every two weeks in the period measured (it has since gone up to weekly), whereas Buffy the Vampire Slayer was monthly, with slippage, and later issues sold fewer copies.

So, relatively speaking, the best-selling media-tie-in comic in the UK last year sold at least eleven times better than the best-selling media-tie-in comic in North America. Those sales were mostly to children, through non-specialist shops such as newsagents and supermarkets, the market that North American publishers have largely given up in favour of notional adults like me who go to comics shops.

Of course, this isn’t an entirely fair comparison. Doctor Who is currently quite preposterously popular over here. The Christmas episode had the second largest audience of any television programme broadcast in the UK in 2007, while the series as a whole made the top ten for the year. Buffy, on the other hand, was always a marginal show on a minority network, and there have been no new episodes since 2003. So its comic incarnation can hardly be expected to sell as well. We need something that is about equally popular in both countries.

How about The Simpsons comics? The latest figures I have found for the UK edition are from 2006, and show it selling an average of 134, 631 copies every four weeks*. Does the American edition shift the 740,000 copies a month that it would need to match up?

*Update 9 March Average circulation 133,086 copies in July-December 2007, according to the ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) figures just posted by Steve Holland.

Panels
Doctor Who “Hot Metal” Part 2, script by Christopher Cooper, art by John Ross, colours by Alan Craddock, letters by Paul Vyse, Doctor Who Adventures issue 49, BBC Magazines, 31 January-6 February 2008

Frayed ends Buffed up

It would seem from Jo Chen’s cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 16 (found via Blog@Newsarama) that Joss Whedon is planning a crossover with his series Fray, which, you will recall, dealt with the adventures of a Slayer in a Blade Runnery far future. This is not too much of a surprise, given that the Big Bad of Season 8 wants to rid the world of magic, while Fray has already told us that it happened. (Click to enlarge, of course.)


But let’s hope that there’s more to it than tying up dangling continuity threads.

Incidentally, what’s Karl Moline up to these days?

Pictures and Panels
Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 16 by Jo Chen

Page from Fray issue 3, created and written by Joss Whedon with Karl Moline (penciller), Andy Owens (inker), Dave Stewart (colourist), Michelle Madsen (letterer) and Scott Allie (editor), Dark Horse Comics, August 2001

Review: Angel – After the Fall

Angel: After the Fall Issue 1, “After the Fall” Chapter 1, plotted by Joss Whedon and Brian Lynch, scripted by Brian Lynch, illustrated by Franco Urru, coloured by Ilaria Traversi, lettered by Robbie Robbins, edited by Chris Ryall, cover by Tony Harris, 27 pages of comics, IDW Publishing, November 2007, US$3.99

It’s probably unfair to reach judgements after just one issue, but it’s still harder to resist the temptation to compare IDW’s new Angel series, After the Fall, the first to show us what Joss Whedon thinks happened after the end of his TV series, with Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Long Way Home, which did the same for its big sister (and which I rather liked).

And the similarities are striking.

First, there is a shift of scale and setting to something that could not be managed on a TV budget. Buffy is now leading an army of slayers based in a Scottish castle; Angel is riding a dragon over a Los Angeles that has been sucked into Hell.


Second, there is an excess of recurring characters and a reluctance to move on from those already left behind. So, in the last TV episode, Wesley Wyndham-Price was killed as decisively as any character could be. He’s back here, admittedly as a ghost, but with more dialogue than pretty much anyone else. Gunn is back too. And we get Connor. And Electro-Gwen. And Angel’s werewolf girlfriend. And Wolfram & Hart. True, Spike is being held back for next issue, and Illyria and Harmony haven’t turned up yet, but that may just mirror the structure of The Long Way Home, in which Giles and Willow only appeared in later issues. It’s odd that a professional writer should seem to be writing fan fiction about his own creations, but then Joss Whedon often comes across as his own biggest fan (if we discount the outright certifiable).

Third, like Buffy, Angel seems now to have discarded the idea of an overarching metaphor. This is a particular shame in Angel’s case, as it was only in its last season on TV that it settled upon a satisfactory approach, using supernatural stories to address the compromises of adult working life.

But alongside these similarities are major differences in the level of craft on display.

The big change from Buffy is that the Angel comic only has Whedon as a co-plotter. He shares the plot with Brian Lynch, who also writes the script. Lynch gives us page after page of macho posturing and dull threats, with only a smattering of wit. Odd touches of quirky originality – a telepathic fish, apparently carried over from Lynch’s earlier Spike comic – are counterbalanced by such tired clichés as a harem of women in chains and a group of men forced to fight as gladiators. Lynch is a television writer by trade, but, unlike his colleague, he does not seem yet to have mastered writing in his new medium. It’s often unclear who is providing the first-person narrative caption boxes, for example, and their relationship to the pictures is unsteady, neither juxtaposed nor properly supportive. The shock ending is undermined as much by bathetic final words as by the difficulty of recognising the character in the last panel (it took me two reads, and I am not the most casual and inattentive of readers. Perhaps it would have helped if artist and colourist had followed the script’s hints about co-ordinated clothes).

Franco Urro’s artwork is often sketchy, but mostly serves the narrative, apart from a curious addiction to panels showing characters standing in straight lines left-to-right, looking out at the reader. Perhaps this is some sort of parodic reference to the “power shots” that always ended the TV show’s title sequences, but it is so artificial as to pull you right out of the story.





The big problem with the art – as has been the case on most IDW comics that I have seen, apart from those with colour art produced by Ben Templesmith – is the crude and muddy Photoshop colour and effects that quite overwhelm Urro’s already non-too-robust drawing. This seems to be a house style, so I am not inclined to blame Ilaria Traversi too much for it.


Altogether, not an inspiring start. I’ll give it another issue, but I remember watching the dismal, incoherent and leaden fourth television season of Angel (the one with Cordelia giving birth to an evil goddess) as the biggest act of misplaced loyalty to a TV show that I’ve committed since mid-1980s Doctor Who, so I am reluctant to repeat the mistake in comics.

Astonishing or Uncanny?

I’ve noted before that Joss Whedon is giving a distinctly X-Men flavour to his Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics, but this cover to issue 11 is the most straightforwardly superheroic yet.


Leaping across urban rooftops?* They’ll all be in yellow spandex by the end of the series, you mark my words.

* Admittedly, that’s more like Batman than the X-Men. Is anyone up for All-Star Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Her Army of Girl Wonders?


Picture
Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 11 by Georges Jeanty, taken from the Dark Horse Comics February 2008 listing posted at Comic Book Resources

An Excuse for an Otherwise Gratuitous Picture

News from Variety, by way of Blog@Newsarama: Joss Whedon is working on the scripts for Dollhouse, a seven-part TV series starring Eliza Dushku, due to be broadcast by Fox TV next year.

It’s good to see that Whedon can still get paid employment in Hollywood. But the last time he tried to combine running a TV show with writing comics, we got gaps of up to thirteen months between issues of his Fray mini-series. Let’s hope that Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 is not similarly affected.

Picture
Cover by Jo Chen to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 9, showing Eliza Dushku as Faith

Stutter

This has been bugging me, so please forgive me if I make a meal over what should be a couple of bites.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 6, Brian K Vaughan and Georges Jeanty drop in a couple of references to external fictions, not in the usual pop geek dialogue way, but as if they were real in Buffy’s world.*


Yes, for the moment, I’m going to treat the idea of Alan Moore as a wizard as fictional, even if he believes it himself. (See Scans Daily for an example.)

Now, the first panel posted above doesn’t bother me at all. I scan the image, take in the Doctor and Rose, smile internally, and move on. But the second panel stalls the comic’s engine.

Why the difference?

At first, I thought it might be because one reference is done in pictures and the other in words. And there might be something in that. It’s easy to make an element of a picture unobtrusive. It is much harder with words – unless there is some kind of set-up, common in American Flagg, for example, in which word balloons are used to indicate the fact of background chatter, rather than to carry meaning in the words themselves.

The type of picture and the type of words matter too. The first panel is an establishing shot: the narrative has already slowed down to show the new location, and, in such low gear, it is easy to take in the side reference without juddering to a halt. The second panel is in the middle of a run of dialogue in which Giles explains the plot to Faith: when the need occurs to stop to take in the reference, it’s like slamming on the brakes while still in third.

And you do need to stop. The phrase “the great bearded wizard of Northampton” is not natural speech, and jolts the reader out of the word balloon to wonder why. That it is shaped as a puzzle – albeit a simple one for comics fans – means that you can’t simply drive on into the story until you’ve solved it. Worse, while it doesn't greatly matter if you don't recognise the Doctor and Rose, as you would just think of them as passers-by added to populate the London street and not know that you'd missed anything, if you didn't know who “the great bearded wizard of Northampton” was, you'd still be aware that there was a puzzle that you'd failed to solve.

So that’s that explained. OK, down to neutral, turn the ignition, up into first, and away.

Oh, heck, he said "fall" instead of "autumn". This thing just isn't destined to run smoothly.


*That was rare on the TV show, wasn’t it? The only example I can think of was Dracula’s appearance in one episode.


Panels
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 6, “No Future For You” part 1, by Brian K Vaughan (script), Georges Jeanty (puzzle), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor) and Joss Whedon (executive producer – whatever that means)

Reviews: Doctor Who, Crécy, Buffy

Doctor Who Magazine issue 385, “Bus Stop!” by Rob Davis (story), John Ross (art), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (letters), Clayton Hickman and Scott Gray (editors), Panini Magazines, 22 August 2007, 9 pages of strip (out of 68), £3.99

Of the three regular licensed Doctor Who periodicals, Doctor Who Magazine is the one aimed mostly at adult readers. The comic strip runs only to a handful of pages each issue, but this time out it’s worth a look even if you aren’t particularly interested in the articles, because “Bus Stop!” is possibly the best Doctor Who strip published since the TV series returned to the screen.

It’s an inconsequential, one-off story about assassins trying to kill a future president by bumping off his ancestor, the present day Mayor of London. But although slight, it captures the upbeat energy and invention of the modern TV show without either the stodginess of storytelling that tends to weigh down the Magazine strip or the toothless, anodyne feel that usually disarms the strip in Doctor Who Adventures (on which Ross is the regular artist). Despite catching the TV tone, it remains resolutely a comic strip, using devices, such as keeping the Doctor off-panel for the opening page of his conversation with a bus passenger, that would not work on the small screen but which do work on the printed page.


Good stuff. I hope that we see more from this team.


Crécy by Warren Ellis (story), Raulo Caceres (artwork) and Felipe Massafera (cover), Avatar Press/Apparat, July 2007, 44 pages of strip, US$6.99

This is the Anglo-American way of war: stay as far away from your enemy as possible, and kill him before he can get near you. Before the cruise missile, before the Lancaster bomber or the Martini-Henry rifle, the way to do that was with the longbow. Handled by a skilled archer, it had a greater range, penetration and rate of fire than any personal weapon before the twentieth century. Muskets replaced it, not because they were inherently more effective, but because any untrained idiot could fire one, whereas it took years of practice to be a longbowman. At Crécy in 1346, the flower of French chivalry met the longbow for the first time, and died. This was in the early days of the Hundred Years War – in truth, perhaps just a particularly intense stage in the 750-year war that began with the triumph of the Bastard in 1066 and ended with the crushing of the Monster in 1815.

Warren Ellis’ story is a monologue by an English longbowmen, anachronistically aware of the 21st century readership he is addressing. His language is foul, and so are his attitudes, but his blunt, coarse honesty keeps the reader on side as he explains why and how the English are fighting in France, while the humour, scatology and xenophobia keep things from getting too schoolmasterly. His account is reasonably accurate, if you discount a far more complete sense of national identity than existed in the fourteenth century, and it is both informative and cruelly entertaining.


In keeping with Avatar’s house style, Cacares’ artwork suggests that much more time has been spent on elaborate rendering than on composition, but it is serviceable.

In comparison with Crécy, the old-school true war stories reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics seem bloodless in more senses than one.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 5, “The Chain” by Joss Whedon (script), Paul Lee (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, Dark Horse Comics, August 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

A new Slayer is recruited to impersonate Buffy, going underground (literally) to intimidate a demon lord with the power of Buffy Summers’ reputation. “There’s always a name … The name can inspire terror, awe, sometimes great things…”

The name on the credits is Joss Whedon. So … how do we know that he actually wrote this?

Portrait of Mademoiselle X

Jo Chen has provided a series of striking and beautifully finished covers for Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight comics, and all I’ve done is poke fun at Buffy’s apparent height, or Willow’s strange wardrobe.

So I thought that I’d point out the virtues of the latest Chen cover to be posted, as part of Dark Horse’s solicitations for October. The composition’s a little awkward, but Chen has caught the faces perfectly, applying just the right amount of exaggeration to Faith’s hooded eyes and cynical mouth (and perhaps a little more exaggeration to her bust). But what I really like is the way that, for a story about Faith infiltrating high society, Chen has nicely evoked the spirit of John Singer Sargent in the black dress and dark pearly background. Classy stuff. Or possibly extreme kitsch. You decide.

Faithful unto Undeath

Dark Horse Comics is publishing next month the first volume of its collected Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus. (Update, 29 June: it actually came out this week.) Here’s part of the blurb:

“The definitive comics collection of all things Buffy starts here. This first massive volume begins at the beginning-The Origin, a faithful adaptation of creator Joss Whedon's original screenplay for the film that started it all …”

The emphasis on “faithful” is Dark Horse’s own. What do they mean by it?

As is well known, Joss Whedon was unhappy with the way the producers, director and cast of the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed his script. It was in part a desire to treat the subject right that led him to respond positively to the suggestion of reworking it into a TV series.

The Dark Horse adaptation, first published in 1999, reversed some of those changes. For example, this version ends with Buffy burning down the gymnasium of her old school, just as Whedon scripted it, and in line with the references in “Welcome to the Hellmouth”.


But Dark Horse have made their own changes to the original script. Buffy is 15, not 18. She doesn’t get menstrual cramps when vampires are near. The vampires can’t fly (probably – a couple of panels are ambiguous, and I have half a premonition that the feet hanging over the demon stronghold in the recent comics story “The Long Way Home” might turn out to belong to the origin story’s villain, the ancient vampire Lothos). So it’s not exactly an accurate representation of - not really faithful to - the screenplay.


There are also whole scenes here that weren’t in the movie script. Two are adapted from the flashback scenes in the TV episode “Becoming, part 1”. So is The Origin faithful to the TV series first, and to the movie screenplay second, where that isn’t in conflict? Well, not really, because those scenes are changed. Buffy gains some extra dialogue to explain references to two different boyfriends in the two different sources, and her first fight with a vampire is totally different. A tag scene involving Buffy going to Las Vegas has no source in either the movie or the TV series, but serves as a hook on which Dark Horse could hang further “Year One” adventures (though it took them a few years to get round to that).

Is there anything wrong with Dark Horse making these changes? Not at all. They were valid choices when trying to make a coherent comic book out of disparate sources from different media. It’s the marketing I object to. The blurb on the original trade paperback collection just calls it an adaptation of Whedon's original script, with no spurious claim to fidelity.

Still and all, The Origin does score points by including the very primal Buffy scene, the idea from which Joss Whedon started, before he worked it up into a character or a story: a stereotypical blonde victim walks into a dark alley, is attacked by a monster, and kicks its ass.




Panels

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin issue 1 “Destiny Free”, issue 2 “Defenseless Mechanisms”, issue 3 “Disco Inferno” by Joss Whedon (original screenplay), Christopher Golden and Daniel Brereton (Script), Joe Bennett (Pencils), Rick Ketcham, Randy Emberlin and J. Jadsen (Inks), Jeromy Cox and Guy Major (Colors), Ken Bruzenak (Letters), Scott Allie and Ben Abernathy (editors), Dark Horse Comics, January – March 1999, reprinted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin, Titan Books September 1999

Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issues 1-4: “The Long Way Home”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 1 “The Long Way Home” part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, 24 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, March 2007

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 2 “The Long Way Home” part 2 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, 24 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, April 2007

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 3 “The Long Way Home” part 3 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, 22 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, May 2007

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 4 “The Long Way Home” part 4 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, 22 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, June 2007


Spoiler-free summary review

Perhaps a year on from the end of the TV series, Buffy and her friends are training and leading five hundred slayers in the war against the demons. But a US general, branding the slayers as terrorists, sets some old enemies against Buffy.

In translating his TV show into comics, Joss Whedon has dropped Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s overarching metaphor. This is no longer a story about growing up, seen through a supernatural lens. The comic is too continuity heavy, and seems to give notice that Whedon wants to turn it into the X-Men. But the story has strong forward momentum, entertaining incident and amusing dialogue, and, above all appealing character relationships.

Georges Jeanty’s art is crisp and fluid, and, with one exception, the characters look like the actors who portrayed them without seeming lightboxed.


SPOILER WARNING – THE FULL REVIEW GIVES AWAY PLOT DETAILS

In the run-up to the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Joss Whedon said that he would not be attempting to replicate the feel of the TV series, but would be aiming to make something that was unashamedly a comic book. And that is what he has done.


The most obvious sign of this is the sense of scale. “The Long Way Home” opens with a team of slayers jumping from a helicopter, and takes us through a zombie assault on a Scottish castle, a visually wild dream sequence and an attack on a US army base. On TV, Buffy might sometimes attempt something like this, but usually only once a season, and not always convincingly. Even so, Whedon’s TV-honed money-saving instincts do seem to cut in unnecessarily on occasion. For example, we don’t actually see the zombies dancing after Willow sabotages the spell that animates them, it is just reported. That’s a shame, as Jeanty, Owens and Stewart offer ample evidence throughout these four issues that they can handle anything Whedon throws at them with aplomb.

One effect that could not have been handled convincingly on a TV special effects budget is giant Dawn, grown to about 20 or 30 feet high. And this marks another departure from the TV show, because Xander’s suggestion that Dawn deliberately got herself enlarged as a call for attention is about the only trace left of the original blueprint for the series: the fantastical as a metaphor for growing up. Although this was sometimes treated heavy-handedly, it was something that gave the series an extra dimension over and above the shenanigans of other telefantasy shows, and it was one of the reasons that I preferred Buffy to Angel - though the latter notably perked up when in its final series it adopted the similar tactic of using the fantastical as a metaphor for dealing with the world of work. So it is a pity to lose that anchor to reality.


The absence of the practical constraints on television production also leads Whedon to adopt some comic book bad habits. For starters, there are far too many recurring characters. Each of the three opening issues ends with a surprise reveal of a someone supposedly unexpected. The TV show might have brought back Amy and Ethan Raine and Warren, but probably not all in the same episode. Worse, we are expected to remember elements of their backstory. It is a reasonable assumption that anyone picking up this comic will be a Buffy fan, but there are fans and fans – not all of them memorise the trivia. So the reason why Amy is so disturbed by the image of her mother – crucial to her defeat – may be lost on many readers who don’t recall the plot of the first season episode “The Witch”.

But those who have swallowed the big pill of geek knowledge will be disturbed by the unconvincing retrospective changes to continuity. A casual throwaway is the disclosure that “The Girl in Question” from Angel’s fifth season wasn’t Buffy at all, but another slayer doubling for her because Buffy is a target. Whedon will be tackling this in depth in issue 5, but for the time being I have an image in my mind of Andrew telling some girl, “You’re the right height and build. Off you go and expose yourself to all Buffy’s enemies. And while you’re at it, please boink this ‘Immortal’ guy so that I can screw with my friends’ heads.” Not very appetising, is it? Or heroic, for that matter.

More seriously, Whedon rewrites the end of season 6: Warren was not burnt to a crisp, but whisked away by Amy’s magic. This is a serious change. It means that Willow is no longer a killer. It is also highly implausible – Warren’s whole deal was that he was a misogynist who couldn’t get a girl without hypnosis, and that’s wholly undermined if he was already involved with Amy.

Those seem to me errors of judgement. The conclusion of the story involves a different sin of comic book writing: I know that Silver Age Superman is all the rage these days, but it is lazy to resolve the story by having the heroes demonstrate never-before-hinted-at super-powers. In this case, Willow is able to project her magics through Buffy. There is some precedent from the composite super-Buffy from the end of season four, but that was presented as a big deal requiring lots of preparation, not something the characters can do whenever it is convenient (and it was also part of the metaphor, a dramatised instance of the importance of friendship).

And finally, Whedon signals that he doesn’t just want this to be a comic, he wants it to be a particular comic.


Honestly, Mr Whedon, I’m sure that, if you asked Joe Quesada, he’d be quite happy to commission some more issues of X-Men from you. You don’t have to turn Buffy into a clone.

So it sounds like I hated this story, right?

Are you kidding? Did you miss the bits about dancing zombies, and giant Dawn, and jumping from helicopters? Or the dream sequence from the man who writes the best dream sequences since Sigmund Freud? Or the obvious signs that I am a seriously unbalanced Buffy fan?

The pacing is spot on, building tension, and throwing in action sequences, but also allowing space for the story and the characters to breathe. The interaction between his lead characters has always been one of the strengths of Whedon’s writing. On Buffy, the later, grimmer series always gained a lift when Whedon wrote an episode himself, because he infused his scripts not just with wacky dialogue, but with a palpable affection between the leads. And so it is here.


In the reviews I wrote of issue 1 and issue 2, I praised Georges Jeanty and the art team for their versatility, storytelling skills and ability to capture likenesses of the actors without looking like they were copying photographs. There are only two points where they falter throughout the opening story – in failing to capture a good likeness of Andrew, and in a slightly confusing presentation of events when Buffy is wakened from her magically-imposed sleep by the Kiss of True Love. Otherwise, this is a fine performance.

“The Long Way Home” is a highly entertaining, thrilling and funny story despite its faults. It also lays the seeds for the rest of the pseudo-Season. There is clearly much to come from the mysterious “Twilight” organisation that opposes the slayers, and maybe we will learn at some point whose feet are hovering over the demon stronghold in issue 1. And maybe my next review will neither hark back to the TV series so much, nor find so much need to revisit the clichés of comicdom. Here’s hoping.

You can disguise your face, but not your height

Back when the first issue of the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer series came out, I complained that Jo Chen's cover made Buffy look six feet tall.


Now, I see the cunning plan. The cover for issue 5 shows us that it wasn't Buffy on that first cover at all, but one of her doubles.


Sneaky stuff (and a damn fine cover painting for issue 5, too).

A full review of Buffy issues 1-4 will follow when my fingers are less like bananas.

Don’t Talk to Me Like That

Using customised spellings to indicate that a character is speaking in a strong accent is a comic device as old as standardised spelling (or is that “standardized”?). Perhaps even older: consider Shakespeare’s Captain Fluellen in Henry V, praising “falorous” men, and eating “pread”. And it has been used in comics for ages. Here’s the Yellow Kid on a visit to Scotland, with his shirt emblazoned with R F Outcault’s idea of Brooklynese.



Lately, Joss Whedon has been using customised spelling to give accents to some of the Slayers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, but that seems to be an attempt to add colour rather than raise a laugh.



The champion user of funny accents recently has been Brian Azzarello in the Dr 13 series in Tales of the Unexpected.



I really don’t like it.

For one thing, it badly affects the pace at which the comic can be read. When reading words, we don’t normally pick out every letter: we see the shapes of words and grab the most likely candidate from our vocabularies – like predictive text messaging software, only a thousand times more efficient. It’s why we stumble over unfamiliar names, and why proofreading requires such concentration. And when we run across something like this …


… we are back in infants’ school, spelling out the individual sounds of the letters one by one and piecing them together. Our fourth-gear cruise through the word balloons crashes down to a first-gear crawl.

For another thing, using customised spelling for accents implies that there is one particular accent which is the correct way to read regular spelling. In British literature, that has traditionally been the educated middle-class accent known as “received pronunciation” or “BBC English”. Accents presented in customised spelling are usually a way of laughing at foreigners and the poor. When the novelist and Scottish Nationalist Alasdair Gray has the voices of his Scots characters presented in standard spelling and his English characters in customised spelling, he is making a strong political point.

And Azzarello does indeed seem to be using customised spelling to make the Spanish Captain Fear into (even more of) a joke. But I have yet another, practical problem with it all.

Brian Azzarello presumably pronounces standardised spellings in one of the many and varied American accents. I pronounce them in one of the many and varied English accents. We have different ideas about how letters and combinations of letters should sound. That’s why dictionaries use a special phonetic alphabet, whose sounds are internationally consistent, to indicate pronunciation. But the accents in Dr 13 aren’t in the phonetic alphabet, and, sometimes, the way they read to me makes no sense at all. This, for example, is how an avatar of Grant Morrison speaks, but even with the knowledge that it is supposed to be a Scottish accent, I can’t work it out.


“Ercu”? Anyone?

So all this is a bit of a blot on Dr 13’s copybook. But, as I hope to show in a later post, it is a very large and interesting copybook otherwise.


Panels

“The Yellow Kid in Edinburgh” by R F Outcault, New York Journal, 13 February 1897, reprinted in R F Outcault The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics, Kitchen Sink Press, 1995

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 1 "The Long Way Home" part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft's Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), Dark Horse Comics, March 2007

Dr 13 “Architecture & Mortality” part 3 by Brian Azzarello (writer), Cliff Chiang (artist), Patricia Mulvihill (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer) and Bob Schreck (editor), Tales of the Unexpected issue 3, DC Comics, February 2007

Dr 13 “Architecture & Mortality” part 4 by Brian Azzarello (writer), Cliff Chiang (artist), Patricia Mulvihill (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer) and Bob Schreck (editor), Tales of the Unexpected issue 4, DC Comics, March 2007

Dr 13 “Architecture & Mortality” part 6 by Brian Azzarello (writer), Cliff Chiang (artist), Patricia Mulvihill (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer) and Bob Schreck (editor), Tales of the Unexpected issue 6, DC Comics, May 2007

Reviews: Buffy, Detective Comics, 2000AD

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 2: “The Long Way Home” Part 2 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), cover by Jo Chen, Dark Horse Comics, April 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

I’ll do a proper review of this opening story once it concludes. For the time being, I’ll note that this is another entertaining issue, with a clever introduction to a dream sequence, but also with a baffling willingness of mortal enemies to stand around and chat.

Georges Jeanty and Andy Owens’s art continues to impress. They don’t manage a good likeness of Andrew, but otherwise handle everything Whedon throws at them, from mass battle scenes to the nicely-captured expressions on the faces of these two new Slayers. Note, too, the way that the extended final panel makes the reader look down, just as the characters do.




Detective Comics issue 831: Batman “Kind of Like Family” by Paul Dini (writer), Don Kramer (pencils), Wayne Faucher (inker), John Kalisz (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer), Peter Tomasi (editor), cover by Simone Bianchi, DC Comics, June 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

With the first trade paperback collection out, this seemed like a good time to sample an issue from Paul Dini’s run on Detective Comics, which I had previously neglected. It turns out to be an OK, basic superhero story, in which Scarface busts Harley Quinn out of Arkham Asylum, and various double-crosses occur. There is none of the zing I had expected from the co-creator of the animated Batman.

Similarly, the artwork is pedestrian, even stodgy, though this panel had a bit of zip.



So it looks like that Batman: Detective trade paperback will stay at the shop.



2000AD prog 1531, Rebellion, 4 April 2007, 28 pages of strip, £1.75
Features: Judge Dredd “Origins, part 19: Army of the Damned” by John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Savage, Book Three “Double Yellow” part 6 by Pat Mills (script), Charlie Adlard (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Robo-Hunter “Casino Royal” part 5 by Alan Grant (script), Ian Gibson (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Sinister Dexter “The Last Thing I Do” part 4 by Dan Abnett (script), Simon Davis (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Nikolai Dante “Hellfire” part 6 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

This is a tired, backward-looking issue, featuring the same old characters by the same old creators. Not that the veterans can’t do great work: but, this time, all inspiration seems long since dried up.

Dredd is an inevitability, of course. Unfortunately, the strip is currently bogged down in a long would-be epic, rather than firing off the short, sharp satirical squibs the format and character do best. This panel did manage to raise just about my only smile of the issue.



The rest of the recurring series could do with being rested or dropped, to give the writers and artists invigorating new challenges. Fresh series, and some fiery, cocksure new creators, are desperately needed.

Monday Miscellany

Weighty Tome
I am still reading and pondering Bryan Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland: An Entertainment. I’ll post a review later in the week, but in the meantime, have a look at the review by Jog, which chimes with what I have read of the book so far.



One thing that strikes you about Alice even before you begin to read is what extraordinary value it represents as an artefact. I know it is philistine to consider the value of books by the yard, but for £16.99 – about the price of a typical hardback prose novel - you get a 330 page, full colour, 28 by 20 cm volume. The blessed thing weighs 1.4 kilograms.

In an article in the Sunday Times last month, Bryan Appleyard suggested that the recent commercial success of graphic novels owed something to the arrival on the international publishing scene of cheap Chinese printers. Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, the UK publishers of Talbot’s new book, reckoned that the British edition of Jimmy Corrigan would have cost about £30 or £40 a copy if it had been printed anywhere else. Who knows what Alice in Sunderland would have cost?

So give a cheer for globalisation, and say a prayer that not too many four-year-old bookbinders were pressed into service to bring us our cheap reading pleasure.

Kow-towing to the Mainstream Media
Speaking of British national newspapers, today’s issue of The Guardian reviews the first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. Reviews of graphic novels in the upmarket national press are becoming, if not commonplace, then unexceptional, but it’s a rare thrill to find a monthly pamphlet reviewed as a piece of story-telling like this (as opposed to the press coverage of Captain America issue 25, which concentrated on the event of Cap’s death, rather than the way the tale was told). A pity that a witless sub-editor should write "what a shame it's only a comic," when the reviewer, Emily Watson, is much more even-handed.

Update
I wrote earlier that Viz now has “a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to”. Steve Holland has posted some more up-to-date sales estimates to his blog, Bear Alley, putting Viz’s sales at around 95,000: a big drop, but still enough for it to be the third best-selling comic in the UK. Visit Steve’s blog to find out the top two.

Foreshadowing: a Masterclass
This panel of Batwoman in her secret identity was published by DC Comics in 1963:



Is that planning ahead, or what?


Panel from:
Batman “Prisoner of Three Worlds” by Bill Finger (writer), Sheldon Moldoff (penciller) and Charles Paris (inker), Batman issue 153, February 1963, reprinted in Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told Volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

Reviews: Buffy, Hunter & Painter, Jack Staff, Viz

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, issue 1: “The Long Way Home”, part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor); cover by Jo Chen. Dark Horse Comics, March 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

Yes, it’s Buffy by Whedon, so you already know if you like this recipe or not. This is setting up a 4-issue story, and has the pacing, incident and patter you’d expect. The only drawbacks – Great Muppety Odin aside – are Whedon’s use of homebrew-phonetic spelling for some of the Slayerettes (after some pondering, I decided to read Leah as Irish and the other girl as Danish, but who knows?) and the return of the “US military versus Buffy” trope. Because the Initiative didn’t give us quite enough hours of dullness back in Season 4, I suppose.



What I really want to draw attention to is Georges Jeanty’s artwork. His compositions are spot on: there were no occasions anywhere in reading this issue when I felt myself having consciously to decide where my eye should go next, either within a panel or across a page. He has managed to incorporate likenesses of the TV actors without making them either unrecognisable or obvious tracings of photographs. A good test is that the one new character who gets significant face-time, General Voll, looks neither more nor less real and fully-rendered than Buffy, Xander and Dawn. Jeanty has a solid command of anatomy, facial expression and perspective; and with inker Andy Owens he provides craggy lines and shadows that give bite to the finish. Top stuff.



Dark Horse lets the package down a little by printing a Jo Chen cover which depicts Buffy as at least six feet tall, and by putting four successive pages of adverts in the middle of an action sequence.


Hunter & Painter by Tom Gauld. Buenaventura Press 2007, 18 pages of strip, US$4.95

The eccentricities of this little booklet start with its format – 24cm wide by 10cm high, bound on the short side – but don’t end there. Gauld gives us the story of a caveman who has hunted every animal he knows, and a caveman who has painted every hunting scene he can think of. The tone is mundane, mixing the cheerful and the melancholy. The art is as lumpy and stylised as cave art itself. Here is Painter, trying something new:



But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. A very engaging oddity.


Jack Staff volume 2 issue 13 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and numerous colourists. Image Comics, February 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.50

This is an all-cliché issue: a parallel world where the good guys are bad guys, characters stepping outside the panel borders, a chimp, undead versions of British sit-com characters (what? that isn’t a cliché? Well, it should be!); but Grist handles proceedings with his customary grace, charm and good humour, and the chimp has his own theme song, so I’m happy enough.



Viz issue 163, with contributions by Alex Collier, Simon Ecob, John Fardell, Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris & Joel Morris, Paul Palmer, Cat Sullivan, Barney Farmer & Lee Healey, Christina Martin & James MacDougall, Will Freeman, Tony Coffey and Robert Doyle. Dennis Publishing, March 2007. 21 pages of strip (out of 52), £2.60.

Viz has now been around long enough to be easily overlooked – and, indeed, sales have fallen from its million-plus heyday to a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to. But Viz’s contents have a consistent reliability about them: it’s the same mix of crude sexual and scatological humour and sharply topical social and cultural references, served up in the style of Beano-esque comic strips and pastiche tabloid articles.



The highlight of this issue is “Jack Black and the Crack Continuum”, in which Jack and his dog Silver spend their summer holiday in the countryside, helping Aunt Meg defend her class-A drug dealership from an unwelcome intruder. Pedallos, a submarine, a bullet to the head and almond and sultana cake all feature in this parody of cozy boy’s adventure stories.

Great Muppety Odin

OK, it’s Joss Whedon. So, wacky with the wordage? Pretty much expected. But “Great Muppety Odin”? It sounds like Tony Stark’s next project after Clone Thor.

Panel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 1, Dark Horse Comics, script by Joss Whedon, pencils by Georges Jeanty, inks by Andy Owens, colours by Dave Stewart, letters by Richard Starkings and Comicraft's Jimmy