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.

Harmony Comes to the Nation

Harmony Comes to the Nation is a new, short Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic on Dark Horse Presents by Jane Espenson and Karl Moline (artist on previous Buffy book Fray), featuring Harmony and Stephen Colbert.

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.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Animated Series - Featured Video on BuzzFeed

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Animated Series - Featured Video on BuzzFeed

Four-minute pilot of the cartoon that was never made. Might have been cool, but what was there that the live action show didn’t already do?

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.

A Mind Interrupted

Touching story about the most recent issue of Buffy. A cameo spot was given to an essay contest winner whose husband wrote in to say how much the show had helped his wife when she was starting to suffer from schizophrenia.

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.

Talking Faith & Buffy with Brian K Vaughan

Talking Faith & Buffy with Brian K Vaughan

Wow, the setup for his Faith arc sounds awesome.

What Makes "Buffy" a Gay Icon?

What makes “Buffy” a gay icon?

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.

IGN: Interview: Joss Whedon

IGN: Interview: Joss Whedon

About the new Buffy comic, along with a few comments at the end about writing for Marvel and the now dead Wonder Woman movie.

Slay Ride

Slay Ride

Brief interviews with Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, and Jeph Loeb about Buffy and their upcoming stints on the comic.

Buffy New Reader's Guide

Buffy New Reader’s Guide

The “season eight” comic comes out soon. Here’s a good refresher on the series and characters.

Slaying Alive: Whedon talks "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Slaying Alive: Whedon talks “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

About the new comic series starting in two weeks.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is Back: The Complete Joss Whedon Q&A

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is Back: The Complete Joss Whedon Q&A

About the new comic, which continues where the series ended.

Fear and Loathing in Sunnydale

Katherine returns tonight from the Tiger Cruise. Color me excited.

A package from my dad came yesterday containing a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Dre, being a good pal, mentioned a few weeks ago that she had seen it in the bookstore and almost got it for me, but I told her that my dad had already ordered it so not to bother. (Thanks, anyways, though.) The first essay was about the moral code of Buffy and Angel, saying that it follows “eudaimonism,” a systems of ethics first put forth by Plato. Basically it says that people who do good lead happier lives than people who do bad, and that good people are only happy when doing good. Argue with it as you will, but the author did a pretty good job of juxtoposing Buffy, who even though she isn’t happy all the time knows that she’s doing the right thing, with Faith, who goes to the dark side and realizes how empty her life is. The essay also references The Ring of Gyges from The Republic, which is a very neat moral polemic.

Also in the package was a $50 US savings bond from my grandmother that was given to me when I was 3 months old. Later in the week I’ll figure out how to cash it and put it into my “Dave’s about to spend way too much money on electronics because he’s been so poor for so long and wants to pamper himself” fund.