So Buffy’s back. I find it feels wrong to be reading a TV show in comic book form, but I convince myself that it’s not a comic about a TV show, it’s a new, unfilmed season, which is how it’s been billed, anyway. It picks up the plot from the finale of the show, and Joss Whedon wrote it. Regardless, the “season premier” is good. If you know and like the characters, you’ll like this.
As the Newsarama blog points out, TV Squad is covering the series just like it were still on TV, and in their writeup of the first issue they make an interesting observation:
The pace of a small comic book is certainly going to be very different than a TV episode. In fact, from cover to cover, this issue’s pace to me felt very much like the cold open of a TV episode; I could almost hear the familiar wolf howl after the last page.
If you’ve been reading comics for the past few years, this isn’t a revelation (especially if you’re used to Marvel’s “decompressed” style where it took four issues of Ultimate Spider-Man to cover the one page origin from the original). What’s interesting is how easy the new Buffy comic makes it to compare the general amount of content you get in one TV episode versus one issue of a comic. An issue of a comic book takes about 15 minutes to read, depending on how wordy it is. Your typical story arc lasts 3-6 issues, meaning on average you get about an hour of content per story, the same as a TV show. But comics take a month to draw, so you do a lot of waiting for that story. On the other hand, as TV Squad points out, there’s no special effects budget to worry about, nor is there a limit to how many sets you can build, so there are fewer limitations on the storytelling.