For anyone who missed it, Joss Whedon has started doing “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” again. And now, he has an unlimited budget for special effects for the 8th season.
How is this possible? Through the magic of comic books.
That’s right, Joss Whedon, who on occasion has written comics such as “Astonishing X-Men,” and “Runaways” for Marvel Comics, has put together a team of writers to pick up where the show ended four years ago.
These writers include (among others):
- Jeph Loeb, a comic book, film, and television writer, extraordinaire. Jeph has worked on such high profile series in TV and Comics as “Lost”, “Smallville,” “Heroes,” “Spider-man,” and “Superman/Batman.” In the 80s, he wrote some of the best known guilty pleasure films such as “Teen Wolf,” and “Commando.”
- Brad Meltzer, a well known novelist, whose books include “Zero Game,” and “The Book of Fate,” and who wrote comics for DC, including “Green Arrow,” and the big company crossover “Identity Crisis,” which set into motion many of the story-lines in the DC Universe of the past few years.
- Jane Espenson, A veteran television writer who worked on “Buffy,” and other shows as varied as “The Gilmore Girls,” and “Battlestar Galactica.”
I’d also heard that Ben Edlund would be involved, but reading over the Wikipedia articles on both Season 8, and Ben himself, it appears he’s not. This would be a shame, as Ben not only has experience in Joss’ worlds (via work on “Firefly” and “Angel”), but he also created one of the most famous comic characters to come out of the 90’s — “The Tick,” an amazingly loving but satirical look at superheroes, which was made into a fantastic cartoon, and a mediocre live action series, and still has the potential to be an absolutely terrible Michael Bay film.
The current Arch, which we are 3 issues into, is written by Joss himself, and touches on quite a few interesting matters. We still have the army of slayers from season 7, and a reformed watchers’ council, which is mostly headed by Xander. As one would imagine in the real world, this army of heavily armed and trained teenage girls, has come to the attention of the US government, which blame them for the destruction of Sunnydale.
It’s gripping, and entertaining, and to be honest the end of the 3rd issue ended any question on whether I would stop reading it. It was a twist which I’m not going to give away, but it totally caught me off guard.
So, this series gets a very big recommendation.