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Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Anita and Buffy : Compare and Contrast

Saturday 14 July 2007, by Webmaster

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter

When it comes to the world of prose fiction, Buffy has some serious competition. Author Laurell K. Hamilton discusses the franchise, comic books and her next novel. by Richard George

July 11, 2007 - Look out, Buffy! Anita Blake is coming to take your slaying crown. Though perhaps not the force on television or comics that Ms. Summers has been, Blake and her paranormal world have been setting the world of fiction novels on fire. With fifteen books in print and two comic book series hitting stores across the nation, vampires have even more to fear.

Marvel Comics and Dabel Bros. are currently producing two series based on Anita Blake. The first, Guilty Pleasures, is an adaptation of author/creator Laurell K. Hamilton’s first book. The second, First Death, is a prequel mini-series featuring storylines and answers that have not been revealed in the prose installments. To discover Anita, her world, and what’s to come, IGN Comics turned to Hamilton herself as well as her husband, Jonathon Green. The pair fielded questions about the next novel, future comic book adaptations as well as the inevitable comparison between the Slayer and the Hunter.

IGN has also spread several pages from First Death #1 throughout this interview. The issue is actually in stores today, so if you are a fan and don’t have it... read this the second you get back from your comic book shop!

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IGN Comics: Speaking of female leads, vampires, and hunting them, I think many pop culture fans will instantly try to associate your series with Buffy the Vampire Slayer - fairly or unfairly. Could you distinguish Anita from Buffy for the fans that might resort to such assumptions?

Hamilton: Well, one, I pre-date Buffy by a number of years. Two, Anita started out at 24. She’s legal for everything. Three, when you kill a vampire in Anita’s world, you get a body. The body bleeds. It’s much closer to killing an actual person. In Buffy’s world, with them going up in ashes, I understand why they did that for the TV show. You’ll have a string of bodies! The cops will always follow you! But in Anita’s world you have that body to deal with. You have that sensation of… at the beginning of the series, vampires are monsters to Anita. She has no problem killing them. As the series progresses, she begins to question whether she’s killing another person who just happens to be a vampire.

Another big difference for Anita and her world is that sex is not a bad thing. You don’t get punished instantly. If Buffy’s universe, if you have sex, really horrible things happen to you. It’s like that old horror clich¿ that only the virgin will survive. I’m sorry, if you’re going to have sex, in a work of fiction, it should be good sex and be between people who care about each other. You shouldn’t be punished. I have a character who is hunting vampires, who is scarred by the attacks… now I’m going to strip her dating life too? That… that just seems wrong! The other thing is… in many ways, Anita’s world is bigger than Buffy’s. There’s a wider variety of monsters on a regular basis. I know there are other monsters like werewolves, but they never played that big of a part. I know there were occasionally other monsters aside from vampires, but primarily it was a vampire series. Anita’s world covers every kind of shape-shifter I could find in folklore.

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