Otherwise I get bored during the wait times, and I miss the full impact of what’s really going on.

Love, C.

*chuckles* Of course, if you don’t mind waiting, the collections can also be ordered from your friendly local book seller (my preferred route for most of this stuff. It takes longer than Barnes and Nobles or Amazon, but any FLBS who will take my orders without snarking at me? They are friendly enough to deserve my business.)

Your tips are excellent, but as I’m not what you’d call a comix consumer, therefore not a customer, that probably won’t work in this market where people are so frenzied that I can’t even get to the racks to just browse, so many are the customers at any old time of the day, the week, the month.

And I’m not an e-bay person either.

So I depend on serendipity, I guess.

Love, C.

There’s a couple routes to getting comics like this one. My local friendly comic book store (and they are actually quite friendly.) Actually still has copies of all 12 issues. Dark Horse seems to be printing compiled editions for each set of five books (one 4 part plus a stand alone I suspect.) As with any well loved setting with a large fan base, I also suspect that about 5 minutes with google on a non-dialup connection would find a torrent of whatever format the fans have scanned these books into (usually pdf or jpg.) Then there’s Amazon and Ebay, both of which frequently have sellers offering most any comic book you are looking for. (That’s actually how I generally got comics I was interested in when I lived in rural Indiana.)

I’m probably going to start putting the Buffy trades on my library purchase request list, not because I don’t own them, but so that other people will be more likely to find them.

Are you sure you wanted to post to this old thread or to the new entry re Season 8 that I posted today?

There is nothing at all wrong with you posting here, not at all!

It’s just that probably no one will see it because this is old — I just saw it because we get auto notice of any comment that posts to our entries.

Your first time around the Buffy-verse …. I’ve done it 4 times now. Maybe not any more. And Season 8 has been beyond my possession. I’ve never figured out this comix buying thang, since I’m not that much a fan.

There are some special ones that I can sometimes get complete runs of from the library when I find out they exist, so it’s not as though I don’t respect the form.

Love, C.

I love the fall of Willow as documented through seasons 5 and 6, it felt entirely in character, even if it was really painful to watch her betraying Tara. Tara’s death on the other hand, it was very poorly done.

Seven had some filler in it, which was especially unfortunate since the last 7 or so episodes felt very compressed to me. My biggest problem with 7 was the lead up to the end. We’ve got a fair amount of betrayal without any confrontation, with minimal remorse, and without even a strong sense of “We’re going to deal with this when everything is done.” (Which is supported by the season 8 comics. They really don’t end up facing what they did to each other, at least not through issue 11.

More on the ending to 7 and why it wasn’t the betrayal that bothered me, but the reactions to it.
I’m not really sure that Willow deserves the “Did I ever tell you about my best friend?” line in issue 4.

I have noticed that Whedon does occasionally use singe note deaths in places where they are not effective story tools.

And Dawn, and the additional complications of having this additional member of the family, that wouldn’t be there except under these super mystical circumstances.

Personally? I suspect that Joyce’s brain troubles came about with the massive alterations of a mother’s memories. Joyce’s brain death, so to speak, was just one part of the price paid by the Summers for the monks’ plan to keep Glory from getting back to her own universe and destroying all the dimensional boundaries between universes on the way.

I’ve not see that suggested by anyone else though ….

My problem with all this, is if that order possessed that much power to so drastically, impeccably and meticulously change the reality of so very many people’s memory and create such a whole human as Dawn, couldn’t they have come up with another solution other than burdening poor over-burdened Buffy even more?

Yes, this was the season that Whedon and Co. decided the love interest had to be family — and more adult responsibilities.

I resisted like crazy the first time around. But now it feels so right. And brilliant.

That others feel otherwise makes for horseraces and interesting dinner conversation.

Love, C.

Inadequate setup: Yes, Joyce had battled cancer several episodes earlier, but as far as we knew she’d beaten it. Joss should’ve led into it; we should have seen Joyce failing over the course of several episodes, until finally she dies.

How long would it have taken to build up? Not long. I’ve heard about people go from having no symptoms other than a persistent cough, to death, within six weeks.

Joss made the same mistake in Serenity.

Reproduced the boring parts of the grieving process: Everybody standing around shellshocked wondering what happened and what they’re going to do next. Yes, that’s realistic, but it doesn’t make for compelling TV.

And, yes, I realize I’m in a tiny minority among Buffy fans for disliking that episode. And if anybody loved it, I hope they’re not offended by my harsh remarks, this is entirely subjective.

I LOVE the Mayor; Groener clearly had fun playing that part.

They all talked too long though. The First really loved to hear itself go on and on.

Love, C.