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shadowkat[As an aside: You want to explain to me why it is easier for me to write a synopsis of a film or a Buffy comic for a review, than my own novel? ]
Just finished reading the latest Buffy S8 comic - "Tales of the Vampires: The Thrill". The heading makes me wonder if they plan on continuing this trend or if it is a one shot? They did do it before - with mixed results. Art is similar to the Spike/Dru Comic that fans loved so much (actually they didn't, I'm being sarcastic). Not fan of this particular style - I like hypo-realistic comic art. Abstract realism with bright colors - I can sort of do myself if I were so inclined, so I tend to be under-impressed and unmoved. It's not. But since I can do that - I don't tend to think much of it. But it's the trend right now. Seen this style a lot lately.
That said the art does work for the comic and the story, which is about disconnection and the feeling of being out of focus or out of step with your life. A common theme in the Buffyverse - I've been re-watching BTVS and Angel, just finished the Faith episodes This Year's Girl and Who Are You, which detail exactly what it is like to feel disconnected with life at least from a "slayer's" perspective. In some respects this comic reminded me a great deal of those episodes.
Jacob the main character...is bored, in a small town, and feels as if his life is going nowhere fast. He has a crush on his best friend, Alex, who he dreams is a vampire. (Turns out that she's actually a "slayer"). And to get a thrill, lets the local vamps suck on him. They don't kill him. Just take enough to give both a thrill. The metaphor is about drugs - and in case we don't get it, the mother even asks her son at one point - are you doing marijuana? One night Jacob meets May, a blond vampire. They flirt. Two days later, after he finally gets up the courage to ask Alex out for a date, he runs into the vamps he'd allowed to suck on him. This round he says no. Being vampires, they don't care and beat him up, then drain him dead. May turns him into a vampire. Three or four days later, he runs into Alex again. Alex slays May. Jacob figures out she's a slayer. And Jacob kills Alex, then asks if she wants him to turn her into a vampire like himself - so they can live together forever, have what he wants. His closing comment is "you're probably wondering what she will do, but it isn't about her choice, it's about my choice - it's about finally having the courage to feel something and wanting more. "
An on-going theme in the comics and Whedon's other works - the feeling of disconnection, yes, but also the desire to control.
What's the Buffy of it? How does it fit inside the arc? Well, it goes back to something DarkWillow states fairly accurately in Time of Your Life to Fray - for both of you, the most important people in your lives have been vampires or your greatest connection, ironically was to vampires. Of all the people that Buffy has been involved with during her lifetime - the two she was closest to, and who she may believe understood her the best, were Spike and Angel. She loses them both. But before she does - it is Spike (In S5 with the episodes preceeding The Gift, in S6 Afterlife through OMWF, in S7 Touched, Killer in Me, Chosen and End of Days) and Angel (Graduation Day and Surprise, and well Earshot), she confides in, who she tells her fears, who she allows her tough facade to fall in front of, who she lets inside, so to speak. And often to her regret. (It's ironic too that she does this..considering they are her sworn enemy.) Faith similarily does this with Angel - it is Angel who inspires Faith to reform not Buffy. In some ways Faith's experience with Angel, echoes Spike's with Buffy. And here, in this comic, Alex's experience with Jacob and vice versa. Taken further, into the future, Fray's experience/bond with her twin Harth - a vampire, who has her visions.
Buffy is not so different from Alex in this issue. The focus may well be on Jacob, but it is Alex who is the victim here, who wishes to connect, who is lost and alone, with no friends, and isolated in a society that loves vampires and hates the slayers who slay them. Another metaphor for how women are treated in society - men are in control, a powerful woman is frowned upon - the woman who doesn't fit what society thinks she should be, finds herself on the outskirts of it, demonized, wrong. Alex - who doesn't choose to be a slayer, unlike Jacob who does in a way decide to become a vampire - he who hangs out with...blah, blah. And Alex who does not get to choose to become a vampire, again that is Jacob. Alex chooses not to kill Jacob and she pays for it. Loving that which cannot love her. The connection she seeks is...dead. Jacob makes all the choices in their relationship, he controls it. But there is no connection and it is made clear that Jacob's actions are motivated primarily by his need to feel something, not by the fact that he actually does feel anything.
Buffy similarly loves dead things. When they follow her...it ends badly. And her friends, as she states on more than one occassion just can't understand, they don't know what it is like. Yet, as Web states in Conversations With Dead People - we all feel that way, we are all alone, until we die. Then, he states, we feel connected, connected to this great evil. Is he right? The contrast may well be Spike who tells her he went around the world to find the spark...the way to connect to humanity, his soul, which he hoped will make it possible for her to love him. The irony of course is that once he gets the soul, he realizes there is no way on earth that she could or more appropriately should.
Willow, similarily desperate for connection - gets it through magic. It rumbles through her veines and she feels everything. But is it real, or genuine? She seems if anything even more cut off from humanity.
In a day and age where connection appears to be as easy as picking up a cell phone or writing a post on the net, or texting on twitter, or facebook, connection is (again) ironically as fleeting if not more fleeting than it was in times past. Market research data suggests that people feel more isolated now with the computer and tv, then they did when they hung out on their front stoops chatting with their neighbors watching fireflies. We have too many choices, too much information, and too many outlets, we are constantly plugged into something - to the point, that we barely have time to actually appreciate those that we are with. Ask yourself how many times you check your cellphone when you are in class, at work, having dinner with a friend, on the street walking with people, or just with family hanging out? Or do you interrupt one call to take another? Everything is fast. That no connections can take root. They drift by, a blur.
Jacob wanted immediate connection, and failed to see what was in front of him. Alex. He could have built a lasting and real connection with Alex. Now whatever connection he creates, will not have been Alex's choice, and won't be real. His desire for immediate gratification, denied him the value of something deeper and more meaningful.
The connection is possible, but it requires hard work. And at times bitter disappointment, when it does not work. It can be sped along.
Overall, I enjoyed the comic. It does resonate with you and the art fits the pov. Also I think it works as a nice end note to the Predators/Prey arc - because here, once again, we are in the pov of both - predator and prey. They change sides. The vampires are both the predator and the prey here, just as are the slayers. It asks the question that was first posed at the start of the arc - which is which? Except unlike Harmonic Divergence and Swell - where we see it from the slayers pov, here we see it from the humans pov and eventually the vampire's. Tales of the Vampires neatly wraps up this five-six issue arc of one-shots. In that arc we did a Watchmen style storyline, where we saw the story from multiple pov's and multiple angles. This serves a purpose - even if it feels like we've gone off on a tangent - in that it not only brings the thematic arc into sharper focus, but it also provides a setting for the plot, a backstory, if it were. What Whedon has done here is do a little bit of world-building, he's colored in his background, and grounded us in the here and now of his world. This is what is happening and this is how people are perceiving it. It's what a film director does with a wide-angle lense, when he/she draws back from the closeup and shows the entire scene, then pulls further back still to show us the entire town, then back further to show us where the town is located. The bird's eye view. Hitchcock did it in The Birds. Orson Wells did it to great effect in Citzen Kane. And Whedon does it here with the Predators/Prey arc culminating in Tales of the Vampires - which on the service appears to be a comic that has nothing to do with Buffy S8 and is from another series entirely. Except, when you look at the producing credit - Executive Producer - Joss Whedon, and note what the story is about. It's about humans preferring and liking vampires and ostracizing slayers. It's about finding a connection through vampirism and, with a broad angle lense showing rather than telling, why that is a bad thing.
Just finished reading the latest Buffy S8 comic - "Tales of the Vampires: The Thrill". The heading makes me wonder if they plan on continuing this trend or if it is a one shot? They did do it before - with mixed results. Art is similar to the Spike/Dru Comic that fans loved so much (actually they didn't, I'm being sarcastic). Not fan of this particular style - I like hypo-realistic comic art. Abstract realism with bright colors - I can sort of do myself if I were so inclined, so I tend to be under-impressed and unmoved. It's not. But since I can do that - I don't tend to think much of it. But it's the trend right now. Seen this style a lot lately.
That said the art does work for the comic and the story, which is about disconnection and the feeling of being out of focus or out of step with your life. A common theme in the Buffyverse - I've been re-watching BTVS and Angel, just finished the Faith episodes This Year's Girl and Who Are You, which detail exactly what it is like to feel disconnected with life at least from a "slayer's" perspective. In some respects this comic reminded me a great deal of those episodes.
Jacob the main character...is bored, in a small town, and feels as if his life is going nowhere fast. He has a crush on his best friend, Alex, who he dreams is a vampire. (Turns out that she's actually a "slayer"). And to get a thrill, lets the local vamps suck on him. They don't kill him. Just take enough to give both a thrill. The metaphor is about drugs - and in case we don't get it, the mother even asks her son at one point - are you doing marijuana? One night Jacob meets May, a blond vampire. They flirt. Two days later, after he finally gets up the courage to ask Alex out for a date, he runs into the vamps he'd allowed to suck on him. This round he says no. Being vampires, they don't care and beat him up, then drain him dead. May turns him into a vampire. Three or four days later, he runs into Alex again. Alex slays May. Jacob figures out she's a slayer. And Jacob kills Alex, then asks if she wants him to turn her into a vampire like himself - so they can live together forever, have what he wants. His closing comment is "you're probably wondering what she will do, but it isn't about her choice, it's about my choice - it's about finally having the courage to feel something and wanting more. "
An on-going theme in the comics and Whedon's other works - the feeling of disconnection, yes, but also the desire to control.
What's the Buffy of it? How does it fit inside the arc? Well, it goes back to something DarkWillow states fairly accurately in Time of Your Life to Fray - for both of you, the most important people in your lives have been vampires or your greatest connection, ironically was to vampires. Of all the people that Buffy has been involved with during her lifetime - the two she was closest to, and who she may believe understood her the best, were Spike and Angel. She loses them both. But before she does - it is Spike (In S5 with the episodes preceeding The Gift, in S6 Afterlife through OMWF, in S7 Touched, Killer in Me, Chosen and End of Days) and Angel (Graduation Day and Surprise, and well Earshot), she confides in, who she tells her fears, who she allows her tough facade to fall in front of, who she lets inside, so to speak. And often to her regret. (It's ironic too that she does this..considering they are her sworn enemy.) Faith similarily does this with Angel - it is Angel who inspires Faith to reform not Buffy. In some ways Faith's experience with Angel, echoes Spike's with Buffy. And here, in this comic, Alex's experience with Jacob and vice versa. Taken further, into the future, Fray's experience/bond with her twin Harth - a vampire, who has her visions.
Buffy is not so different from Alex in this issue. The focus may well be on Jacob, but it is Alex who is the victim here, who wishes to connect, who is lost and alone, with no friends, and isolated in a society that loves vampires and hates the slayers who slay them. Another metaphor for how women are treated in society - men are in control, a powerful woman is frowned upon - the woman who doesn't fit what society thinks she should be, finds herself on the outskirts of it, demonized, wrong. Alex - who doesn't choose to be a slayer, unlike Jacob who does in a way decide to become a vampire - he who hangs out with...blah, blah. And Alex who does not get to choose to become a vampire, again that is Jacob. Alex chooses not to kill Jacob and she pays for it. Loving that which cannot love her. The connection she seeks is...dead. Jacob makes all the choices in their relationship, he controls it. But there is no connection and it is made clear that Jacob's actions are motivated primarily by his need to feel something, not by the fact that he actually does feel anything.
Buffy similarly loves dead things. When they follow her...it ends badly. And her friends, as she states on more than one occassion just can't understand, they don't know what it is like. Yet, as Web states in Conversations With Dead People - we all feel that way, we are all alone, until we die. Then, he states, we feel connected, connected to this great evil. Is he right? The contrast may well be Spike who tells her he went around the world to find the spark...the way to connect to humanity, his soul, which he hoped will make it possible for her to love him. The irony of course is that once he gets the soul, he realizes there is no way on earth that she could or more appropriately should.
Willow, similarily desperate for connection - gets it through magic. It rumbles through her veines and she feels everything. But is it real, or genuine? She seems if anything even more cut off from humanity.
In a day and age where connection appears to be as easy as picking up a cell phone or writing a post on the net, or texting on twitter, or facebook, connection is (again) ironically as fleeting if not more fleeting than it was in times past. Market research data suggests that people feel more isolated now with the computer and tv, then they did when they hung out on their front stoops chatting with their neighbors watching fireflies. We have too many choices, too much information, and too many outlets, we are constantly plugged into something - to the point, that we barely have time to actually appreciate those that we are with. Ask yourself how many times you check your cellphone when you are in class, at work, having dinner with a friend, on the street walking with people, or just with family hanging out? Or do you interrupt one call to take another? Everything is fast. That no connections can take root. They drift by, a blur.
Jacob wanted immediate connection, and failed to see what was in front of him. Alex. He could have built a lasting and real connection with Alex. Now whatever connection he creates, will not have been Alex's choice, and won't be real. His desire for immediate gratification, denied him the value of something deeper and more meaningful.
The connection is possible, but it requires hard work. And at times bitter disappointment, when it does not work. It can be sped along.
Overall, I enjoyed the comic. It does resonate with you and the art fits the pov. Also I think it works as a nice end note to the Predators/Prey arc - because here, once again, we are in the pov of both - predator and prey. They change sides. The vampires are both the predator and the prey here, just as are the slayers. It asks the question that was first posed at the start of the arc - which is which? Except unlike Harmonic Divergence and Swell - where we see it from the slayers pov, here we see it from the humans pov and eventually the vampire's. Tales of the Vampires neatly wraps up this five-six issue arc of one-shots. In that arc we did a Watchmen style storyline, where we saw the story from multiple pov's and multiple angles. This serves a purpose - even if it feels like we've gone off on a tangent - in that it not only brings the thematic arc into sharper focus, but it also provides a setting for the plot, a backstory, if it were. What Whedon has done here is do a little bit of world-building, he's colored in his background, and grounded us in the here and now of his world. This is what is happening and this is how people are perceiving it. It's what a film director does with a wide-angle lense, when he/she draws back from the closeup and shows the entire scene, then pulls further back still to show us the entire town, then back further to show us where the town is located. The bird's eye view. Hitchcock did it in The Birds. Orson Wells did it to great effect in Citzen Kane. And Whedon does it here with the Predators/Prey arc culminating in Tales of the Vampires - which on the service appears to be a comic that has nothing to do with Buffy S8 and is from another series entirely. Except, when you look at the producing credit - Executive Producer - Joss Whedon, and note what the story is about. It's about humans preferring and liking vampires and ostracizing slayers. It's about finding a connection through vampirism and, with a broad angle lense showing rather than telling, why that is a bad thing.
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Date: 2009-06-07 08:42 pm (UTC)I liked the fact that I couldn't tell right away what was happening, I realized the blonde was a vampire right away, but I hadn't realized that Jacob's thing was getting bit, or that that was what Alex was objecting to. And I didn't realize Alex was a slayer until toward the end, so they managed to give me some satisfying surprises.
I liked that they tied this to BtVS S8 by referencing Harmony's Reality Show...
and of course it makes it clear that there are probably a lot of new slayers who live out in rural areas who were never brought in to Buffy's orbit, and except for the dreams don't really know that much about their power.
I don't think 'Tales of the Vampire' works that well for a series, but I have really enjoyed all the 'Tales of the Slayer' books (and the one comic as well).