What’s Buffy Saying?

Those of you who are still keeping up with Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 may have noticed that the last issue was pretty much just 22 pages of people shouting plot points while Buffy and Angel got it on in low orbit.

No, really. That happened.

 

 

And that’s why today at ComicsAlliance, I’ve got six suggestions for the dialogue that was lost to the airless vacuum of space!

21 thoughts on “What’s Buffy Saying?

  1. Thanks so much for posting pornography on your front page.

    I just got fired from my job at the hentai factory.

  2. Thanks so much for this one. As a fan of the TV show, I’ve been following (and largely enjoying) the “Season Eight” comics. And then…

    …I found out (after three years’ worth of “season”) that the Big Bad is really just Angel in a silly outfit. And that he’s been playing one of the most elaborate yet pointless cons in all comicbookdom.

    And that was before Buffy had sex in outer space.

    I mean, for Glory’s sake, I didn’t realize Dark Horse published fanfic.

  3. David Thiel, as someone who has both read and written fanfic, I take offense at that.

    Also, I am legitimiately surprised at the lack of “Hot damn! Vaginas!”

  4. Seriously, if you don’t like fanfic, what the hell are you doing reading comic books in 2010?

  5. You know what, given that Meltzer has been penning this arc, I’m just glad it wasn’t a rape scene. Because we need another Meltzer written space-based-rape scene…

  6. You know, the first issue or two was a surprising uptick in quality for this series, and I was more surprised than anyone to find Meltzer writing a decent comic.

    I take back everything nice I said.

  7. Now this is only a theory, here, but it seems to me that BtVS was much better back in the days when the wackiness had to conform to both a television production budget and the limits of human flesh. I guess I should have seen it coming in the first trade, when Dawn became giant just because it would be funny to draw her like that, wouldn’t it?, but making everyone fly just because it costs the same amount to draw people flying as it does to draw them sitting on a couch is not a good enough reason to give all the Slayers the power of flight.

  8. I think the blank word bubble is less about them being in space, and more about the letterer just saving some money, because honestly. No one is reading this anymore, they wont notice if he skips a bubble here and there.

  9. “Seriously, if you don’t like fanfic, what the hell are you doing reading comic books in 2010?”

    For the most part, I don’t. Most of my reading is confined to Silver Age reprints and Hellboy trades. My interest in the Buffy comic was because I missed the show and was looking forward to seeing the original writers tell more stories about these characters. And while Meltzer wasn’t one of the Buffy TV writers, it appears that his storyline is greatly informed by Whedon. Which means that the mighty Whedon himself thinks that having Buffy and Angel have sex in space is something less than ridiculous.

  10. Joe,

    Overtly fanboyish as some writers are, I find that “all modern comics might as well be fanfiction” is kinda harsh and cynical towards modern comic writing.

    But yeah, that said, from what I’ve heard I’m rather glad I passed on reading this series. Seemed to start out pretty good and eventually peetered out pretty bad.

  11. @Elwood, you’re sounding kind of harsh and cynical to fanfiction to me. There is a difference between ‘derivative’ and ‘original’, yes, but there is also a difference between ‘dull’ and ‘engaging.’ Derivative work gets a leg up because it stands on the shoulders of someone who already did the work to get you interested. That work is why we pay original copyright owners when we use their stuff.

    I’m going to point you at Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s definition of fanfiction.

    And then, when you have time, try perusing these fanfics:

    Minisinoo’s online X-men movieverse novel about Cyclops. Its a finding yourself by investigating your heritage story.

    http://www.phoenixfyre.net/darkvault/x-men/heyoka1.html

    (Goes thru internet archive) John Percy’s novella Age of Apocalypse Revelations, tries to fill in the blank on how Prelate Cyclops turned against his family before the story canon starts. No adult stuff here, unless you count the way Dark Beast tortures people.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20021023235309/www.geocities.com/SoHo/6329/archive.html

    Sorry if you hate Cyclops, that’s just what I’m familiar with. Try Darkmark, like minisinoo, he’s an occasional professional writer. He’s done some DC fanfic. He’s a continuity fanboy.

    http://dark_mark.tripod.com/darkmark1.htm

    Or just read Lost Girls by Alan Moore, for his version of slash.

    But don’t read the lowest levels of it and tell me it defines all of fanfiction.

  12. @Badficwriter

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there is high quality fan fiction out there. I know that there are people who put real time, effort and creative ability into such works and more power to them. Heck, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is basically the most ambitious crossover fan fiction ever written and I like that comic a lot, and if you want to get technical about, many modern superhero comics ARE fanfics in the sense that most modern comic writers started as comic fans.

    I was referring more to how Joe phrased it, which seemed to be more invoking the idea of fan fiction as “fanboy writers creating sloppy, poorly written stories with the toys they grew up loving” rather then it just being “stories based on established creations by fans.” It came across as very cynical, as if the majority of modern comic book writers are no better then some basement crawler writing the muck lining the bottom of the Fanfiction.net barrel.

    So yeah, I wasn’t ragging on fanfics, just on Joe’s comment, which seemed to more of the typical “all comic writers want to do is relive when they were teenagers, but with blood and sex and stuff!” argument I’ve seen a lot elsewhere.

    Oh, and Chris, congrats. You KNOW you’ve made it when you get a fanfic based on your work! : )