Buffy The Vampire Slayer

If you need something a bit breezier after all that serious reading, here’s my top pick: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight," a new comics series from Dark Horse. The comic picks up where the eponymous television show (which went off the air in 2003 after seven seasons) left off, and it’s penned by Buffy’s creator Joss Whedon — a top talent in feminism-soaked mass-media entertainments. I caught flack from Worldchanging readers a few years ago when I recommended Whedon’s comic "Fray," another tale of the vampire slayers, as well as his fresh and fun Astonishing X-Men series for Marvel Comic, but I stand by my opinion that Whedon is a worldchanger: his tough, smart (both street and book), and funny heroines are some of the most upbeat and intelligent takes on empowered women in contemporary popcult. Some see the sexy garb and (yes, sometimes startling) violence, and the mass media context, as de facto sexist and irrelevant; others see them as feminism’s new wave of mainstream impact.

***SPOILERS***

Hopefully both sides can unite over exchanges such as this pulp fiction dialogue in issue number four:

Black Ops General: "Twilight is coming. For you, for all your monstrous spawn...it all ends very soon."

Buffy: "Are you talking about the girls who are protecting the world from —"

Black Ops General: "Evil? Demons? ...You’ve upset the balance, girl. Do you really think we were going to sit by and let you create a master race?"

Buffy: "This isn’t about demons at all, is it? It’s about women. It’s about power and it’s about women and you just hate those two words in the same sentence, don’t you?"

Sounds like it’s about demons to me, just not the paranormal kind.