Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
When Sarah Michelle Geller burst onto the television screens in 1997 as Buffy Summers, the reluctant Vampire Slayer who typified a growing confidence in women being given meaty roles, a whole generation of viewers were hooked. In the days before the genre seemed to become over saturated with young girls fighting off the attentions of vampires who wanted to kill them or romance them, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a breath of fresh air in a field that had become tired and almost mundane, so mundane that even comedy pastiches were as tired and anaemic as a Vampire at a N.H.S. transfusion run on the day when nobody is around to give a pint.
Dark Horse comics, arguably the thinking readers’ graphic novel makers during the latter decade and a half of the 20th Century had already had success with tying into the art world the films Alien and Predator now added Joss Whedon’s heroine to the roster and in the stories that make up Omnibus One, what may have been missing from the television series, which admittedly was not a lot, was soon rectified with some great stories that captured the very heart of what made the programme so popular.
Unlike the Alien and Predator stories, which to this day still stand up as graphic novels of note and brilliance, this is an omnibus that could introduce young fans to the world of the graphic novel in a way that perhaps in recent years only the likes of Sin City and V For Vendetta could attract. It also introduced a hero who wasn’t drawn and inked as a cross between an Amazon Queen, the brutality of a commando making their way through a 100 miles of carefully laid landmines and a beauty queen on a date. The artists framed the idea of Sarah Michelle Geller perfectly as the spoilt young rich kid who becomes the next chosen one. They capture the spirit of the television programme perfectly and in stories such as Buffy: The Origin, which was adapted from Joss Whedon’s original screenplay, the excellent Viva Las Buffy and Slayer Interrupted, the hero is within easy reach and someone that you cannot help but care about.
Throughout it all give the readers they can more easily identify with than perhaps even Dark Horse, or indeed Marvel and D.C. Comics could have ever hoped to have done. Whether this was because Joss Whedon had made such an unforgettable and interesting character, full of flaws, spoilt, damaged but intensely loyal and so much spark in her she could get a disused power station up and running with a single quip of pouted look, is up for debate however there should be no doubting that Joss Whedon has managed to do that with almost anything he has attempted to put on screen.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Volume 1 is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall