Buffy # 6 And The Passing References

As much as I enjoyed Joss Whedon's first five issues of the Buffy Season Eight comic series, I'm starting to wonder if I may just end up liking Brian K. Vaughan's even more! If BKV's first issue, # 6's "No Future For You Part 1," is anything to go by, it looks like he's going to yank the ball right out of the park, just as he does every month in his excellent Ex Machina series.

There's just something about the "other" slayer Faith that's always made her intrinsically more interesting to me than Buffy ever was. Whedon and crew did a great job of adding some figurative meat to the little blonde bombshell's personality over her seven TV seasons, but Faith was intriguing from the moment she arrived on the scene. And her rehabilitation, in the second (?) season of Angel, brought her back into the Scooby fold without diluting her rebelliousness or in-your-face attitude. I've always thought that Faith provided the BtVS writers with a canvas on which to draw the pictures they didn't dare tackle with Buffy, and they've really made the most of that opportunity over the years. I suspect we'll see more of the same in this arc.

Here, Vaughan does an impressive job capturing the voices of both Faith and former Watcher Rupert Giles. I can actually hear the characters speaking in this issue, moreso than even in the Joss Whedon stories that kicked the series off. The interior art is good, although it only occasionally captures the alternate slayer's eyes, which are certainly *ahem* among her more identifiable features. The spray-painting cover by Jo Chen (shown above), on the other hand, totally nails Faith (and I'm not even going to touch that line... I'm a happily-married man, after all!)

While the entire setup is unashamedly a send-up of My Fair Lady, the book is absolutely riddled with plenty more of the traditional pop culture references we've come to know and love from the Buffyverse. I won't attempt to note them all, but my favourites included:

• Invoking the augers of "the great bearded wizard of Northampton" which can only be a nod in the general direction of incomparable comic scribe Alan Moore
• Use of "You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat" as attributed to a "wise man," known to many as Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd (and The Wall) fame
• Faith's misinterpretation of "subterfuge and cunning" as instruction to "go downtown on this chick" (perhaps she thought Giles was calling for a Cunning Linguist?)
• Xander's comparison of himself to Escape from New York's Snake Plissken as he ruthlessly intimidated a punching bag
• One-eyed Xander further pandering to the pop cultists by calling his shabby workout area "the ol' Danger Room," as if he were perhaps another X-adorned hero, Prof Xavier himself

All in all, this comic was a joy to read, and my eagerness for the rest of the story can only be classified as "five by five."