Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 1

For seven years Buffy the Vampire Slayer, teenage high school girl and later college student battled vampires, demons, school, relationships and life in general. The WB had disposed of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" after five years and even put a tombstone, but the slayer herself returned on UPN for two more seasons. For a while it seemed as if there might be an eight season, but the show's star, Buffy actress, Sarah Michelle Gellar, chose to move on instead to do movies. A planned spinoff based around Faith never materialized, neither did a proposed Spike TV movie. Angel lasted another season, weighed down by Spike's increasingly gleeful presence, and with that the Buffyverse seemed to have come to an end.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8" is in a sense, the return of Buffy. Picking up where the series left off, as can be seen in some of the last moments of Season 7 in the video on the right, Season 8 shows Buffy burdened now with the responsibility of leading an organization of hundreds of thousands of slayers and being addressed as "Ma'am" by the younger girls.

Xander is still around, having incorporated himself as a leader in the new organization, complete with a Nick Fury style eyepatch and a commanding attitude. Willow and Giles remains off-stage for the issue, though they are mentioned, but Dawn is around, albeit much much larger than life. Jonathan, as seen in Season Five of Angel, plays a sort of commanding role in the new Slayer order, coordinating operations.

Buffy herself as left her home behind and the remains of the shattered Sunnydale, which is now just a gigantic crater in the California earth, and is operating out of a lonely Scottish castle, along with their gang of commandoettes. She's out of place and isolated from her friends. As had begun after Buffy's temporary death, Willow had come to be closer to Dawn, than Buffy herself in some ways. Her own role is one that she never asked for and that stretches Buffy's limits, demanding that she now lead a worldwide army.

Thus "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8" begins with a world weary slayer, realizing that even in a world filled with slayers, she can't rest or retire or have a social life. Despite the great number of slayers now populating the world and fighting back evil, not only can Buffy not take a break, but her burdens and responsibilities and isolation are greater than ever. And she's trapped in an adult role, cut off from doing what she used to have fun doing, including relationships. (The issue mentions that The Immortal who was portrayed as dating Buffy in Angel Season 5, was actually with a decoy of a Buffy double. This of course neatly jibes with the fact that the original plan for that episode had been to arrange for a guest starring role by Sarah Michelle Gellar and when she refused, the episode only showed Buffy dancing from the back and thus in fact did feature a Buffy double.)

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8" continues the path Buffy has been walking in the previous seasons. In Season 2's "What's My Line" episode, it was suggested that Buffy had a natural aptitude for law enforcement. To some degree that is her life now. With the arrival of Dawn as her younger sister in Season 5, Buffy had been increasingly forced to take on an adult role, first as an older sister for Dawn and with the death of her mother, Joyce Summers, also a mom. With the arrival of the Slayer candidates in Season 7 as they were being hunted by the First Evil, Buffy had to become a leader. Where Fray the Vampire Slayer takes a shortcut, leading an army against the demonic invasion within days of learning her destiny as a slayer, Buffy has had to grow into that role year by year.

Season Eight marks a return of the military plotline from Season 4, with a general that views Buffy as leading a terrorist group and determined to bring her down. This is a bit of a cliche in comic books but it fits within the framework of the ending of Season 4 and portions of Season 5 involving Riley and the revelation that the United States government is running commando groups against demon operations while continuing to monitor Buffy and her friends, in the wake of the collapse of The Initiative government program for studying and harnessing demonic creatures as living weapons. In essence Buffy's new slayer commandos are versions of the government's teams, but backed by non-projectile weapons and pure slayer power.

Amy the Witch also returns, though in a vastly darker form. The villanization of Amy had always struck me as a dubious move on the part of the series, as was its attempt to demonize magic itself as addictive or evil and to further revise the portrayal of magic, from being a power summoned from higher beings, to some sort of battery embedded in the flesh or the spirit that needs to be recharged. Nevertheless it's clear that even with Tara dead and the need to maintain a plotline that has Willow succumbing to the dark side, Amy the Witch is back to play an antagonist role toward Buffy. While Amy's powers had always been rather negligible, she appears to have somehow survived the catastrophe that struck the rest of Sunnydale and has become quite powerful apparently and ruthless. Additionally there appeals to be a new cult or research group in place that is likely to serve as the focal point of a developing story.

But while Season Eight may find Buffy fighting evil on a grand scale and leading hundreds of thousands, inside she's a lonely girl who misses her home and her mother and wants a social life. In other words she's fundamentally Buffy, as she has always been. Lonely, afraid inside and with no one to show it to, despite all her friends and determined to see things through to the end, no matter how embittered the burdens she must carry on her own, make her. Buffy will see it through. To hell and back.