It’s a pretty good week for new books.  From the X-books, we’ve got the conclusion of the “Wolverine Goes to Hell” arc in Wolverine #5, the launch of Kathryn Immonen and Phil Noto’s Wolverine & Jubilee miniseries, a very strange Darwin story in X-Factor #214, and X-Men Legacy #244, in which some minor characters fight a giant astral squid.  Plus, the final issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, and the debut issues of Daredevil Reborn, Infinite Vacation and Memoir.  Shame we’re not doing a podcast this weekend, actually.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #40 – The main storyline for Joss Whedon’s notional eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually ended last issue, so this is more of an epilogue designed to tie up loose ends and signal the direction of Season Nine.  For, yes, there will be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 in the not too distant future.

Now, I’ve rather been losing patience with this series, which seemed at times to have lost touch with what made Buffy work in the first place, in favour of a lot of globetrotting and warmongering that wasn’t all that successful.  Interestingly, Joss Whedon’s closing editorial suggests he tends to agree with some of those criticisms.  “I was so excited to finally have an unlimited budget that I wanted to make the book an epic,” he says, “but I realised along the way that the things I loved the best were the things you loved the best” – the characters.    And indeed, this issue seems to be setting us up for a much more low-key Season 9 with a much more restricted central cast, something that can only be for the best.  The remaining characters are relocated to San Francisco, lots of magic-users have been depowered as a result of last issue’s destruction of the Enormously Important Macguffin, and some of the ones who remain aren’t very happy about Buffy wiping out so much of the world’s magic.  It’s not a reset button – the change of location and the embittered ex-followers are enough to avoid that – but it’s a back-to-basics approach which is very welcome at the end of a series that laudably tried to stretch the format with mixed success.

It also turns out that one of Whedon’s main aims for this series was, of all things, to try and reconcile Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuity with the sci-fi spin-off comic Fray (the question being, given how the TV show ended, why are there no slayers left in Fray?).  Technically that’s a valid question but it does feel like a loose end rather too minor to merit such extended attention.  Still, the practical effect – somewhat to my surprise – is a final issue that pretty much convinces me that Season 9 will be much more to my tastes than Season 8.  I was planning to jump off after this issue.  He’s got me reconsidering now.  Damn you, Whedon.

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There’s a new podcast up today, and you’ll find it at the next post down.  Reviews include Who is Jake Ellis? (of which more below), Weird Worlds and a more-or-less random issue of Deadpool Team-Up, since at least it was self-contained.  Meanwhile, here in the X-Axis, it’s a fairly restrained week for X-books – we’ve got X-Factor, the penultimate issue of X-Men Forever, and the second issue of Wolverine: The Best There Is.  Will it be any better this time round?  And there’s a couple of other books to round out the numbers…

Knight & Squire #4 – Back at the year-in-review show, somebody asked if there are any books that Al and I disagree over.  Well, this is one.  Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton’s extremely tongue-in-cheek miniseries about the British versions of Batman and Robin is the sort of thing you’ll either find endearing or thoroughly irritating; it’s got nothing to do with real Britain, so much as the sort of weird chewed-up mess of pop culture references that might have resulted if the UK had produced comics in the spirit of Silver Age DC.  Following through with the warped logic of an inverted Batman and Robin, this issue introduces the Knight’s loyal butler: Hank, a stereotypical American with a wandering accent (“Y’all for tea, sir?”).

So far this has miniseries been a series of standalone stories, but notionally it’s supposed to be a six-parter, and this is the point where Cornell changes gear and starts to draw stuff together.  The Shrike from issue #1 returns as Squire’s love interest, and the main story – in which Knight’s armour comes to life animated by a copy of his repressed feelings – is played basically straight, even if the central idea is that good old-fashioned repression saves the day.  (Come to think of it, a gag which also worked rather well when they did it with Cyclops in Uncanny X-Men a year or so back…)  There’s a balancing exercise with the tone here; the series has been so deliberately silly thus far that it’s slightly odd to have us suddenly take the characters more or less seriously for an issue.  To some extent Cornell is trying to have his cake and eat it here, and it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable.  Still, if the two sides of the book don’t entirely come together, they do each work on their own terms – and the difficult task of drawing them together had to be attempted at some point.

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