There have been plenty of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books produced over the years. Some of the earliest were merely merchandising tie ins with a loose and limited affiliation to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show and the Buffyverse canon. Over the years the comic books drifted closer into line with the Buffyverse, storylines were approved by Joss Whedon and the characters were drawn to resemble Buffy and her friends, as they appeared on television more and more. But in the end the comic books were nothing more than auxiliaries, accessories to the real show. No one could really advance the story forward before Joss Whedon directly took over and began turning out Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight and more than any other issue so far, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Issue 4 demonstrates why.

Anyone could have picked up on Dawn and Buffy's uncomfortable relationship and Dawn's closeness to Willow overshadowing her ties to Buffy. But only Joss Whedon could have made Dawn into a giantess and suggested that she did it deliberately in order to get people to pay attention to her. And only Joss Whedon could have written a rescue scene in the middle of which Xander has to tell Dawn to stop happily hopping up and down because it's shaking the entire Scottish castle.

Anyone could have brought back assorted villains like Warren and Amy but only Joss Whedon could have taken two random characters and logically strung them together into the creepiest but most effective couple since Spike and Drusilla. Anyone could have brought back Ethan Rayne but never so effectively transformed him into a force for good, complete with his trademark snarkiness and integrated it all into dream sequences on part with the Season 4 Buffy finale, "Restless".

After three issues in which Buffy has been stretched to her limit, her band of slayers assaulted by an unknown conspiracy and by some very familiar enemies, including Amy the Rat (witch) and Warren, skinless and lusting for revenge, Issue 4 brings Buffy face to face with a larger glimpse of the real enemy. Beginning with a raid on a military base near Sunnydale, Buffy Season 8 Issue 4 delivers the most action packed episode of Buffy Season 8 from start to finish.

With Willow kidnapped and being tortured by Warren at a secret military base, time is short and the raid preparations are carried through with the mixture of casual professionalism and teamwork and lip gloss and Whedonesque chatter that has become a staple of the way that Buffy runs her slayer army. As Amy carries through her deal with General Voll, leading Buffy and her slayers into a trap while Warren gets to torture and lobotomize Willow strapped to a table by manacles powered by her own powers, so that her own powers are used against her to keep her restrained, the military moves some sort of energy cannon into position to prepare for the slayer invasion.

What follows next are the best action sequences in Buffy Season 8 so far and if you have been reading the Season Eight issues all the way in then you know that includes the zombie army climbing the castle wall before beginning to deliver lines from Pride and Prejudice, Xander's Tweety pajama led bedroom charge and Dawn stomping zombies giant girl power style. A sequence too good to spoil except to say that it contains one of the best throwaway lines of the series too.

Buffy's showdown with Amy references the blending of their powers used to defeat the original Initiative's prize subject, Adam. And this time again with a battle in a military base, Buffy is aided by Willow who has escaped to a higher realm in the company of powerful mysterious beings while Warren tortures her, Buffy destroys a creature summoned by Amy and then takes the form of Amy's mother, Catherine Madison, who originally imprisoned Amy in her own form in the first place. Warren and Amy escape, allowing Willow to be rescued.

Willow overcoming her torture by ascending higher while Buffy leads a squad of female fighters to rescue her is a timely and welcome antidote to the hype and controversy centering over Eli Roth's noxious Hostel II movie that sells the abuse and torture of women as entertainment and sexual gratification. Hostel II has no shortage of defenders eager to argue that this is what horror is all about and only prudes can object. And indeed that's what a lot of horror is about. Stripping women naked and dismembering them in pools of gore. Buffy's return is all the more important with Season 8 to serve as a countervailing force to show what quality horror is. Not the abuse and torture of women masquerading as social commentary but a genuine story and one where women and men show themselves capable of fighting evil, rather than succumbing to and savoring it.

Even tied down and tortured, Willow is not helpless and nor does the comic book art dwell gratuitously on her body as the camera does on the helpless character of Lorna in Hostel II. I do not know whether Joss Whedon intended the rescue scene to be a direct antidote to the torture porn (gorno) genre of the Saw, Hostel and Captivity movies but he spoke out strongly against Captivity and has always fought for strong female heroines on screen and now in print.

The military base proves to be a continuation of The Initiative and also contains the cells in the desert where Ethan Rayne was taken to and imprisoned by Riley's army buddies after his little bout of turning Giles into a giant horned demon served as the straw that breaks the slayer's back. And it comes stocked with Ethan Rayne too, dead of a bullet in the head courtesy of General Voll, but not before he managed to successfully guide Buffy to his cell via his vision. General Voll reveals himself to be a member of the organization that had imprisoned the demons, an organization or order apparently called, The Twilight. The goal of the Twilight is apparently to resume the original state of the balance between good and evil, mankind and demons, by destroying Buffy and her Slayers and bringing back the old razor's edge war mankind labored under.

The original Slayer was a tool, a way for men to fight evil without ever really defeating it. The Slayers fought and were sacrificed and died and new ones arose in their place, always maintaining the balance. Buffy shattered the balance by raising a Slayer army and now many of those men want to put that balance back to where it was all along. At the beginning in the Joss Whedon penned, "Tales of the Slayers" the First Slayer was viewed as a demon, driven from villages and inhabited areas, growing wild and mad in the process. Buffy now faces a world that does not want her and her Slayers any more than it wanted the First Slayer.

With Issue Four, Buffy Season Eight is clearly drawing out a larger playing field, larger than the show's scope ever allowed. On the one hand this kind of X-Men storytelling is somewhat of a cliche, particularly in the aftermath of the Marvel Civil War, which has probably served to beat the Superheroes vs the Government and people with extraordinary abilities storyline deep into the ground. On the other hand it's also the only inevitable place for Buffy to go.