Buffy : Season 9

Dark Horse’s Scott Allie talks new projects, Buffyverse in comics

We caught up with Scott Allie, comics maestro of Dark Horse, who clued us in on some of the publisher’s plans for the near future, as well as the direction of the Buffyverse comics series. According to Allie, just announced are three new projects for DH:

“Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is writing a book called The Orchid, which is about a young woman in a futuristic end-of-the-world scenario; there’s political overtones, as you’d expect from Tom; it’s a great story with Scott Hepburn on art. P.C. Cast, a very popular novelist, whose series House of Night has sold like 5 million copies. We’re doing a comic series with her based on House of Night. And we just announced The Strain, from Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, a series of novels that they’ve been doing, we’re going to be doing as comics with David Lapham and Mike Huddleston.”

As for Buffyverse comics,

“We’re right now about a month out from the first issue of Angel & Faith, and then two weeks later, Buffy #1 comes out– so season 9 kicks off. So we’re just jazzed for that. The creative team’s all ready: we’ve got Rebecca Isaacson and Chris Gage doing Angel & Faith; and Joss and Georges Jenty are back on Buffy, with Andrew Chambliss, one of the writers from Dollhouse, and also from Vampire Diaries– and now he’s working on Once Upon A Time, with Jane Espenson… Buffy’s in San Francisco, Angel and Faith are in London. Buffy is trying to settle into a nice, normal life at this point. She’s still fighting vampires, but trying to have a bit of a more of a normal life and obviously running into big problems there. Willow is a major part of the cast, Xander and Dawn are around. And we’ll be fleshing out the cast from there.

With Angel & Faith, it’s a lot of new characters. We’re introducing a group of new slayers, that Faith is sort of mentoring. The main one is a girl named Nadera, who is an Indian girl that needs special attention from Faith.

In terms of the cross-overs, possibly reuniting Angel and Buffy, Allie was pretty clear:

“No we’re going to keep them apart; after everything that went down between them, they’re going to stay apart from each other. There is going to be a sense of cross-over between the two books, and there will be other books that will bridge that gap. With the destruction of the Seed, and other destruction that happened at the end of season 8, there’s a lot of repercussions that are going to affect everybody in the world, particularly characters involved in magic and supernatural things. There are things happening in both books that are very similar; there’s things happening that you see are clearly in both books and there will be some characters moving from book to book, but there won’t be a real blatant cross-over anytime soon.

Dark Horse has really pulled out the stops this year, expanding their presence at Comic-Con and bringing a slew of Whedon-related panels and signings — including the only appearances of Joss at the show, as Marvel Studios has skipped having an Avengers panel this year.