Buffy Summers: Party Slayer: Review Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #1

Fun Fact Of The Day: today, I discovered that my taste in classical music runs toward pieces that involve string instruments, restrained use of the woodwind family, and, are actually Led Zeppelin. Mostly the latter, actually. I determined this during a brief, but abortive attempt at cultivating a taste for classical music while trapped in traffic gridlock on the I-95 corridor. This may not have been the best time to make the attempt, but it’s not like I had anything better to do. I was trapped in a sedan sandwich between what appeared to be a head made mostly of cell phone in front of me and a morbidly obese individual in a Toyota Yaris who seemed to have dozed off in back of me. He would appear to wake every now and again to shovel a fistful of Funyuns down his head and then drop right back to sleep. It was fascinating except for that part where I worried he’d lose control over the brake pedal and smash me into Funyun dusted road pizza. I needed something to distract me.

There are seven television seasons that one could point to in the Buffy-verse as being “Classic Buffy”, as opposed to the comic book Season 8, which I consider to be “New Coke Buffy”. I wanted to like it, but even Whedon has said in interviews that by the end of Season 8 things needed to be reined back in and brought back to basics. But hey, sometimes, you just have to try. For every instance of “No, I think I need something that rocks a little harder than Mr. Vivaldi here”, there is also an “anything goes” reverting back to “basics/world with no magic”. Sometimes the classic is better.

A Dose Of The Sticky Green Rings

Heidi MacDonald at Comics Beat got her hands on an email from DC Comics saying that some percentage of copies of Green Lantern #1, which came out this past Wednesday, are being recalled for replacement due to a printing error that dropped a big, ugly-looking green loop on the cover, making Sinestro look like he’s rocking a raging dose of Oan Face Herpes:

Batman, Robin and Curly Joe: Batman & Robin #1 Review

We’re only halfway into the four-week reveal of DC’s New 52, so it might be a little early to say this about any particular book, but I’ll say it anyway: I firmly believe that Batman & Robin was only released because “New 52” sounds catchier than “New 51”.

This book tries to be all things to everyone who ever read a Batman comic book. And while that might be a noble goal for some marketing drone slavering over the idea of thousands of non-comic geeks stumbling into comic stores to “check out that new blasphemous, hipster douchebag Superman I keep hearing about,” for an actual comic reader, it leads to an uneven, schizophrenic read that can’t seem to decide what it wants to be.

After an introductary action sequence where a new villain, Nobody… no, HE’S Nobody… the name of the bad guy is Nobody… um, third base? Anyway, there’s a new bad guy. Nobody. He’s invisible. Spoilers. Yeah.

The book proper opens with a reproduction of the parlor from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One where Bruce Wayne told his father’s memory that he would become a bat. Which for a rebooted Batman story isn’t a bad place to start, and God knows that last week’s Detective Comics #1 did itself a solid referencing Miller’s classic look…

And two pages later? Batpoles.

The Nightwatchman Moonlights

The first big Comic-Con announcement, on preview night, was that Dark Horse Comics was planning to publish Orchid, a comic written by Tom Morello, the lead guitarist for Audioslave and Rage Against The Machine, which led most if us there at the time to take in a sharp breath and remark: “I hung around the Dark Horse booth for an hour to hear an announcement that didn’t include the words ‘Buffy’, ‘Sin’ or ‘City’?”

Dial ahead two months and Dark Horse has released a six-page preview of the first issue of a book they’re hyping as “the tale of a teenage prostitute who learns that she is more than the role society has imposed upon her.” Oh, Dark Horse… you had me at “teenage prostitute.” And so did the Internet. Be right back…