Sonnenblume

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner pens Sonnenblume, a look at a slayer in Nazi Germany. Like the previous tales of vampire slayers in Joss Whedon's "Righteous", Amber Benson's "The Innocent", Jane Espenson's "Presumption" and David Fury's "The Glittering World", "Sonnenblume" is far less a story of vampires or even slayers, than it is a story of coping with human evil, in which the demonic evil of vampires is if anything secondary to the evil humans perpetrate.

Sonnenblume, the vampire slayer of the day, Germany 1938-- who has presumably taken over from the American vampire slayer Elizabeth O'Connor in 1937, unless some odd state of affairs resembling the Buffy / Kendra / and Buffy / Faith co-existence had brought about a situation where two vampire slayers had been called at the same time -- is a young member of the Hitler Youth who slays vampires even as she notices the growing persecution of the Jews.

Sonnenblume is overall the weakest of the tales in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayers" in part because it's simply so predictable. Between Mira Friedman's childlike art and Rebecca Rand Kirshner's character trajectory for Sonnenblume which follows a painfully obvious track with every single cliche of this kind of story enumerated along the way, the material comes off as intended for small children just learning about the history-- but that isn't the target audience of a Dark Horse comic making the entire thing seem rather pointless. Where "Presumption" and "The Glittering World" at least relied on plot twists, "Sonnenblume" is painfully simplistic.

While Sonnenblume attempts to acknowledge human evil, unlike the majority of the stories in "Tales of the Slayers" it treats it as an entirely separate quantity that is altogether apart. Lacking depth it never really explores the motivations behind bigotry or racial hatred, simply showing us the external physical manifestations of it.

Nikki Goes Down!

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayers" is full of more meditative stories on humanity and the slayer, by contras "Nikki Goes Down" is a refreshing romp in a 70's blacksploitation style movie free of any moral ambiguities or complexities. Drawn in gritty artwork by Gene Colan, his work in "Nikki Goes Down" is a dead match for his artwork in the 1937 section of "Broken Bottle of Djinn", capturing the brutal textures of urban life surrounded by grit and looming shapes of skyscrapers.

Written by "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" writer Doug Petrie, who had already also penned the "Broken Bottle of Djinn" 1937 section as well, is also essentially a series of action sequences set in New York City-- forty years apart. Like Elizabeth O'Connor, Nikki Wood is a hardened businesslike slayer. She is also the only slayer in "Tales of the Slayers" besides Buffy herself, whom we have seen on the show-- as you can view in the video clip on the right.

Nikki Wood was the second vampire slayer killed by Spike and her black leather coat, which we see her wearing in "Nikki Goes Down", is taken by him and becomes a major part of Spike's basic wardrobe. Nikki Wood's son, would become the mother of Robin Wood-- at some point in time after the events of "Nikki Goes Down" -- and would move to Sunnydale and become the principal of the newly rebuilt Sunnydale High School. Encountering Buffy he would ally himself with her and fight alongside her to the end. Visions of his mother, Nikki Wood, would be used by the First Evil as a means to try and control him.

Two actresses portrayed Nikki Wood on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Nikki's appearance in "Nikki Goes Down" strongly suggests that she remains modeled on April Weeden-Washington, the stuntwoman who portrayed her in the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode "Fool for Love" rather than the more sitcomish appearance of K. D. Aubert. This is especially likely as "Tales of the Slayers" had come out around the time of Buffy's Seventh Season and thus before or during the reinvention of the Nikki Wood character.

The progress of Nikki's days in "Nikki Goes Down" gives us a clue of why she eventually gave up for a moment and allowed Spike to kill her. In "Nikki Goes Down". Her boyfriend, a police officer named Li, is killed during an aborted raid and Nikki's response is to pursue the mob boss responsible, Le Banc, who specializes in transporting and smuggling demons-- fighting a monstrous bat demon along the way and eventually hunting down Le Banc himself in the Bahamas. This suggests that Nikki Wood, like Faith, had few problems killing humans. Nikki leaves an isolated life and in "Nikki Goes Down" loses the one human connection she has, replacing him with a son, who may or may not have been born from her time together with Li. She is the only Slayer we meet who is a mother, but a single mother all alone in a big city, which eventually swallows her whole.

Tales

"Tales of the Slayers" which began with the prologue of the First Slayer ends with an afterword of sorts that focuses on Melaka Fray, the future slayer, and the last or the final slayer we have met in the Buffyverse. Moving from the dawn of human history to the distant future filled with mutants and flying cars, "Tales of the Slayers" has covered the history of the Slayer-- and in "Tales", the history of the Slayers is summed up when Melaka Fray pursues a demon who has seized her scythe to find a repository of the diaries of the Watchers Council, containing all the histories of the Watchers all the way to the present.

In the limited run "Fray" comics we had learned that in Melaka Fray's time, the Watcher's Council had gone insane and become the realm of fanatics and the room Melaka finds appears to be abandoned. Lacking the memories of past Slayers-- in these diaries Melaka Fray recaptures the legacy of the Slayers to her own destiny.