Graphic Novels, Comics, and Me

The book group I’m a member of had a good time a couple of nights ago discussing graphic novels – a discussion that somehow morphed into the proposal that we should put on a play (possibly improvised on the spot) at our next meeting.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, whose work I first got to know through her excellent Dykes To Watch Out For comic strips, was the book officially under discussion. We have our best discussions when there’s a range of opinions about the book in question – as there was this time; some of us loved it, others weren’t so sure. It had been a little while since I read it, and I didn’t get to do so again before the group met, but I enjoyed it very much that first time. It’s darker and more obviously personal than the DTWOF books, and cuts deeply into family traumas.

We then got on to talking about graphic novels & comics we had known, all the was from The Trigan Empire to Maus by way of Buffy Season 8 (now up to Volume 3: Wolves at the Gate) and Watchmen.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, v. 3: Wolves at the Gate
When most of us in the group were young, comics were at best tolerated by most adults as fodder for the children. I remember the fuss when I was at high school over the Classics Illustrated versions of Shakespeare’s plays – how dare they associate the master playwright with speech bubbles and illustrations. While there are many comics that don’t interest me at all, I’m glad that they are now considered on their merits, rather than on their format.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 2: No Future for You

 

BTVS 8v2 No Future for You
But till then, television’s Tina Fey, we must find a way to keep warm.

Previously on Books in the Trees:

For seven years, Buffy Summers, a vampire slayer, saved the world. A lot. Then she ran foul of the ultimate Big Bad, the network, which cancelled her show. Now she’s back in comic form. The comics are being collected in five-issue trade paperback omnibus editions. Volume 1: The Long Way Home was a mixed bag. Now Volume 2: No Future for You has been released. Does it represent a new beginning, or a stake through the heart?

(fade)

I hate cliffhangers, so let’s cut to the chase. No Future for You is a big improvement on The Long Way Home. There are three main reasons for this:

  1. Unlike the first volume, the stories in this collection don’t try to fit a TV programme’s worth of material into each issue.
  2. The first four issues in this omnibus form a consistent arc — it’s one narrative, split over four issues.
  3. Faith.

I’m with George Michael on this: I gotta have Faith (in a strictly narrative sense, of course). Faith Lehane, played in the TV series by Eliza Dushku, is the working-class, bad-girl Slayer from Boston who first appears in Season 3. Her uninhibited exercise of her powers was both sexy and frightening, and frightening quickly won. After hitting some very deep depths, Faith climbed partway out of them in Season 7, but she is still the outsider, still comparing herself to Buffy, still coming off second-best. (It is one of the great strengths of Buffy that everyone is an outsider in their own estimation, even those who are seen as insiders by others.)

The end of Season 7 saw two thousand young women turned from potential to actual Slayers, and come into full possession of their powers: superhuman strength, speed, ability to heal, and endurance. Much of Buffy and her team’s effort has gone into finding, recruiting and training these young women, but some of them have preferred to go it alone. One such is Gigi, a young English aristocrat, who is most decidedly not committed to using her powers for the common good. Faith is sent on a mission to take her down, but has second thoughts when she discovers that she and Gigi, despite all their differences, may share a common foe.

To say more would be to give too much away, but this arc is rewarding on many levels — from seeing Faith trying to fit in to British high society, to exploring once again her complex rivalry with Buffy Summers.

Issue 10 doesn’t reach the same heights — which is interesting, because the Faith arc was written by Brian K. Vaughan, whereas Issue 10 is written by Joss Whedon. As Lee commented on my previous Buffy post, Joss’s issues haven’t been as good. My feeling is that he tries to cram too much into each issue, using them like TV storyboards rather than working in a way that’s native to the medium.

(Lee’s review of No Future for You is also available online.)

Just like Issue 5, Issue 10 is a stand-alone, concentrating on Willow and Buffy. We get to find out that Buffy has a thing about Daniel Craig, while Willow fantasises about Tina Fey from 30 Rock (in an alpine-cabin kind of scenario), but there’s not much more here. Still, it’s a minor flaw in a fine volume, which to cap it all off, even has a tiny cameo by the Doctor and Rose. I shall be back for more.

If the Apocalypse Comes, Beep Me

It took me a long time to warm to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was shown at odd times and on obscure channels on New Zealand television. My wife cottoned on to it a couple of seasons before I did, and kept trying to persuade me to watch it with her — but I resisted. What a stupid title, and wasn’t it some kind of teen romance thing?

Finally, she persuaded me to watch an episode right through; but that didn’t help much, because that episode was Into The Woods (5.10), the one in which Buffy breaks up with her boyfriend Riley. Into the Woods is about as thoroughly “teen romance” as Buffy ever got. Sure, there was a baffling scene where the distraught heroine gets into a fight with emaciated people who kept evaporating in puffs of dust, but I couldn’t really see the point of all that.

Kay persisted, though, and I was sufficiently interested to sit through and enjoy Once More, With Feeling (6.7), the musical episode, even though I generally can’t abide musicals. Before much longer, I was demanding back episodes and plotting to acquire the DVDs.

After seven seasons of brilliant writing, excellent acting, comedy, drama, horror, romance — of scenes that managed to be gut-wrenching, hilarious, scary and thought-provoking all at once — the series came up against the biggest Big Bad of all, the network. Buffy Summers had already died twice (though the first time hardly counted); the third time was the charm, because even the Chosen One had no power against the Hollywood suits. The spin-off series, Angel, ran for one more season.

Then, it seemed, the rest would be silence, despite the fan and academic activity that sprang up to fill the gap (and even some poetry).

But, not so much. Buffy Season 8 has been incarnated in comic form. The “season” is canon – that is to say, official — Buffy. It is supervised, and partly written, by the TV series’ creator, Joss Whedon. It picks up on the climactic events of Season 7, which liberated Buffy from the heavy burden of being The One Girl to save the world, and shows how Buffy and her friends adapt to the new dispensation and some ugly new threats.

The individual comics, in sets of five, are being collected into trade paperbacks. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 1: The Long Way Home was a mixed bag: it was great to enter the lives of the familiar characters again and find out how they were feeling about life (not uniformly happy, which will come as no surprise to those familiar with Joss Whedon’s work), but the storyline was so compressed, and so much new material was introduced, that it was hard even for a Buffy fan to follow what was going on. And then there was the contrast between Jo Chen’s wonderful cover art, with its beautiful and true-to-life (or at least true-to-the-actors) depiction of the characters, and Georges Jeanty’s interior art, which made Buffy looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar one minute, and Anna Kournikova the next.

Coming soon: a review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 2: No Future for You.

Poem for a Windy Night

Wind Walks the Hand

Wind walks the hand over rooftops
searching for gaps.

Through the hole in the flashing
the neighbourhood cat

traps the neighbourhood rat
in our attic.

Cries, scuffles.
Drawn-out, messy death.

A ceiling below
we look up from Buffy and wonder.

This poem is included in my latest collection, All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens.