Buffy The Vampire Slayer

I’ve been a bad bad Hercules. Issue four of Dark Horse’s new “Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight” series has been on the stands since Wednesday, but all sorts of last-minute stuff - mounting piles of pilots and Galactica and Jericho and Veronica - kept me out of the comic-book stores until a few hours ago. But I’ve now read and digested the wonderful “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” 8.4, which successfully concludes writer/mastermind Joss Whedon’s excellent initial “season-eight” arc.

Here’s what doesn’t happen in 8.4:

* Dawn Summers, 60 feet tall since season’s start, doesn’t shrink. Not an inch.

* We don’t meet a thricewise.

* We don’t definitively learn which true love woke Buffy with a big wet one.

* We don’t learn where Rupert Giles is.

* Andrew Wells is not glimpsed, nor is he reunited with skinless fellow nerd of doom Warren Meers.

* A familiar character is not introduced on the final page.

Here’s what does happen:

* Dawn beats up an entire castle.

* We meet some of Willow Rosenberg’s newer friends.

* We get another hint of what happened with Kennedy.

* Xander Harris has a line on page 10 that to my ears sounds suspiciously like, “Winifred Burkle. Go.”

* The action moves to two miles south of Sunnydale and doesn’t move back.

* Another face from season one returns.

* There’s a couple of payoffs to that Ethan Rayne business.

* We learn who this season’s symbol-happy big bad is. (Highlight invisotext for more specificity.) It’s us!!

Whedon writes one more issue - focusing on the Italy-based Buffy-double introduced in the antepenultimate episode of “Angel” - before handing the season off to other writers for a while. Freshman “Lost” staffer Brian K. Vaughn writes issue six, which deals with what Faith the Vampire Slayer has been up to.

Herc’s rating for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” 8.4? *****

In comic-book shops now.