Buffy Season 8: The Long Way Home

Buffy Season 8: The Long Way Home (2007) Joss Whedon, Georges Jeanty

I love Buffy. Buffy is what made me check out Firefly, and I love Firefly more than almost anything ever on TV.

The Long Way Home takes up after the end of Season 7. Sunnydale is destroyed, every slayer with potential is now a full slayer, and these slayers are now organized into groups all over the world, to take out demons as they find them. Unfortunately for Buffy, others know about her and want to take her out, for a variety of reasons. In the meantime, we get to spend time with our favorite characters (for me, that would be Xander. So cute!).

We also revisit some old enemies and meet some new enemies. (Because there is always a new big bad every season.)

Of course the flow of a comic is very different from the flow of a TV show. There is a lot less dialog, and a lot more reading between the lines. So there is a transition as you try and get used to the new format, which takes a bit. I’ll definitely have to read through a second time, paying more attention as I go (My first read through of every coming tends to be very fast, and this was worse than normal, as I meant only to browse through the book (it arrived today) and then spend time reading it this weekend. Unfortunately, as soon as I started browsing I was hooked and had to finish. (This was unfortunate, because I’d twisted around to get a different book, decided to grab The Long Way Home quickly to browse through it, and then ended up reading the first 20 pages while sitting at a strange angle because I thought I was just going to set it right back down.

So how did The Long Way Home fit into the Buffy series? As I said, it’s a change. If you don’t read comics, then it may be a difficult adjustment. If you read comics, then the adjustment should be far easier. The one thing I didn’t like in the change of format is that we don’t get to spend a lot of time with any one character, so the feeling of the comic is different from the TV series. It also takes longer to learn about what has been happening to the characters, because not only are we curious about what has been happening, the story also has to move forward immediately. Which makes sense for a comic, but as a fan of the show, one wants to spend just finding out how everyone has been doing.

But is it worth it? Hell yeah. We got more Buffy, Xander, and Willow! What could be better? Additionally, there are things that can be done in the comic form far more easily than on TV. For instance, we get to see “&@#%ing” instead of some milder comment. Which all things considered makes a lot more sense. We also get things that might not be as easily done in TV, including lots of monsters, and, well, then there’s Dawn.

So if you’re a Buffy fan whose already a comic reader, then you’ll want to pick up The Long Way Home, and you’l probably love it right off the bat. If you’re a Buffy fan who is not a comic reader, you’ll want to lower your expectations before reading The Long Way Home. The format is very different, and takes some adjustment. If you expect it to be just like the TV series, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you recognize that a different medium requires a different approach, then you should be able to enjoy it.
Rating: 7/10

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