Comic Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer #16

[jakebe]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #16
Time of Your Life, Part 1


This is the arc that ties the original Buffy crew to the universe of Fray, the comic that Joss wrote after the series ended. I know this is supposed to make me positively vomit with glee, but I never read the thing, so I just can’t get that excited about it. Though I am secretly hoping that Fray’s demon Watcher makes an appearance at some point.

There’s an awful lot going on in this issue. Willow decides to head to New York with Buffy after she gets a tip from a mysterious snake-woman-demon she may or may not be romantically involved with. Buffy herself meets with some mysterious party after she arrives there, while Willow reunites with Kennedy. Meanwhile, Dawn turns into a centaur, Warren and Amy create some kind of mystical bomb for Twilight, and the castle in Scotland gets blown to smithereens. The last two are probably connected.

Xander wins for being the most awesome character two issues in a row. After telling off Dracula at the end of “Wolves at the Gate,” he takes Dawn to task for complaining about being a centaur…in the nicest possible way. Even still, the thin-skinned cry-baby is back and she gallops off in a huff. It’s always two steps forward, one step back for Buffy’s little sister. If I were a centaur, maybe I would miss being able to climb ladders a little bit, but on the whole I’d think it were a positive development.

Anyway, now we know that whatever’s happened to Dawn has three stages, the centaur of which is the middle one. Dawn’s arc has been mostly background, but we’ve picked up little bits along the way: the way things really went down with the thrice-wise isn’t the way she’s saying to everyone it went down, and I think we even might have an idea who this other party in question might be. I’m not entirely sure, and I’m not going to go back to check, but with the way things are progressing it might be safe to say Dawn’s angle will be tied up just in time for everyone to focus on Twilight.

Speaking of which, Twilight takes the fight to the Slayers in a pretty big way, blowing up HQ in a grand, green-glowy fashion. We don’t know much about the bomb, besides the fact that it works. Amy and Warren worked really hard on it, and it was covered in sigils, candles and skulls before it flew off to Scotland. We also know that Xander and Dawn managed to escape the worst of its effects. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the bomb turned all of the Slayers into hyper-powered undead? Obviously, it doesn’t just stop with killing everyone. Twilight (and Joss) is far too sinister for that.

The exchange between Buffy and Willow and Kennedy is all gold. Willow’s really come into her own this season, and she’s my favorite expression of feminine empowerment so far. Buffy at least learns to loosen up enough to enjoy her first trip to the Big Apple. It’s kind of neat to see this Valley girl totally enthralled with the City That Never Sleeps. Witty cynicism is pretty nice, but it doesn’t age too well.

The issue is bookended by what promises to be a pretty decent fight between Buffy and Fray, which sucks you in to the comic and keeps you hooked for the next issue. Or at least, it’s supposed to. I’m a terrible, crappy Buffy fan, so this meeting of the titans doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.

Rating: 8/10