Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer enjoyed a seven-year TV run, during which the Chosen One died twice before UPN staked the show permanently. But you can’t keep a good slayer down, especially one imbued with so much cultural energy, and we’re crazy-glad to report that Buffy’s translation to pen and ink is an ab-fab success.

Written by creator Joss Whedon and gorgeously, kinetically drawn by Georges Jeanty, whose past work on assorted X-Men, Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice and Wonder Woman make his employment here seem preordained, the comic picks up four years after the TV show ended with Buffy saving the world (again) by destroying the Hellmouth, that demon portal in Sunnydale, California, and finds our heroine stationed in Scotland.

Along with a mess of new slayers in saucy outfits "activated" at Season 7’s close, Buffy’s assisted in her newly global anti-evil work by ex-Watcher Giles, blue-collar pal Xander and Andrew, the sexually ambiguous reformed dork-baddie of Season 6.

And not to worry-beloved witch Willow will appear (we’re telling you exactly nothing about her grand entrance), although Buffy’s sister Dawn is temporarily sidelined due to a mystical ailment.

Anyway, and as per usual, a demonic presence threatens. What the Buffy group doesn’t know is that the U.S. military may in fact be in league with the forces of darkness.

Fanboy gush aside, it’s worth looking at why Buffy is still a viable enterprise, and perhaps even that rare pop icon that transcends medium.

The core of its enduring validity has a great deal to do with the fact that Buffy has always been reflectively political, whether in its obvious, if eccentric, feminism; its consistent endorsement of nuclear-family alternatives represented by the flexible core group of Buffy’s friends; its reflexive mistrust of anything patriarchal or authoritarian; and/or its presentation of network TV’s first lesbian sex scene.

The Long Way Home doesn’t represent the first time Buffy’s run afoul of the military/industrial/black-magic complex: Back in 1999’s Season 4, she defeated a black op called "The Initiative" hellbent on creating a human/demon supersoldier.

Like clockwork, the new Buffy reflects current reality, that lousy one where the world-dominance-minded neoconservatives run everything disastrously. And so the Initiative’s small cabal has morphed, in The Long Way Home, into a vast militarist elite that’s learned zip from past defeats and views Buffy’s group of dedicated humanists as a terrorist cell defined by "a hard-line ideology that does not jibe with American interests." Their solution is typically draconian: Kill Buffy, and so decapitate her movement of outsiders and uppity feminists in cool outfits.

Anyway, it’s Buffy’s ability to create an ongoing, hugely entertaining conversation with current fears and hopes in supernatural drag that may allow it to join Batman, Superman and, yes, Wonder Woman as a text with so much cultural energy it almost can’t help but manifest in whatever forum’s available. With Whedon helming things, it confirms our suspicions-okay, hopes, too-that the epic tale didn’t end with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Mona Lisa smile in the show’s last image. Hell, based on all the plummy stuff we’ve enjoyed in just two issues, the story’s just starting.

All of the above wouldn’t be worth jack without Whedon’s characters, who’ve grown up but at their core are still the same ridiculously lovable outsiders. Xander still confuses his libido with his mission while doting on Nick Fury minutiae. Andrew multitasks a demon raid with a hilarious discourse on Lando Calrissian’s space-pimp wardrobe. And Buffy just wouldn’t be Buffy without the characters’ artful mangling of the King’s English, something that’s especially savory in print.

So it’s with dork delight we read and reread Buffy explaining the slayer’s powers thusly: "One slayer fighting alone is formidable. Two is formidabler. Three? Mega-formidable. And after mega, it goes to mondo, then super, hyper, beaucoup, crazy, stupid ... it gets exponentially prefixy." Even for normal folks, such prattle is funny stuff. But for us, the fans, it’s the smart, loopy language of true geek love.