Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon has a fabulous voice. Not his speaking voice. Actually, that’s kind of an understated, amused mutter. No, it’s his writer’s voice that inspires fans to worship this TV producer and movie director.

Whedon writes people who are self-deprecating, pop-culture savvy, madly in love with wordplay, quick-witted, terrified of sounding pompous and with wells of emotion lurking beneath a shiny, protective layer of self-aware sarcasm.

That voice came through the characters in Whedon’s most famous creation, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which became a pop phenomenon during its seven-season TV run. But, in what comics aficionados believe is a first, Whedon has kept Buffy alive and well — in comics. For almost a year, Milwaukie’s Dark Horse Comics and Whedon have published Season Eight, a series of "Buffy" comics that picked up where the TV show left off in 2003.

In a sign of Whedon’s staunch fan following, the comic series has been a success for Dark Horse. "Dark Horse is the third-largest comic company in America, but we’re kind of a distant third," says Scott Allie, who edits the Season Eight books. "Dark Horse will always have a title in the top 100, or top 50-selling comics. But ’Buffy’ is the first time in quite a while that we’ve consistently cracked the top 10 sellers, beating some of the ’Spider-Man’ and ’Batman’ titles."

Flip through the issues that Whedon has written or overseen, and his familiar, slangy sound comes through: Buffy, preparing to battle demons, marshals her troops. But first: "Did you bring any lip gloss? I’m all cracky." Or, Buffy, fighting her fears: "It’s good. It’s good. I’m spine." Or, Buffy facing down a "Big Bad," as Whedon’s villains are called: "This isn’t about demons at all, is it? . . . It’s about power and it’s about women and you just hate those two words in the same sentence, don’t you?"

In decades past, when a favorite TV series went off the air, that was that. Maybe it would show up in syndicated reruns, maybe it would molder away in the Graveyard of Dead Shows. But in today’s multifaceted entertainment world, a popular idea’s too lucrative to give up. And so we have the parade of sequels, reunions, ringtones, video games, straight-to-DVD quickies and lunchboxes.

Rarer is what’s happened in the case of "Buffy" Season Eight: A creator who clearly loves his characters returns, not for a chintzy marketing payday but to keep the story alive.

"It’s similar to running a TV show," says Whedon in a phone call from Los Angeles. "You seize a big arc of a story and leave spaces for people who have a better idea of how to get through that arc." Among the writers Whedon left room for in his "Buffyverse," as the fans call it, are acclaimed comics author Brian K. Vaughan and Drew Goddard, a former "Buffy" TV staff writer who wrote the sleeper hit movie "Cloverfield" and is co-executive producer of the TV series, "Lost."

Goddard wrote the new issue (#12), "Wolves at the Gate," which is generating fan chatter because of a highly Whedonesque move: Our heroine, heretofore actively heterosexual, winds up in bed with a female fellow slayer.

"It’s something that just made sense," Whedon says. "I was talking to Drew about it, and we were saying it’d be fun to play here with the idea of, ’Oh, here’s this person who’s really cool, and who digs me, and I’m lonely, and open-minded.’ " It’s not that Buffy has changed her orientation. "It’s sort of youthful experimentation. It’ll be very interesting to see if people are angered, thrilled or excited. But I don’t think of it as a sea change."

It’s entirely typical that Whedon & Co. should continue exploring the character of Buffy Summers. She’s seen plenty of variations since her debut in the 1992 movie, which starred Kristy Swanson. Though Whedon wrote it, he didn’t direct and wasn’t happy with the finished product. While the movie sets the Buffy template — a high school cheerleader learns that she’s the latest in an ancient line of "chosen ones" born to kill vampires — the character only bloomed once Sarah Michelle Gellar took the role in the TV series, under Whedon’s creative direction.

In a commentary on the Season One DVD set, Whedon recalls that his inspiration for Buffy was "the little blond girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie." Following his mission statement for the show, "to subvert the obvious," Buffy was the strong one. Back then, she was a high school student, with the implied joke that high school was plenty hellish on its own, no vampires required.

Over time, Buffy graduated, lost her virginity, lost her mother, attended college, died, came back to life, discovered a sister and wrestled with isolation, depression and one heck of a sex drive.

After all that, the transformation to comics was no big deal. Whedon grew up loving comic books and already had a relationship with Dark Horse. While the "Buffy" series was still on TV, Dark Horse published a series of "Buffy" comics licensed through 20th Century Fox, which owns the right to the character. Whedon didn’t write those stories but did create "Fray," a comic miniseries about a slayerlike heroine, for Dark Horse in 2001.

Scott Allie, senior managing editor for Dark Horse, worked on the first "Buffy" comics before taking on Season Eight editing. "When the show ended, and we decided we wanted to take a break on the comics, I told Joss I wanted to wrap up the series, but I wanted to re-start it," Allie recalls. "I told him, we need a new vision, and that vision needs to come from you."

One thing led to another, and the idea to continue the "Buffy" story in comics was launched. "I’ve learned so much about character-driven genre fiction from Joss," Allie says. "Every conflict, every plot point, every bit of drama really stems from who the main characters are. Joss has a phrase that he uses with his writers — ’What’s the Buffy of it?’ " For example, if you’ve got a tale of a three-headed monster that comes to town, and Buffy fights it and kills it, Whedon’s concern always is: ’What makes it about Buffy?’ "

Though Portland has both a thriving community of comics artists and a fervent Whedon fan base who have made his movie, "Serenity," the focus of an annual charity fundraising event, Whedon hasn’t seen the Rose City. "Portland is my favorite city that I’ve never been to," he says, agreeably.

"It was looking at one point like he was going to come up here during the writers’ strike," Allie says. "But it didn’t happen. I haven’t had a chance to drag him through Powell’s."

But, as Buffy has shown, you never know what might happen.