Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #20

Read­ers of this site and fol­low­ers of my Twit­ter account may know of my utter dis­ap­point­ment with any­thing that comes from Jeph Loeb’s hand. So it was with utmost trep­i­da­tion that I sat down and started in on this book.

Just a note of warn­ing: this is a book for the hard­core fans only. Unless you’ve been watch­ing the show since episode one you will be lost.

The meat of this book is a flack­back to sea­son 2 of the TV show in the style of the ani­mated series that was pro­posed way­back when.

There’s a cou­ple of decent enough moments in the book, Like Buffy think­ing back to Angel’s words of advice and get­ting them mixed up. But the major­ity of it is just incred­i­bly bad. Like the “real-life” scenes that book­end the car­toony mid­dle. The char­ac­ters are writ­ten so over the top that they bor­der on par­ody. They get worse once the car­toon sequence begins.

And Loeb? Points off for using the same lame Wiz­ard of Oz ref­er­ence that you used in the sea­son finale of Heroes. It wasn’t good then and it’s not good in this book.

Thank the var­i­ous gods that this is just a one shot. I don’t think I could han­dle another Loeb issue.

Mighty Avengers #20

When Secret Inva­sion started way back at the start of the year both the Mighty and New Avengers books were hijacked to pro­vide for filler material.

You could eas­ily class this book as more filler, but the writ­ing, by Bendis, is just so much bet­ter than the main Secret Inva­sion book. I won­der how much bet­ter SI would’ve been had Bendis stuck to the small character-focused arcs, rather than resort­ing to scenes where the Skrulls break out the big guns.

Prob­a­bly my favourite part was the silent mon­tage of Ms Mar­vel fill­ing in Hank Pym on the Mar­vel Uni­verse hap­pen­ings since he’s been gone. Can’t wait for the inevitable pho­to­shops where Cap­tain America’s death is replaced with pic­tures of Sarah Palin. If it hasn’t hap­pened already that is.

There’s three artists listed in the cred­its: Lee Weeks, Jim Che­ung and Carlo Pag­u­layan. I don’t know why they needed three dif­fer­ent artists to fin­ish off this book as it’s just a stan­dard 22 pager. No upsiz­ing at all. Which is strange as this is Bendis’ last issue of Mighty Avengers. Dan Slott takes over next month ad for the fore­see­able future (hopefully).

Com­plete List:

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #20
Ex Machina #40
Trin­ity #29
Avengers: Ini­tia­tive #19
Dark Reign New Nation
Mighty Avengers #20
Thor: God-Size Spe­cial #1
Thun­der­bolts #127
Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #59
Uncanny X-Men #505
X-Factor #38
X-Men: Legacy #219