Jeremy.

When news first hit that Buffy would officially continue with season eight in comic book form, I, well… hit the roof. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been much of a comic book reader. But more Buffy? Real Buffy? Like canon, with the original writers and everything? And this time with no budget constraints? Still my heart! I can’t breathe! I’m even willing to read comic books for this.

I preordered my issues the moment they became available. A marathon of the seventh season held me over as I counted down the days. But when The Long Way Home arrived, boarded and wrapped, I couldn’t open it. Faced with Jo Chen’s gorgeous cover art of Buffy, confident and indomitable with the words JOSS WHEDON printed above her head, I got cold feet.

What if it wasn’t that good? Actually, what if it was terrible?

The final moments of the TV series were still fresh on my mind. Everything was wrapped so poignantly, and the poetry in that final shot still brings a tear to my eye. Did I want to ruin it with a potentially disastrous comic book? And this is real stuff, you guys – Joss Whedon’s name is on the cover. You can’t pretend like it never happened if you don’t like it. This isn’t a case of Donnie Darko versus S. Darko. No,  this could be a case of old Star Wars versus prequel Star Wars.  Once you start down that road, there’s no turning back.

I couldn’t do it.

Months passed, and the issues I had preordered stacked. Longingly, I stared at the beautiful covers, wondering what magic could be happening within. I could only imagine! The last issue I had preordered arrived, and the cover teased me with a glimpse of what I was missing out on: Dawn’s a fucking giant.

What if it’s amazing?

Enough was enough. I tore open the wrapper and dove in. And it was Buffy! The dialogue was witty, hilarious, and true to character. Even if the artwork didn’t quite (at all) match how the actors look, I could still picture them saying every line and exactly how they would say it. The lack of a network television budget allowed the writers to go wild, and it took the Scoobies to places we never would have dreamed of seeing on UPN.

I devoured them, and anxiously awaited the next, and the next, and the next. The monsters became bigger, and badder. The Scoobies were reunited with old characters without actor scheduling conflicts, or nasty network contracts preventing crossovers. The Buffy cartoon saw fruition. It was pure fan service, at it’s best.

But as the plot gradually began to climax, and the big bad reared his ugly head, something terrible happened.

As it turns out, bigger is not necessarily better. The writers may have just gotten a little carried away…

Maybe a lot.

As the stakes grew higher, I felt more and more disconnected from the Scoobies. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was until the final story arc: a major character died, and I didn’t care. They were no longer real to me, I wasn’t taking it seriously, and I didn’t give two shits for a single person in a series I watched purely for the character development. Even with only one issue left in the season, I took that as my cue to stop reading, with no intention of picking them up again.

A recent interview with Joss Whedon on the topic of The Avengers is brought to mind, in which he said:

“Special effects can destroy a movie. An unlimited budget can destroy a movie […] You could say to me, ‘You’ve got the Avengers, but all they can do is sit in a room and talk’. And with those actors I’d still have the time of my life.”

When I read this, it occurred to me that many of my favorite scenes in Buffy were exactly that: the Scoobies, sitting in a room talking. In fact, that is what 99% of the show was comprised of, and some of it’s weakest points were when it took the action and the monsters too seriously.

Nobody watched Buffy to get scared. Nobody watched Buffy for the action. It was never about the weekly creature feature. We watched Buffy for the characters, the witty dialogue, and the turbulent character development. The monsters and big bads were a means to an end. At best, they served as metaphors for the things every teenager growing up in America faces. At worst, they were… well… The Annoying One.

At some point along the road, season eight lost it’s vision and became exactly what I feared the comics would be.

The final issue in my subscription arrived. The artwork mimicked the cover of the first issue, only this time Buffy was no longer so confident. Battered and defeated, Buffy reflected exactly how I felt regarding the revival. Again, I left it untouched for weeks. Before I knew it, the comic ended up buried underneath mail, and other books that caught my attention. I forgot about it.

A month ago, my boyfriend unwisely agreed to marathon Buffy with me from the beginning, unaware of the monster he was about to unleash. Midway through the second season, the rabid Buffy fanatic in me rekindled, and I was utterly incapable of waiting for our next marathon. Thoughts filled my mind of chaining him to the couch, unable to leave until we had watched every remaining episode. Thoughts of police and restraining orders followed that. As it played through my head, I found myself digging through a pile of books, unaware of what I was doing until I had unearthed that last, untouched issue.

I reminded myself that it wasn’t all bad. Time of Your Life matched some of the best moments Buffy ever saw on TV, the dialogue was as Whedonesque as ever, and it certainly made me laugh. It did an alright job of patching the nasty plot hole between season seven’s finale, and the one-slayer-in-all-the-future-world comic, Fray. Besides, I wanted more Buffy, and there was more Buffy sitting right here! So I sucked it up, and finished what I started.

And suddenly, Buffy was Buffy again.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming it up. Gone were the outrageous actions scenes, replaced with Buffy as we’ve always known her: An every day girl in her twenties, living our life, dealing with all the same problems we do. It just so happens that some of those problems manifest as actual demons.

Twenty-four pages of bliss later, the season concluded with a letter from Joss Whedon.

If you’ve read this issue, you’ve got a sense of where we’re heading for Season 9. Back, a bit, to the everyday trials that made Buffy more than a superhero. That made her us. I was so excited to finally have an unlimited budget that I wanted to make the book an epic, but I realized along the way that the things I loved the best were the things you loved the best: the peeps. The down-to-earth, recognizable people. And Mecha-Dawn. (She has a tail!) So that’s what we’ll try to evoke next season—along with the usual perils, and a few new ones, of course.

All of my issues with the eighth season, and everything I wished it would be, summed up in one paragraph with a promise. Immediately, I caught up with the ninth season via Darkhorse Digital Comics, and I’ve loved every moment of season nine so far.

Do I recommend old fans of Buffy to keep up with her comic book continuation? It’s hard to say. Season eight was long, half of which I think was absolute dreck. The other half really was incredible. I’m glad that the writers got their “big budget” ambitions out of their system, and now we’ve gone back to the basics. As the series stands now, it is very worth reading. The trouble is making it through to the good stuff, which may be especially problematic for readers like myself – not especially fond of comic books anyway.

If you’re up to the challenge, I recommend sticking to the book compilations – waiting a month between pieces of an episode can try your patience. I imagine it’s also easier to breeze through the lower points of the season. A library edition covering the first two story arcs will be available next month, and trade paperbacks of the rest of season eight are available now.