Top Of The Pile: Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Volume 6 - Retreat

Like many I was unimpressed with the calculated "accidental" leaking of the secret identity of this series' Big Bad 'Twilight'.

It's one of those things that once learned cannot be unlearned, so that now, as I read through the latest collected volume of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season Eight, I was no longer trying to piece together the clues whenever Twilight was in a scene, but instead just thinking "Does this work?"

Second guessing the authors of a supernatural mystery like this is never a healthy thing; it puts the reader on the backfoot and makes the reader-author dynamic slightly antagonistic. Surely that's not what Dark Horse were aiming for; I suspect their gambit was simply to drum up a bit of publicity and boost sales with the 'shock' revelation.

Then we have the problem with Georges Jeanty's slightly cartoonish/pseudo-manga style of art. I don't know if these issues were particularly rushed, but the lack of detailing in many of the panels makes it increasingly hard to tell one character from another; for instance, Dawn, Faith and about half-a-dozen random Slayers are virtually interchangeable - which made Xander's romantic sub-plot rather odd as I had no idea who he was meant to be snogging!

Then, there's the scene where the fleeing Slayers' submarine magically appears in front of a meditating figure and there's a dramatic close-up of the man's face... and again I had no idea who that was supposed to be. It turned out to be Oz, I discovered on the next page, but the dramatic moment had already been undermined.

Don't get me wrong, on the whole I like Jeanty's fast, slick, Japanese-influenced style; it's great for some things - like fight scenes, two-shots and (most) close-ups, but not so hot for others (such as the build-up to the central battle of this story arc, where the forces of the enemy are just indistinct, nebulous blobs and it's only when they got close I saw they were 'simply' human soldiers, rather than demons or monsters).

Writer Jane Espenson brings some welcome levity back to the Season Eight storyline, with this collection of issues seeing the global conglomeration of Slayers forced into retreat by Twilight's forces and taking shelter in Tibet with Oz. They discover that the Big Bad has been able to track them by the concentration of magic around them and so they - slightly unconvincingly - decide to surrender their magical powers and rely on brute strength, skill and caches of firearms.

Problems aside (as detailed above), I've come to embrace the fact that having migrated to comics, Buffy The Vampire Slayer has, increasingly, become a superhero comic, with all the attendant tropes, and this story arc really plays to those strengths.

It may have sounded like I was moaning a lot, but - despite being pulled out of the moment every so often by the erratic artwork and my annoyance at knowing the central big secret before it has actually been revealed in the comic - the series is very involving and exciting and reminds me why I always enjoyed Buffy The Vampire Slayer's world on television: when done right, it could go anywhere and take you along for the ride.