The Slayer Rises

EW's got an article about next year's Buffy the Vampire Slayer psuedo-eighth-season comic series, started and then overseen by series-mastermind Joss Whedon. I am pretty much gonna quote the entire article, cuz I'm that big a geek. But EW's got more images from the comic itself if you read it over there.

The goods on the comics run:

"Whedon, 42, is running the comic as if it were a TV show; after writing the first four issues (a premise-establishing pilot), he'll oversee other scribes who will write the remaining issues (think: episodes) in what is planned to be 25-to-30-issue saga. ''We're calling it season 8,'' says Whedon, ''and we're picking up almost right after season seven left off. I don't know exactly why it or how it happened. I just thought, 'Oh, I could do that! It would be fun!' It happens to me every now and then, and causes me to commit to things I really don't have time for.'"

On where we'll find our Slayer after the TV show's finale:

"'Not so much with the freedom,'' quips Whedon. ''Not that everything is dire and angsty and season six-y, But she's dealing with the consequences of having empowered thousands of girls around the world. She may have closed the Hellmouth under Sunnydale and defeated The First. But evil? Still rampant!''

In the Buffy spin-off TV series Angel, it was established that the Slayer was living in Italy and dating. The new comic fleshes out her time abroad, ''as we want to keep everything canon and in line with the shows. But right now, she's out of the country and training a new squadron of Slayers.'' Whedon had once discussed the idea of a spin-off TV series unofficially titled Slayer School, and he says the comic will include some of those ideas. ''There will be some new slayers that you'll meet, and by the second issue, you'll find out there are different camps across the world being run by various characters that fans will know. The comic focuses a lot on this new generation of slayers — the problems they will face, and the problems they will cause.'"

Xander?

"How's Xander doing with his one eye? ''He's still got one, and if he can hold onto that one, he's golden. '' Will he be dealing with the ramifications of the death in the series finale of gal pal Anya? ''Well, yes, but not in the way you think. It is not the next day. A lot of time has passed for the fans, a lot of time has passed for me, and you can't pretend that no time has passed for the characters. We're keeping with the original mandate of the series: The audience has to identify with the characters. And time has passed. So we find them anew and have to relearn them. Buffy is in an odd place at a different part of her life. It's like we're sitting down to chat for the first time in a long while. There's a lot to catch up on.''"

And my old flame, Willow?

"'Well, what Willow is up to is not revealed right away, but she will show up. But I just got the cover of the first issue she appears,'' Whedon teases, ''and all I'll say is that it's awesome.'"

Also, Joss on where his adaptation of Wonder Woman stands at the moment:

''Everything that was hard at the beginning is still hard. I don't feel like I've nailed it yet, and I think the studio agrees. So I'm still plugging away. It's probably not as hard as I think it is, because I'm still a little fired from my TV decade. I should have taken a year off. It's now too late to realize that. But it's a big job. And besides her great origin story, there's nothing from the comics that felt right 100 percent, no iconic canon story that must be told. Batman has it made — he's got the greatest rogues gallery ever, he's got Gotham City. The Bat writes himself. With Wonder Woman, you're writing from whole cloth, but trying to make to feel like you didn't. To make to feel like it's existed for 60 years, even though you're making it up as you go along. But who she, and what the movie, is about, thematically, has never been a problem for me. But the steps along the way, it could be so easy for them to feel wrong. I won't settle. She wouldn't let me settle.''

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