Comic book fans since I love to spoil you guys rotten I thought i'd give you all another review only this one wasn't one of the books that I mentioned in a previous post. That's honestly because I didn't think of it until right now and that's honestly a good thing since it means that these opinions will be very raw with very little to know research so here is my review of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8 Volume 1: The Ling Way Home.
The plot of this book is Buffy and her friends have now formed there own secret army with dozens of other slayers and witches but there's an evil witch out there who wants them dead and will stop at nothing to do it. Ok getting the obvious out of the way early you have to be fan of the Buffy TV show in order to understand what's going on with that said I honestly thought that the story in this first arc was honestly pretty weak and I honestly thought that it would have been better if the storyline here was the whole series and not just the first four issues.
Now not only do you need to be a fan of the show in order to understand certain things said in this book it's also set around a year after the season 7 finale. So this book takes place in the year 2004 I mention all of this because the season 7 finale "Chosen" does kind of play a part in this opening arc since we do see the aftermath of that episode which i'm not going to spoil since it's honestly a really good episode and one that that should be checked out.
What honestly shocked me is that alot of characters who were main characters in not only the final season of the show but also the show as a whole aren't present in this arc. Now granted one of them does make an appearance in the next arc but you'd think that given how popular those characters were in the show that they'd be present at least in the few opening panels. Having those characters not appear does work because the story really doesn't allow for them to be there but a quick line of dialog would have been nice.
The writer for this opening arc is actually show creator Joss Wheadon and that for me is a good thing because who else would know these characters better then the person who created them in the first place. Writing wise it's the kind of writing that you'd expect from Joss and while not a bad thing in anyway it would have been better if more time was given to the characters and more time setting up this new world.
The art for this arc was done by Georges Jeanty who's worked on things such as Batman: Streets Of Gotham Buffy Season 9 and Buffy season 12 among many other things. Now here I would normally say that the artwork isn't that good well here it actually is pretty good OK it's not the best artwork out there all of the characters do look like there TV counterpart which is very hard to do but I got the feeling that he didn't really put his own mark on the characters.
There was one thing that didn't get resolved in this arc and it's something that really did bug the hell out of me. For some Dawn Buffy's sister has been learning magic from one of Buffy's friends and has turned herself into a giant. Now i'll admit I havn't seen the show in a while but from what I recall Dawn was never learning magic and they don't either show or tell us if they turned Dawn back to normal or not I don't know why that second one really bugged me but it did.
Not only does this issue have ties to the end of the show's finale but it also ties it self into season 6 and also the first season with the character of Amy. When I said that you need to be a fan of this series I really wasn't kidding because they'll reference the most obscure thing and even the character of Amy is a little known character i'm not going to reveal what the connection is to season 6 because it's honestly pretty freaking cool.
Again something that they don't explain in this arc but something that might get explained in future arc's is the fact that Willow has been away from the main group for quite sometime. That to me is honestly quite interesting because we know from the show that she's one of the strongest witches out there so it makes you wonder what she could possibly be up to that would require her to be away from her friends for such a long time.
As for what I thought about the action it's the type of action that one would expect from Buffy so if you liked the action that was seen in the show then you'll love the action in this opening arc. I myself tho thought that the action was just an excuse to include jokes mostly because at least once or twice during an action scene someone would tell a joke and while that might work in a TV show here it just didn't work for me.
Overall this wasn't a bad opening arc it does a fairly good job of setting up the main villain for this season but tho it fails at telling a good story and that should be have been more important at least in my opinion so this arc gets a 5 out of 10 from me.