Sunnydale Tweets

Sunnydale Tweets is an acting troupe that’s performing Buffy the Vampire Slayer over Twitter in real time. They’re about to start season four. The Twitter account @sunnydaletweets is friends with all of the players if you want to follow along.

Joss Whedon on Dollhouse and Buffy Comics

In an interview on Complex.com, Joss Whedon talks about Dollhouse and a few other things, including confirming that there will be a “season nine” of Buffy in comics once season eight finishes, and that comic book artist John Cassaday will direct a Dollhouse episode.

Epitaph One

The 13th episode of Dollhouse, which Fox didn’t air, is now available on iTunes.

Rough Draft - The Original of Buffy

Neat article on the original movie Buffy versus the series. There aren’t many other cases where you can see how a screenplay can get mangled as it becomes a movie and then compared it to a TV series where the creator was able to bring it to life. The American President and The West Wing come to mind. Comments are open if anyone has other examples.

Will Fox Air Dollhouse's Final Episode or Not? - E! Online

Will Fox Air Dollhouse’s Final Episode or Not?

Fairly confusing, but at least it’s not cancelled (yet).

The Terrific, Tragic Origin of Dr. Horrible

I know, I know, I can’t stop talking about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Bear with me for a minute.

Star Wars started in the middle of its tale, and did it brilliantly. Did you really need to know how Darth Vader became a bad guy? No, the movies were perfect just as they were, starting with part four. Certainly the prequels could have been better, but no matter what story they told, they still end with Darth Vader becoming the villain, which you figure out pretty quickly in the very first scene of the original movie. Why bother telling the whole story when you can just tell the interesting stuff and leave the rest to your the imagination?

Lost has just gotten through a similar problem. When the show started out, the flashback sequences were a great format that gave you background about the character that contrasted with what was going on the present. But once you know that Charlie is a failed rock star and junkie, how many more episodes do you need to see of his pathetic life? Again, just give us enough to know what’s going on. Fan fiction writers will will in the rest.

Dr. Horrible gives us a neat spin on this. We see how a small time crook becomes the mighty Dr. Horrible, but we never see who he is afterwards. Maybe he becomes the leader of the Evil League of Evil. Maybe he really does take over the world. It’s like Joss Whedon just gave us Bruce Wayne’s training on the mountain and cut out the context where he becomes Batman. We get Dr. Horrible’s tragic rise to power, and then a fade to black instead of the rest of the picture. Sure, he could probably go back and make the rest of the movie, but why bother when he’s already shot the good parts?

Dr. Horrible

Dr. Horrible

Act I is out today. II and III will be Thursday and Saturday.

Captain Hammer: Be Like Me! Nemesis of Dr. Horrible

Captain Hammer: Be Like Me! Nemesis of Dr. Horrible

By Zack Whedon, a tie-in to Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Sugarshock 2

Sugarshock 2

Join MySpace & Dark Horse Comics for a historic comic book experience online. DHP is now MYSPACE DARK HORSE PRESENTS! MySpace dark horse presents features the best writers & artists in comics creating original work - all for free exclusively on MySpace…

Sugarshock 1

Sugarshock 1

Join MySpace & Dark Horse Comics for a historic comic book experience online. DHP is now MYSPACE DARK HORSE PRESENTS! MySpace dark horse presents features the best writers & artists in comics creating original work - all for free exclusively on MySpace…

Whedon Readies Sci-Fi Web Musical, Dr. Horrible | The Underwire from Wired.com

This article gave me a case of the vapors. Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion starring in a web musical written by Joss Whedon.

Buffy 12

This week’s Buffy had a pretty shocking reveal early on in the story. The New York Times has the spoilers and some words from Whedon.

Update: a longer interview with Whedon. One with editor Scott Allie.

New Joss Whedon Series: Dollhouse

Variety and Entertainment Weekly report that Joss Whedon will develop a series called Dollhouse for Fox that, barring a writer’s strike, will go into production next year for the fall season. Seven episodes will be produced initially, starring Eliza Dushku in a concept that’s pure Philip K. Dick:

Dollhouse follows a top-secret world of people programmed with different personalities, abilities and memories depending on their mission.

After each assignment—which can be physical, romantic or even illegal—the characters have their memories wiped clean, and are sent back to a lab (dubbed the “Dollhouse”).

It’s odd to me though that he’s working with Fox again after the Firefly debacle.

Update: E! has a Q&A, and of course Whedonesque is flipping out.

Whedon’s also directing tonight’s episode of The Office.

Faith's Surname

Faith’s surname on Buffy is “Lehane”. It was never used on the series, but Whedon had to make it up for merchandising. Also, “five by five” is an expression used over radio to indicate that the message is “loud and clear”. The first number, on a scale of one to five, represents signal strength; the second: signal clarity.

Sugarshock

The second “issue” of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock! is up now for your free online viewing. First one’s here. This is all part of Dark Horse’s new Dark Horse Presents experiment on MySpace, and I’m going to go ahead and call it unsavory. The works themselves are great, but the Web just isn’t the place for long form comics. (Comic strips work great.) Whenever I read anything online, I’m usually in “skim” mode. It’s already very easy to skim comics when reading them in physical form. You just read the words and skip over the pictures once you have the general idea of what’s going on. In doing that, you’re missing a lot of the work, like watching TV with the picture turned off. Online, it’s even easier to do this, with your finger on the scroll wheel. I’d even go so far as to say that this movement by Dark Horse will weaken people’s impressions of the comic book format. Get them used to skimming comics on the web in 30 seconds each and they’ll start to think of comics as something not substantial, not worth spending money on. The webcomic strip works great because it’s designed to be read in under a minute, and you can put one out a few times a week.

Whedon and Moon’s work is good, though. I’d like to see it printed.

Interview with Joss Whedon at The A.V. Club

Interview with Joss Whedon at The A.V. Club

I wouldn't link to every interview he gives if they weren't all so good.

Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon's Sugershock #1

Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugershock #1

Free online comic.

Astonishing X-Men #1

Astonishing X-Men #1

Save ‘Angel' Campaign Takes Flight

Save ‘Angel’ campaign takes flight

gets around to covering the fan movement to save .

The Long Way Home

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.