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strange_complexIt's probably a bit of a cheat to include a comic book in this year's book blog. But it's a sheaf of papers between two covers which I read, so I'm just jolly well going to.
I'm not normally much of a comic reader, although I have read and enjoyed a few in my time. And I think that meant I struggled to follow this at some points, where someone more practised with the genre wouldn't have done. Quite often the setting switched abruptly from one place / character to another, and while I have no problem at all following that sort of transition in televised Buffy, in this comic I found I often wasn't getting enough in the way of visual cues to tell me where the hell we now were, and what was going on. So I spent quite a lot of time having to flick back through the pages to pick up previous threads and work it out. It also didn't help that several of the female characters (particularly Amy and Buffy) looked rather a lot like each other, so that sometimes what seemed at first like sudden unexpected changes in people's priorities and motivations actually turned out to be a completely different character speaking.
Despite the unfamiliar territory, though, the story was fun, and Whedon seemed (in my limited experience) to have made good use of the comic book format for the most part. There were some interesting sequences, like a battle between Willow and Amy, Buffy trapped inside her own nightmare and Willow shifting onto another plane while her body was being tortured. It was also nice to see where some of the characters had gone to after the end of the televised season 7, although of course their stories feel incomplete to me now, because this volume only constitutes episodes 1-5 of the new season.
But, I don't think there was enough here to guarantee that I will buy the next volume when it comes out. A lot of the story seemed to rely on the return of old enemies - Amy, EthanHawke (oops!) Rayne, Warren from the Trio - and while there's obviously some larger plot developing around the evening star design carved into several people's chests, I'm not intrigued enough by it yet to feel I must rush out for the next instalment. Besides, comic books are expensive for what you get! This cost £7.35 on Amazon for about an hour's reading, and that included the time I spent getting confused, as well as subjecting individual frames to intensive scrutiny in search of interesting clues or background information - there were a few, but not as many as I'd have expected. For the same price, an ordinary novel would keep me amused for about twenty times as long.
So, I've satisfied my curiosity by finding out what this was like. But I'm not a convert.
I'm not normally much of a comic reader, although I have read and enjoyed a few in my time. And I think that meant I struggled to follow this at some points, where someone more practised with the genre wouldn't have done. Quite often the setting switched abruptly from one place / character to another, and while I have no problem at all following that sort of transition in televised Buffy, in this comic I found I often wasn't getting enough in the way of visual cues to tell me where the hell we now were, and what was going on. So I spent quite a lot of time having to flick back through the pages to pick up previous threads and work it out. It also didn't help that several of the female characters (particularly Amy and Buffy) looked rather a lot like each other, so that sometimes what seemed at first like sudden unexpected changes in people's priorities and motivations actually turned out to be a completely different character speaking.
Despite the unfamiliar territory, though, the story was fun, and Whedon seemed (in my limited experience) to have made good use of the comic book format for the most part. There were some interesting sequences, like a battle between Willow and Amy, Buffy trapped inside her own nightmare and Willow shifting onto another plane while her body was being tortured. It was also nice to see where some of the characters had gone to after the end of the televised season 7, although of course their stories feel incomplete to me now, because this volume only constitutes episodes 1-5 of the new season.
But, I don't think there was enough here to guarantee that I will buy the next volume when it comes out. A lot of the story seemed to rely on the return of old enemies - Amy, Ethan
So, I've satisfied my curiosity by finding out what this was like. But I'm not a convert.
