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Buffy Season 8 - Predators & Prey
Mar. 16th, 2009 07:50 pm[I finally got my comics on Sunday. The sprained ankle made it impossible to pick it up until well yesterday. The Buffy comics are getting better, which isn't really all that surprising when I think about it. The tv series was slow to start too.]
In a recent interview - Joss Whedon stated something along the lines that he's always focused to a degree on the relationship between predators and prey in his works. [Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aycheb for pointing it out to me.] The title of this issue, written by Drew Greenberg (of Dexter and Smallville fame), is Predators & Prey. But it isn't entirely clear who the predators and who the prey are, they keep flipping back and forth - something that happens a lot in Whedon's tales. In the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we see a blond cheerleader, pretty, young, with an innocent voice, who is wandering the darkened halls of the school with a bad boy, or so we think. It's a scene out of a slasher picture. We think the boy has brought her there to kill her or rape her. That he is the predator and she is the prey. But there's a twist, she's a vampire and sinks her fangs into him, sucking his life away. A spider, who has caught an errant fly in her web. Same deal with Buffy - when we first see her, we think she's prey, the victim, the petite blond who gets killed in the beginning of the horror flick. And as played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who at the time had starred in at least two horror flicks - where she was the little blond girl who got sliced and diced, this is not all that far fetched. But again, there's a twist, she's a vampire slayer. She preys on the predators, slays them.
I think that twist, simple as it sounds, may well be what attracted me to Whedon's stories. I like the ironic twist, and I like the fact that the underdog, the victim, actually turns out to be the only one left standing. It's a concept that was borrowed from Ridley Scott's Alien, where the only one left standing is a female worker, named Ripley, who normally is the victim in those types of tales. Or Terminator - where it is a blond waitress who kills and defeats against all odds an unstoppable monster.
In most tales, the woman is the prey, or if predator, she's depicted a bit like a spider, with fangs, weaving a web of lies around the poor hapless fly of a man she has trapped in her web.
Greenberg's Predators & Prey flips this a bit. The spider, is a female demon, but the weaver of the lies, the one who constructs the trap and creates the demon is a man. A man with the best of intentions.
( Review of Issue 23, spoilers within for those who have not read it and still want to. )
In a recent interview - Joss Whedon stated something along the lines that he's always focused to a degree on the relationship between predators and prey in his works. [Thanks to
aycheb for pointing it out to me.] The title of this issue, written by Drew Greenberg (of Dexter and Smallville fame), is Predators & Prey. But it isn't entirely clear who the predators and who the prey are, they keep flipping back and forth - something that happens a lot in Whedon's tales. In the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we see a blond cheerleader, pretty, young, with an innocent voice, who is wandering the darkened halls of the school with a bad boy, or so we think. It's a scene out of a slasher picture. We think the boy has brought her there to kill her or rape her. That he is the predator and she is the prey. But there's a twist, she's a vampire and sinks her fangs into him, sucking his life away. A spider, who has caught an errant fly in her web. Same deal with Buffy - when we first see her, we think she's prey, the victim, the petite blond who gets killed in the beginning of the horror flick. And as played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who at the time had starred in at least two horror flicks - where she was the little blond girl who got sliced and diced, this is not all that far fetched. But again, there's a twist, she's a vampire slayer. She preys on the predators, slays them. I think that twist, simple as it sounds, may well be what attracted me to Whedon's stories. I like the ironic twist, and I like the fact that the underdog, the victim, actually turns out to be the only one left standing. It's a concept that was borrowed from Ridley Scott's Alien, where the only one left standing is a female worker, named Ripley, who normally is the victim in those types of tales. Or Terminator - where it is a blond waitress who kills and defeats against all odds an unstoppable monster.
In most tales, the woman is the prey, or if predator, she's depicted a bit like a spider, with fangs, weaving a web of lies around the poor hapless fly of a man she has trapped in her web.
Greenberg's Predators & Prey flips this a bit. The spider, is a female demon, but the weaver of the lies, the one who constructs the trap and creates the demon is a man. A man with the best of intentions.
( Review of Issue 23, spoilers within for those who have not read it and still want to. )