No Future For You
Time again for yet another review; don’t know if it’s been noticed yet but I tend to focus more on the story telling in a comic than the art work. Not in any way shape or form do I deny the importance of art in comics. I mean without the work of talented artist and colorists we wouldn’t have a book. I also know of many series that have crashed and burned because it fell into the wrong artist hands. I just more often than not don’t have a way of discussing the artwork. Hell, I focused on English and literary works in school and although I’ve taken a few art classes I don’t consider myself enough of an expert to go into too much heavy evaluation; except when something is exceptional in one way or another.
I can say this about the art work so far in Buffy Season Eight the characters are well defined. You can clearly see the actors defined in every frame and it makes it feel more like an episode of the show. Also the dark tones of the coloring make the books kind of creepy nature stand out. I’ve also loved all the covers by Ju Chen.
Now that I got that off my chest; I wanted to focus on one of the stories that was revealed this season. It actually went through a couple of books. I’m talking about the No Future For You storyline that went from issues 6 – 9. To start I was totally excited when I heard about this story. I’d read the interviews with Brian Vaughan and Joss on Comic Book Resource and looked at the preview pages impatiently waiting for it to come out.
The story is focused on Faith who’s pretty much become the wet works agent of the slayers. She kills the demons and baddies no one else can handle. After an assignment where she has to take out a vampire family she gets a visit from Giles who has a new assignment for her. One that comes with a bonus of getting to get out of the business with a free pass to anywhere she wants to go all expenses paid. All Faith has to do is take out a slayer who’s teamed up with the big bad the Twilight and is killing other slayers.
This slayer is a respected heiress in the British Isles and therefore to get close to her Faith gets a little training on how to be a proper lady, Eliza Doolittle style. Training only lasts about two pages in which Giles reveals that yes he too once was bad; the whole tattoo summing a demon thing. I think this is where the problem starts for me, I know you can’t fit everything into a story I mean as it is this is four books, but for how the book ends with Faith and Giles going off together I think I needed a little more story there.
That’s the main issue I have with this story. It feels like there were big parts left out. Genevieve (the rouge slayer Faith’s sent to kill) and Faith’s bonding falls easy enough. The fight between Faith and Buffy also is OK. I mean who doesn’t love to see these two go at it. When it finished though it the whole Giles secrecy and split from Buffy and the gang seemed off. It just seemed like there should have been another piece to the story; some kind of conflict between Buffy and Giles prior to all this going down.
I do have one thing more to say. I loved that in the final book they brought back the Mayor even if it was in a flashback. I’ve always wondered how Faith viewed her relationship with him and it was nice to have some answers about that. It also helped with Faith’s decision at the end to go and try and counsel and reach out to some of the possible lost slayers out there.
All in all not a bad book it just felt like something was missing. Hopefully that’s something that can be expanded upon in the future.