Buffy the Vampire Slayer: From T.V. to Comics

My blog has sort of been taken over lately by t.v. shows I'm loving right now because I've been spending a lot of time watching and not as much reading. I think this is fine because I love doing both things! I just finished the entire series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is most excellent. I fell in love with pretty much all the characters and you can bet I'll be doing more posts on it. But today I want to talk about my thoughts before I take the leap from watching Buffy, Xander and Williow on my t.v. to reading about more of their adventures in comic book form.

My first thought is overwhelming relief. I spent a little under 144 hours watching these characters grow up right in front of my eyes. I've seen Buffy die (twice), save the world a lot, seen Willow deal with losing both Oz and Tara as she makes her way in witchcraft, and seen Xander date his way through most of the girls on the show. So when the show was over and the last line of dialog spoken (by Dawn actually) I knew I had to figure out where these characters are going. This lead me to the comics which I'd always known were out there but never thought I'd read.

So for the past few nights, I've been living on Wikipedia, trying to figure out which order to read them and if I'm interested only in some or all. I've decided to start with the continuation of the series with the Season 8 comics but I've also decided that I want to read them all so I'll be going back into earlier seasons and snatching that Spike bind-up.

With this decision, I've also had one big worry. Will the comics live up to the brilliance of the t.v. show? As a self-proclaimed Whedon-addict, I've always said that I love the writing in his scripts. But will I really feel that way when I don't get to hear Sarah Michelle Gellar "-y-ify" regular words like "jello-y" or when I don't get to see Alyson Hannigan's face turn blank before she says something optimistic or hear Spike's British accent. Will it matter?

The truth is, I'm not really sure. I'm not sure if a bunch of words and drawings can take the place of people that feel real to me. I'm used to their mannerisms and what if those can't be captured in the pages of a comic book? I know they did a good job with drawing the characters to look like the actors who portrayed them on screen but what if I can't recognize the character in one panel? Watching it on t.v., I got to see a close up of the character's face when they were talking and got used to their voices. No longer will this be the case. Now I'm going to have to do the acting in my head. I become the actor. And I'm not a good one or I'd be doing that for a living.

Plus, comics are not somewhere I've tread before so I have no idea about the terminology, how to navigate that section and how to even read them. It's like learning how to read all over again and it's scary. I'm just really hoping that all this work of organizing where everything fits in the world, figuring out what all the different companies producing them means and re-working my brain to understand them makes sense.

There is only one way to find out. So I'll dig into this Buffy comic and see if my fears will come true or if I've found something else to love. And then I'll let you all know how I feel about it in a review. Let me grab that stake in get stabbing. Wish me luck!

Have you read the comics or have you been thinking about getting into them? Let me know what you think!