[CBRC] Buffy: Season 9 #7
ok sorry for the delay; couldn't find this anywhere for ages.
gonna do this nermy style
The Good: The artwork for the Buffy comics since season 8 has been consistently pretty good, never terrible, and occasionally wonderful. This is a pretty great issue for art. Everything is clear and characters well-differentiated from each other, which is helpful when you have plainclothes cops and characters in general who don't have distinctive costumes. I also like the little filmic touches like "inserts" things in people's hands or things happening. As usual, some fine dialogue, as well as some Buffy-speak that seems a little flat in text form. And the "twist" at the very end
was hilarious and extremely clever, but it's hard to judge when we so don't know where it's going.
The Bad: I'm not in love with this chapter of the story -- Buffy's pregnancy -- but it is bringing out some nice character beats and isn't completely terrible AND thankfully seems to be over (or at least changing gears!) pretty summarily. It's just felt very Movie Of The Week, without the usual self-awareness and clever subversion Buffy is known for. (Well, it is pretty well subverted by the end reveal, but still, we've spent two months with a bun in our collective oven, and it's felt pretty weird.) Overall, I'm enjoying the story of season 9 so far, I just don't think it's been plotted particularly well, and this issue's no exception, still feeling slow-moving even with a massive "zompire" setpiece in the middle. Also, we're still frustratingly in the dark about a lot of things that have happened, like Spike's spaceship manned by giant bugs. Annoyingly, it feels like a lot of the characters haven't even asked the simple questions (reminds me of how nobody would ever ask a simple, direct, relevant question on Lost). Also, no Willow this week, which is good and bad: good because she's been kind of a brat since the Seed was destroyed; bad because she's pretty much our only source for news and information on a post-Seed world.
The Ugly: Nothing ugly in this issue, really, except for one panel that inexplicably makes Spike look older than he ever looked on the show, which is odd -- the age of the actor is finally not an issue, and he looked like a mid-forties dad.
Rating: 7.5/10 - nothing really bad, but some lingering frustrations, most of which aren't this particular issue's fault.
