Genre Jumping

I thought I'd posted previously about how Joss Whedon made the announcement awhile back that he was going to use the comic book format to provide fans with Season 8 of The Adventures of Buffy, Vampire-Killing Girl. And yet now I can't find a reference to any such post, so apparently it doesn't exist except inside my brain (or I just can't search worth a damn, which is also a possibility). Anyway, I'm sure you're all well aware of that particular bit of old news, and if not, you can either do a quick search or read the Dark Horse Comics write-up of the first issue here.

The comic was at one point scheduled to start up this Wednesday, but now it's pushed back a week to March 14. I'm quite sure I'd have had no interest in the series were it not for watching all seven seasons on DVD, courtesy of Tammy. As it is, I'm looking forward to it, in order to see what Joss has up his sleeve for the Scooby gang following that big mashup at the end of Season 7. I'll probably have some or all of the Angel TV series spoiled for me - haven't gotten around to watching it yet! - but whatever. None of that's really germaine to this blog entry.

What's interesting to me about this whole sequence of events is that it's an example of something jumping genres, with a twist. Genre jumping's far from rare, as we see comic book characters making their way to TV and movies all the time, as well as TV shows getting turned into movies (The Simpsons Movie being a current example) and movies and TV shows being adapted in comic or book form, etc. But there's generally an assumption, in all of those cases, of some loss of continuity. One of the most famous examples of this revolved around the stories presented, in book and comic form, which were based on the events of the first three Star Wars movies. Much hue and cry went up from fans whenever a new movie would come out and contradict something written in one of the books or the Marvel comic series, and invariably the response from Lucas or his representatives was, "Only the movies are canon!" In other words, "We'll happily take your money by cranking out all kinds of supplementary material as fast as we can, but don't expect us to treat any of it as gospel later!" That approach always bugged me, because I like to read stories as if they exist in a world of their own. I don't care if they contradict what we know of the real world; but for God's sake, at least make them internally consistent! Anything less is lazy, or a money grab, or both! When DC Comics did their short-lived Babylon 5 comic series, there was at least a serious attempt made to keep their events in-continuity, right to the point of unintentionally revealing a spoiler when an issue arrived earlier than expected and gave away a major plot twist before it happened on the TV show!

All of which is a long way around saying, I like what Whedon's trying to do here. He's telling everyone this is Season 8 of Buffy! And as such, I'd think that the vast majority of the fans of the TV show would want to own this series (or at least read it), meaning that it should sell in numbers that would put most contemporary comic series to shame. I haven't heard any pre-sales figures yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it sold in the several hundreds of thousands (a great series today is one that breaks 100,000 copies) by the time it's been collected in trade paperback form. Possibly I'm over-estimating its popularity, but if so, that's got to have more to do with lack of promotion than anything else. I can't believe most Buffy fans would resist the idea of buying comics, considering all of the comic references in the show, and in the DVD extras for the various seasons. So I see this as a very smart move, and a nice one to do for the fans. Win-win, in other words. And hopefully if a big- (or small-) screen Buffy movie ever gets made, this Season 8 won't be forgotten or tossed aside.

Now I just hope it's a good comic series...