Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy is back - A new comic book revives a favorite slayer

Those fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" who didn’t know the character is still kicking pointy teeth in four years after the series finale shouldn’t feel bad.

Creator Joss Whedon hasn’t even told Sarah Michelle Gellar or the rest of the cast about the new comic series that picks up where season seven of the hit television show ended.

"I have not told them," says the 43-year-old Whedon. "I can tell you right now what everyone’s reaction would be: ’My nose doesn’t look like that!’"

What the actors have been missing in Dark Horse Comics’ "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8" is the first four issues of a planned 40-issue run. The story, drawn by artist Georges Jeanty, pits the titular heroine against an army of zombies and a military of a more traditional kind. Issue No. 5 goes on sale Aug. 1.

After a series of frustrations in Hollywood - including the cancellation of a television series, "Firefly," his abrupt divorce from Warner Bros.’ "Wonder Woman" movie, which he was slated to write and direct, and the slow development of "Goners," a supernatural thriller - Whedon said he needed an escape to the four-panel world of comic books.

Whedon has been working in the medium for the past few years. Scoring a gig writing Marvel Comics’ "Astonishing X-Men" was a particular "nerdgasm," he explains.

"It’s like a weekend at a spa," says Whedon, comparing the comic book industry to Hollywood.

"You have a creative concept and instead of going through an endless array of suits to realize it," he says, "instead of spending millions of dollars of someone else’s money to realize it - which is why the suits come along - you give it to an artist."

There are other perks.

Whedon turned Buffy’s sister Dawn Summers into a 50-foot giant, which would have blown an entire season’s worth of special effects budget in real, and reel, life.

"It gives us enormous freedom, particularly because our show was never terribly expensive," said Whedon. "There was just a limit on where our imaginations could go."

And while Gellar and company may not be rushing out to get the next issue, plenty of others are, said Mark Friedman, owner of Cosmic Comics in midtown Manhattan.

"We’re selling out every month," said Friedman. "My usual customers are buying them, but we’re also getting lots of new people, [mainly] women."

All the more reason for Whedon to dust off his favorite female warrior and give the medium’s dominant muscle-bound supermen a run for their money.

"I realized that there were lots of fun things I could do," says Whedon, "and with the exhaustion of seven seasons now passed, I see there was no reason we didn’t have an eighth other than the physical grind of it."