Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Seven seasons of the hit TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer were not enough for its legions of devoted fans. The wait for season eight is finally over, writes Emily Wilson - what a shame it’s only a comic

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a weird title for a TV show, and it put a lot of people off watching it. Other people were repelled by the silly sci-fi stuff - the demons, the giant snakes, the zombies. But at the heart of Buffy was a brilliant, and still radical fantasy: the story of a woman who walked without fear into dark alleys full of monsters, and kicked monster butt. There have been other iconic female action heroes - Ripley in the Alien films, Sarah Connor in the Terminators - but Buffy was a feminist icon who got to tell jokes too.

The TV show ended four years ago after seven seasons, having won over even the most highbrow of critics, and it’s been much mourned since - perhaps more than any other dead TV show. No new heroine has come along to replace Buffy, and her legions of peculiarly obsessive fans still chew over every twist and turn of her exploits. Countless academic essays have been written on her enduring cultural impact. Now, after four years in the wilderness, the Slayer is back. Well, sort of.

Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, has launched "season eight" of Buffy - not as a TV series, but as a comic. There have been other Buffy-related comics since the TV show finished, but this is "canon", the official Whedonesque version of events post-season seven. In America, the first instalment, from Dark Horse Comics, sold out in a matter of days.

You can see why people who wouldn’t normally buy a comic are going out to get this one - even if it’s a poor second best to a new TV series. Most shows finish when they are well past done. It seemed sad when Friends ended, but do you care what they’re doing now? Ditto The West Wing: could you really have borne it all over again, even with a new president? The Sopranos is another monumental TV show, but who wants the lumpish thug that Tony has become to go on for another season?

Buffy, though ... she was only in her early 20s, and full of promise, when we left her. And although season seven may not have been the best of the run, it was still complicated, clever, delicious telly. For those who have never been there, the show didn’t just have the great feminist fantasy, the demons and the jokes. It was multi-stranded, superbly written television with characters you cared about. And it evolved in interesting ways, growing darker, more adult with the years.

The story started out with a new girl called Buffy, a peppy 16-year-old virgin, arriving at Sunnydale high school. The place was crawling with vampires; luckily, Buffy (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) had special powers in the vampire-hunting department. Soon she put together a gang of lovable, quirky friends (nicknamed the "Scoobies" after the gang in Scooby Doo) to help her in her preordained fight against evil.

Things didn’t stay so simple, though. The Scoobies grew up: Willow, Buffy’s best friend, became a lesbian, developed superpowers of her own; Xander, her other best friend, made an almighty mess of his private life. The Scooby gang creaked apart. By season six, Buffy was isolated, depressed, working in a burger bar, and locked in a highly sexual relationship with a soulless guy called Spike. She was still the Slayer, still the boss, but you believed she was a woman too. And no one could mistake the show for a kids’ programme any more.

The last we saw of her, Buffy was standing in front of the enormous crater that was once Sunnydale, after yet another apocalypse (an occupational hazard in the Buffyverse, as Buffy’s world is known). The comic picks up a few months later. Buffy is on the comic’s cover, looking quite like herself (ie quite like Gellar). Inside, the drawings are by a different artist, and Buffy doesn’t look much like Buffy any more, but more like an anonymous blonde in a Tank Girl outfit. Xander looks like himself, but himself at 16 (except with an eyepatch). Buffy is in Europe, fighting alongside all the new slayers (long story), when we join her. Dawn (Buffy’s sister, although not really - very long story) is a giant. Whedon has promised that other beloved characters will pitch up in future instalments of the comic - there will be 20 or more - even those who, for convoluted entertainment-world reasons, now fight evil for other comic companies. (Buffy’s first love, a vampire named Angel, went off to do his own spin-off show, which has caused all kinds of rights issues.)

The first part of the comic has some familiar moments of Buffy humour and warmth, alongside the slayage of monsters. (At one point Xander and Buffy, supposed monster experts, struggle to decipher a mystical symbol carved into some dead guy’s chest. "I think it’s a frown turned upside down," says Xander. "I think it’s a beautiful sunset," says Buffy.) It’s short, this first episode - just a few scenes, really - but it’s well scripted and twisty. It’s nice to see the guys again. Ah, but it’s not the same! How could it be?

Sadly, season eight, the comic, makes it more likely than ever that this is it for Buffy and friends in terms of film and TV. As Whedon, whose post-Buffy fortunes have been mixed, told TVGuide.com recently: "The idea of doing movies about the ancillary characters got me excited, because I love those actors and I love that world. That kind of fell through, but when I started working on the comic ... I sketched out this sort of broad arc that would connect everything. Now it will probably only appear on the comic-book pages, but it will be really well drawn."

Even if Whedon had the will, and found the money, it’s hard to see how he could scrape back the Buffy cast from all the film stuff they’re doing now, even if the film stuff is rubbish. Then there’s the problem that vampires don’t age, but actors do. And if you want Buffy herself in the mix, well, Gellar hasn’t sounded too keen on going back there, and it’s hard to imagine casting anyone else. The supporting actors were so good - particularly James Marsters as Buffy’s vampire boyfriend Spike, and Alyson Hannigan as her friend Willow - that it was easy to forget how much the show depended on the still, powerful presence of Gellar, and her ability to react so convincingly to everything the writers threw at her, from elaborate song-and-dance routines to the extraordinary episode where she finds her mother dead on the sofa.

Do we even need Buffy back? After all, all seven seasons of the TV show are out now on DVD. Well, maybe we do need her, or at least someone very like her. Maybe you can’t have too much of a good thing. I watched Shrek rescue Princess Fiona from a castle the other day with a three-year-old of my acquaintance, and afterwards he said: "Mummy, why didn’t the princess rescue herself?" Which is a good question, especially as Princess Fiona is later revealed to have ninja fighting skills. The thing is, it wouldn’t happen on Buffy. Buffy sometimes got rescued by her friends and lovers, but that was always the exception to the rule. In Buffy, week after week, year after year, it was the princess who turned up, just in the nick of time, to save the world.