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beer_good_foamyMan, I go away for a week and lookit what happens. Comics.
Thoughts below the cut. Take'em for what they are – it's just the start of an arc, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
OK, the obvious whine-a-thon first. Having run out of jokes about Giant!Dawn after the Dawnzilla thing, they're simply going to junk that storyline and play around with Centaur!Dawn for a while instead. Well, at least we'll get some fresh crack now, and to her credit Dawn finally seems to have had enough, even if nobody else seems all that bothered.
BUFFY: And seriously, what is up with Dawn?
She's your sister, Buffy. You died for her. Willow, you supposedly consider her your pseudo-daughter. And Xander, your reaction...
XANDER: You really don't know how awesome you look?
...doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of "inappropriate." Victimization = hot in the Buffyverse now? Who ARE these people?!? Well, personal attachments to Dawn aside, they're supposedly the very powerful heads of a mystical organisation specifically founded to help young girls. But don't worry, guys, it's not like anyone expects you to... I dunno, give Dawn half the priority you used to give the victim of the week back in TV canon or anything. Just take it easy, tell her not to whine about being turned into a monster (Willow's word), make no effort to, say, track down this Kenny character and make him Listen To Reason, and hope that Dawn won't simply be permanently turned into a frog or a swan on her last go-round. That would be sort of ooops-worthy.
Anyway, moving on. The opening scene is both cute and foreboding, as are the New York scenes; all very interesting, and set up some nice character moments. So Kennedy doesn't trust Buffy around her Willow, and Buffy (and to some extent Xander) knows about Willow/Snakewoman, though I'm not sure if we're supposed to read Willow's denial as real (and rather pathetic) or just embarrassed babbling in the face of overwhelming evidence. Something tells me Kennedy's about to find out about Willow's cheatin' ways too. Which should be interesting. There's a lot of talk about secrets – the bank robberies get mentioned again, and Buffy pretty much comes right out and tells Willow that she's keeping secrets from her. Well, it's nice that they're open about it. Meanwhile, Xander is either repressing or didn't take Renee's death all THAT hard - he's grieving, but handling it. Or slowly breaking under the pressure. Again, Buffyspeak is not necessarily well-suited for a non-audio visual medium.
Good to see Vi (or "Violet" as she apparently goes by now) and Kennedy again, though. And Fray, who has apparently somehow found out what Buffy looked/looks/will look/will have looked like (which is impressive, given that Moline seems to have a somewhat fuzzy idea – by his own admission, even). And I like that they kept the continuity from "Get It Done" of switching one creature for another in the temporal-dimensional-whatsit. This storyline definitely has potential.
And Castle Anthrax is gone. Shrug. A number of Slayers probably died, and I suppose they'll have to find a new HQ now, which would probably have mattered more if any of the Slayers we cared about were in the castle (which we know they're not) and if we had any clue why it was so important for them to be in Scotland in the first place. Though you gotta wonder about Twilight's planning; in #1, Voll said they couldn't simply bomb Castle Anthrax, and had some pretty good reasons too. So now they've... bombed Castle Anthrax. With a mystical missile, but still. And Warren's back as a useful all-purposes bad guy, ho-hum. But wait a tick...
WILLOW: That message was sent for a reason. We need to find out what it means – before we get attacked again.
And the second they go to find out what it means, they get attacked. Interesting coincidence, n'est pas?
ETA what I commented on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stormwreath's review re: Saga Vasuki:
Look what happens immediately when they act on that tip; the castle gets blown up and Buffy is lost in time. Given Twilight's reluctance to kill Buffy and his insistance that this is just a small part of the plan, it's awfully convenient that she's out of town when the missile strikes...
So far, that's at least TWO majorly hairy situations (Tokyo and this one) they've gotten into that are explicitly connected in some way to Saga Vasuki and Willow's relationship with her. That doesn't exactly convince me that she's one of the good guys, and I'm looking forward to finding out why Willow would think she is. Besides, why would the demon in #10 have shown them that image if it had no connection to Twilight? They were there to find out about him, after all, and Willow herself made the connection between the bank robberies and Twilight's plan - if that's the first domino, what's the second?
Various:
- So what was that secret meeting of Buffy's? Business or pleasure?
- Who do we know in New York? AFAIR, the only New York-based character from Buffy's own time is Whistler... and while it would make sense to bring him into this storyline, given what he knew about prophecies and correct timelines back in s2, I don't see Buffy dressing up like that for him.
- And should Buffy's "Bad day. Started out bad, stayed that way" be a hint that the meeting wasn't successful?
- Who told Karl Moline that Willow used to be played by Celine Dion?
- Did Warren's MagicPhallus Missile blow up the grail-shaped beacon?
AtF #10
OK, I've been about this close to dropping AtF completely. Get the story going already! For all its faults, at least the Buffy comic seems to have a huge plot that's just starting to unfold – Lynch is still hung up on trying to work out everything that happened in the seconds following NFA (which just goes to prove how great an ending for the entire series it really was). He's not really building on it, he's just picking through the debris. As a self-contained story, it's nice if somewhat unengaging; as a serial, it's way too slow. But some pretty crucial stuff did happen in this issue, so...
I liked the opening dream scene, which together with some future covers seem to hint that that's exactly what's NOT going to happen... "Life's too short," eh Angel?
So hell has frozen over? Does this mean that Lorne was behind the Eagles reunion, and does this qualify him as evil?
Confirmation: Spike/Spider is a no-go, at least as far as Spike is concerned. I'm sure some people are happy. I liked the Spike and Wesley scene a lot.
Gunn's Slayers seem... on edge. Yup. Quite literally. They keep establishing that Gunn's pretty badass as a vampire, and now they've got George as his weapon. Hmmm. And then it all happens: the cat's finally out of the bag about Angel (about time) and he knows about Gunn AND... we know what the rest of the world know about LA! Well, maybe. I have no clue who those characters watching TV were and how they relate to the "real" world and how the LA glamour works or anything. But at least it makes some more sense of Season 8's refusal to even mention the LA thing.
So I'm not dropping it yet.
Thoughts below the cut. Take'em for what they are – it's just the start of an arc, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
OK, the obvious whine-a-thon first. Having run out of jokes about Giant!Dawn after the Dawnzilla thing, they're simply going to junk that storyline and play around with Centaur!Dawn for a while instead. Well, at least we'll get some fresh crack now, and to her credit Dawn finally seems to have had enough, even if nobody else seems all that bothered.
BUFFY: And seriously, what is up with Dawn?
She's your sister, Buffy. You died for her. Willow, you supposedly consider her your pseudo-daughter. And Xander, your reaction...
XANDER: You really don't know how awesome you look?
...doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of "inappropriate." Victimization = hot in the Buffyverse now? Who ARE these people?!? Well, personal attachments to Dawn aside, they're supposedly the very powerful heads of a mystical organisation specifically founded to help young girls. But don't worry, guys, it's not like anyone expects you to... I dunno, give Dawn half the priority you used to give the victim of the week back in TV canon or anything. Just take it easy, tell her not to whine about being turned into a monster (Willow's word), make no effort to, say, track down this Kenny character and make him Listen To Reason, and hope that Dawn won't simply be permanently turned into a frog or a swan on her last go-round. That would be sort of ooops-worthy.
Anyway, moving on. The opening scene is both cute and foreboding, as are the New York scenes; all very interesting, and set up some nice character moments. So Kennedy doesn't trust Buffy around her Willow, and Buffy (and to some extent Xander) knows about Willow/Snakewoman, though I'm not sure if we're supposed to read Willow's denial as real (and rather pathetic) or just embarrassed babbling in the face of overwhelming evidence. Something tells me Kennedy's about to find out about Willow's cheatin' ways too. Which should be interesting. There's a lot of talk about secrets – the bank robberies get mentioned again, and Buffy pretty much comes right out and tells Willow that she's keeping secrets from her. Well, it's nice that they're open about it. Meanwhile, Xander is either repressing or didn't take Renee's death all THAT hard - he's grieving, but handling it. Or slowly breaking under the pressure. Again, Buffyspeak is not necessarily well-suited for a non-audio visual medium.
Good to see Vi (or "Violet" as she apparently goes by now) and Kennedy again, though. And Fray, who has apparently somehow found out what Buffy looked/looks/will look/will have looked like (which is impressive, given that Moline seems to have a somewhat fuzzy idea – by his own admission, even). And I like that they kept the continuity from "Get It Done" of switching one creature for another in the temporal-dimensional-whatsit. This storyline definitely has potential.
And Castle Anthrax is gone. Shrug. A number of Slayers probably died, and I suppose they'll have to find a new HQ now, which would probably have mattered more if any of the Slayers we cared about were in the castle (which we know they're not) and if we had any clue why it was so important for them to be in Scotland in the first place. Though you gotta wonder about Twilight's planning; in #1, Voll said they couldn't simply bomb Castle Anthrax, and had some pretty good reasons too. So now they've... bombed Castle Anthrax. With a mystical missile, but still. And Warren's back as a useful all-purposes bad guy, ho-hum. But wait a tick...
WILLOW: That message was sent for a reason. We need to find out what it means – before we get attacked again.
And the second they go to find out what it means, they get attacked. Interesting coincidence, n'est pas?
ETA what I commented on
stormwreath's review re: Saga Vasuki:Look what happens immediately when they act on that tip; the castle gets blown up and Buffy is lost in time. Given Twilight's reluctance to kill Buffy and his insistance that this is just a small part of the plan, it's awfully convenient that she's out of town when the missile strikes...
So far, that's at least TWO majorly hairy situations (Tokyo and this one) they've gotten into that are explicitly connected in some way to Saga Vasuki and Willow's relationship with her. That doesn't exactly convince me that she's one of the good guys, and I'm looking forward to finding out why Willow would think she is. Besides, why would the demon in #10 have shown them that image if it had no connection to Twilight? They were there to find out about him, after all, and Willow herself made the connection between the bank robberies and Twilight's plan - if that's the first domino, what's the second?
Various:
- So what was that secret meeting of Buffy's? Business or pleasure?
- Who do we know in New York? AFAIR, the only New York-based character from Buffy's own time is Whistler... and while it would make sense to bring him into this storyline, given what he knew about prophecies and correct timelines back in s2, I don't see Buffy dressing up like that for him.
- And should Buffy's "Bad day. Started out bad, stayed that way" be a hint that the meeting wasn't successful?
- Who told Karl Moline that Willow used to be played by Celine Dion?
- Did Warren's Magic
AtF #10
OK, I've been about this close to dropping AtF completely. Get the story going already! For all its faults, at least the Buffy comic seems to have a huge plot that's just starting to unfold – Lynch is still hung up on trying to work out everything that happened in the seconds following NFA (which just goes to prove how great an ending for the entire series it really was). He's not really building on it, he's just picking through the debris. As a self-contained story, it's nice if somewhat unengaging; as a serial, it's way too slow. But some pretty crucial stuff did happen in this issue, so...
I liked the opening dream scene, which together with some future covers seem to hint that that's exactly what's NOT going to happen... "Life's too short," eh Angel?
So hell has frozen over? Does this mean that Lorne was behind the Eagles reunion, and does this qualify him as evil?
Confirmation: Spike/Spider is a no-go, at least as far as Spike is concerned. I'm sure some people are happy. I liked the Spike and Wesley scene a lot.
Gunn's Slayers seem... on edge. Yup. Quite literally. They keep establishing that Gunn's pretty badass as a vampire, and now they've got George as his weapon. Hmmm. And then it all happens: the cat's finally out of the bag about Angel (about time) and he knows about Gunn AND... we know what the rest of the world know about LA! Well, maybe. I have no clue who those characters watching TV were and how they relate to the "real" world and how the LA glamour works or anything. But at least it makes some more sense of Season 8's refusal to even mention the LA thing.
So I'm not dropping it yet.
