nixsight

Okay, so second week out, and a bit of a cheat. I got to yesterday, and realised that I hadn’t actually read, or more specifically finished, anything this week, for one reason or another.

So I gave a quick re-read to a couple of recent comics, and picked up a short, older graphic novel that I knew I could read in the bath earlier.

I’m actually kind of glad I did.

First up:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer – Season 8: Wolves At The Gate

Comic spin-offs of TV or movie licenses are notoriously hit-and-miss, even when published by a company that built itself partially on them the way Dark Horse did. Too often, the creative team makes too much effort to ape the series, creating writing without fluidity, and art that provides near-perfect likenesses, at the risk of composition and storytelling.

Either that, or there is an apparent urge to try and outstrip or move beyond the source material, and alter the scale or focus of the piece completely.

Thankfully, in the case of Buffy Season 8, this has not, for the most part, been the case. There has been the odd clunky issue, and this story arc isn’t without flaws, but somehow the whole thing clips along, bringing enough freshness with it to be a valid addition to the Buffy canon, without ever pushing the reader too far away from the original series that they cease caring.

I think it’s down to Joss Whedon, in this case. Dark Horse Comics have done Buffy comics before, and they have never been this good, but the close attention that Whedon seems to be showing to this franchise, seemingly above and beyond that which he is giving to the comic adaptations of his other shows, shines through.

It isn’t like they don’t test the formula a little in these comics. Up till this arc, we’ve seen some pretty brave decisions made with the property’s direction, including one that strays into pet-peeve territory in comic adaptations – the “comics are like movies/tv, but with an unlimited budget” idea that normally means a franchise that has well-established stylistic rules suddenly finds itself featuring utterly non-humanoid creatures, aliens that prosthetics might make difficult, or, well, say, a trained dragon.

In this arc alone there are some unusually twisty sub-plots, a revelation or two about the many unresolved plot-threads left hanging when the show ended – in some cases, threads that we didn’t even realise were dangley, and some pretty big-budget set-pieces. But for some reason, here it all works, rather than seeming like the team are trying too hard.

Maybe it isn’t just down to Whedon. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Buffy on TV always tried to push itself out of the boundaries of the medium. Whatever the case, I found myself just as invested in what was going on in these books as I did when the show first aired.

Admittedly, these issues aren’t actually written by Whedon – instead the role falls to Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard. But he does a good job, and it’s clear that as promised, Whedon really is treating this the way he would a TV season, as show runner. His hand is visible behind every scene.

The dialogue, on occasion, isn’t as sure-handed, and there are some admittedly rare moments where the writer is counting on intonation to carry off a line that ends up reading oddly. He also only nails Whedon’s particular cadence most of the time, which is pretty good, but does leave a few “eh?” bits.

Georges Jeanty’s normally gorgeous art rarely slips up, though – and unfortunately most notably in Xander’s big climactic scene, which should be intense, and ends up looking a little goofy instead.

But overall, these are ungrateful moments of nit-picking. This is a fun book, and if it wasn’t for the restraint I am deliberately showing to spare Girl One any spoilers – we are just watching through Season 3 at the moment, I could go on about it for ages. Much better than the green vampires and nonsense of DH’s earlier run. Or the current Angel series, which allegedly also has Whedon’s blessing, but for some reason just isn’t working as well as this. Hm.

Serenity – Those Left Behind/Better Days

And of course, as if to prove my misgivings about tie-in comics, here comes Serenity.

Serenity could always have done with a bit more time. Sorry, I mean Firefly. I mean that this universe hasn’t had enough screen-time, and in some ways the comic medium could have been the ideal place for that to happen.

Sadly, this hasn’t been the case with these comics. It might be that Whedon didn’t have as much to do with these books as he did with Buffy. As likely is the fact that these books were a little hamstrung by continuity – unlike with the older show, these stories had to fit into a much more exact period of the franchise’s history, and couldn’t afford to make any real detours from the timeline. To get the whole crew in, the stories had to be set between the series and the movie, and any real development or character interplay would have to have been stifled to make that work.

Further to that, though, there’s the arbitrariness of it all. We already know how things turn out for at least two of these characters. That casts a shadow over everything that happens here.

None of which really explains the confused visual storytelling, distracted and distracting scripting, and the uncomfortable shift to more expository plotting.

The art and writing really both suffer from the same problem, and that is that in each case, they are trying too hard. The likenesses here are great, but there is too much effort put in to keep the actors’ faces front and center – this makes for great pin-up images and pretty panels, but doesn’t add much to the flow of the story, or cohesive sequences.

Brett Matthews, who has done excellent work writing the Lone Ranger books, clearly loves Whedon’s characters but here lacks restraint, and this means that the books have too many moments where the characters are either delivering routines or scenes typical to their screen persona, butting up against scenes where Matthews is clearly trying to add some new insight or previously unseen behaviour into them. The problem is that these all happen at the expense of story, and we end up with comics full of narrative non-sequiturs.

I love the Firefly characters, but aside from the odd exceptional moment, these two stories don’t feel like they’re really Firefly or Serenity stories, so I don’t know if I’ll be around for the next one.

Magic Boy & Robot Elf by James Kochalka

This is the book that I’m cheating with, because it’s the one that I grabbed on my way into the bath a couple of hours ago, knowing that it wouldn’t take me long to finish it, and that Kochalka is always worth talking about.

This is Kochalka’s first book, from 1995, although apparently this edition has an ending that was lacking in earlier versions. It follows the exploits of the now very old Magic Boy, Kochalka’s proxy in his comic world, as he laments the loss of his youth, and makes a robot companion. That goes mad.

It is also about his cat, that has been possessed by an alien robot. And it is also about the young Magic Boy’s relationship with his parents.

And under it all, it is also apparently a surreal love letter to Kochalka’s wife, Amy, who he married in the same year.

It’s an odd book. The whimsical charm and almost naive vulgarity of much of the cartoonist’s work is present here – his spare and irreverent dialogue is intact, and his solid and clear line is too, if a little less refined than it would later become.

In some ways, the fever-dream nature of “Magic Boy & Robot Elf” undercuts the clear talent that Kochalka is bringing to the table – although his view of the world is always surreal, the strength of his later work is that it still always manages to maintain it’s own internal logic. That isn’t present here, with a free-ranging narrative that is more stream-of-consciousness than Kochalka’s normal brand of spontaneous and nonsensical, but always clear storytelling.

I enjoyed re-reading the book, but although it was an enjoyable and compact trip, what I really got from it was an urge to revisit some of Kochalka’s later, chunkier books, where Magic Boy is married to Amy, and the creator relies more on keen observation and flights of fancy than abstracts and surrealism.