Fans of Buffy have suffered another blow this week, with the publication of the last issue of the official Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Angel bi-monthly magazine. This has been on the cards since the magazine went bi-monthly and combined its content (previously Angel and Buffy were separate magazines).To be honest, most of the content was fluff about the actors and - in most cases - their floundering careers or quizzes that wouldn't have looked out of place in a pre-teen mag; but every so often there was something new and exciting: this issue, for instance, has a feature interview on the Buffy Season 8 comic book's awesome cover artist Jo Chen.
I'm surprised the title managed to run to 94 issues, although I am sorry for the staff that they couldn't reach the landmark 100, but given the lack of quality "expanded universe" Buffy material being regularly produced, it's no wonder that the mag was reduced to pretty much interviewing the same actors over and over again (I'm surprised they didn't just give James Marsters his own column!).
Perhaps if they had published articles on, or scenarios for, the Buffy roleplaying game from Eden Studios, or been slightly more critical in their reviews of the spin-off novels, they might have kept their readership up (or, at least, helped to keep the excellent, but now defunct, roleplaying game alive).
Of course, these days, if you want to keep abreast of what your favourite ex-Buffy stars are up, there's a million and one websites and podcasts out there with this information for free, but still there's nothing quite like laying in the garden on a hot summer's day flicking through a glossy, dead-tree magazine full of pictures of monsters and hotties.
A sad day, but not a great shock. Perhaps this will free Titan staff up to produce some different genre titles - if they can justify a Grey's Anatomy magazine and a Prison Break magazine, there's no telling what will be appearing next on the shelves!
However, most Titan titles are now quarterly anyway, (plus two 'year books', which are invariably reprints of articles from back issues), making their news content almost meaningless - so perhaps the Internet has killed off this young niche of professional 'fan' magazines.
I suspect Star Wars is their main earner - as they've now picked up the rights to combine their title with the American Stars Wars Insider (the official voice of the Star Wars fan club), so it would be a shame if the other titles collapsed and took Star Wars Insider with it - being the only one of their titles I read regularly that is always full of quality news, fiction, new and rare photographs etc
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