…which is more than Buffy Summers can say for you.
There’s a big screaming spoiler alert on the CNN story about the last ish of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 8, hitting the stands today. Is it a coincidence that CNN is owned by Time-Warner, which also owns Buffy’s original network, The WB, and Warner Brothers, which is remaking the BTVS film without the involvement of Whedon or Sarah Michelle Gellar? Who knows? Who cares?
It’s a celebratory article, but the real celebration is the Buffy-themed body of work on DVD, download, and video game — not to mention in syndication. You can check out the Buffy Marathon this Saturday from 10am to 8pm on Oxygen. And if that doesn’t cut it, maybe you should plan a Buffy party.
Given how some of Buffy’s parties tended to end, I’m not sure that’s a great idea. But that didn’t stop Oxford Comics in Atlanta, the Multnomah County Library in Portland, or Meltdown Comics in El Lay and Isotope Comics in San Francisco; the latter two featured for your refreshment — that’s right, cupcakes. (Because what evokes the slaughter of vampires like cupcakes?) Those were just a few of the Buffy hoedowns held nationwide to celebrate the release.
Whether any of them ended like the classic Sunnydale parties of old, with the blood, and the screaming, and the running — especially with the running and the screaming — I dunno. I’m sure the Mayor is hushing it up, if they did.
Speaking of which: In the newest and final Season 8 comic, Buffy turns 30 (she was 16 when the show debuted in 1997.) Buffy Season 8 #40 brings to a close the eighth and final story cycle, The Last Gleaming. The summary promises that, for Buffy, “betrayal comes in the shape of the closest, most unexpected individual of all. Reeling from their losses, the Scoobies will never be the same again.”
Wow, it’s almost enough to make me get interested in the comic book, which I’ve mostly avoided doing until now ’cause the few issues I’ve read disappointed me. As much as I loved the series, I felt like the few issues I caught here and there were just more of the same — bringing to the Buffyverse the same sense of repetition and overwrought here-we-go-again that dogs great long-running detective fiction serieses. Plus, I read comics too fast to wait between issues. I’ll probably subject myself to the whole forty issues, now that it’s all tied up with a neat little bow.
Or is it? Didn’t this chick get whacked once or twice before, then rise from the grave to kick sucker booty, sort of undead-to-undead? Will Buffy rise again? Joss Wheden says mas oui; Season 9 is forthcoming, though he says it may be shorter than Season 8’s forty issues.
Not like Joss really has a choice, right? Given that the Buffster’s stitched-together golem is being zapped with high-voltage evil from that hideous mad-scientist Remake Factory that used to make movies (i.e., Hollywood), there’s only so much rest that a Vampire slayer can get.
Personally, I’m bucking for a Buffy/Dr. Horrible crossover. Don’t you think those two were just made for each other?