Thanks to Dave at Nostalgia & Comics for the heads up on this one....The Guardian yesterday had a piece in it's G2 section on the new Buffy series that's just started at Dark Horse. It's Joss Whedon's continuation of the series, effectively bringing us season 8 of Buffy as an ongoing comic.
There's a pretty nice write up on the Guardian online here but that online version is a very different piece to the printed one......
The printed one got off to a really bad start with the strap line:
"Seven seasons of the hit TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer were not enough for its legion of devoted fans. The wait for season eight is finally over - what a shame it's only a comic"
Okay, so after that bit of needless slagging off, it doesn't necessarily continue in the same vein, but the die is cast by that point.
I've watched most of Buffy, I've read the comic. It's pretty good and will certainly appeal to any Buffy fan out there. It's certainly better than the pile of steaming crap that was Stephen King's Dark Tower comic. That was bloody awful, a guaranteed way to get new readers to pick up a comic spoilt only by being so awful they'd throw it back down vowing never to give comics a chance again.
But unfortunately time and time again we get bloody lazy journalists trotting out all the same tired cliches about comics. No wonder we're a hidden little medium. This journalist is obviously a big fan of Buffy but she can't get over her prejudices about the comics to give them a fair airing.
I certainly don't see what her problem is regarding the comic. It's not only approved by Buffy's creator Joss Whedon, it's written by him. This is him getting to finish the story off, like he always planned. I'm really sorry that he didn't get the red light to make this season as a piece of TV but I just don't think it's necessarily fair for the Buffy fan writing the Guardian piece to dismiss the comic out of hand.
This all ties into the recent posts and comments about comics needing to expand into new readerships and not rely exclusively on superheroes. Unfortunately, despite some wonderful successes like Jimmy Corrigan, Palestine, Maus, Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Persopolis or Alice in Sunderland garnering not only incredible critical acclaim, but new readers buying the books, we still have to put up with this sort of closemindedness.
But despite this problem, I genuinely think things are changing for the better. It may take a long time to get there, but I think the future is looking pretty good.....
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