It's hard to beat Tales of the Slayer, but this is probably the second best Buffy story I've read in comic-book form. It's a good standalone story, encompassing the themes of growth and change that are a big part of the series as a whole, as well as being a great bridge between Buffy season three and season four, when a lot of things changed. This period of the show gives her plenty to play with, including the last hurrah of the "Scooby Gang" with Cordelia as a member, the all-too-brief comfortable period of the relationship between Willow and Oz, the fallout from the renegade Slayer Faith and the evil Mayor Wilkins and the beginning of the Initiative, which would become a major player in season four. Cliff Richards, a mainstay of the Buffy backlist, acquits himself better here than in the recent issues I reviewed last week (perhaps helped by a different inker), still lacking a little in likenesses but with a lot of characters who look quite different and the same strong sense of storytelling I've observed in the rest of his work.
Jane Espenson, responsible for a couple of my favorite episodes ("Superstar" and "Band Candy") as well as at least one of my least favorites ("Doublemeat Palace"), has one thing going for her right off the bat: she knows how to write the dialogue that makes Buffy and friends work. When I read it, I can hear the actors' voices, and she can make me forget I'm reading a comic-book adaptation of a property that works best in the television medium. There were even a few lines that made me laugh out loud, which is something I expect from Buffy television episodes but not necessarily prose or comic-book tales of the slayer.
The plot I'm not quite so certain about, at times. The Mayor's demise was a grand event, something pretty important and symbolic in the scope of the series, and to have him return as a ghost felt a little bit like milking a good antagonist and weakening that important moment. However, because Wilkins was such a fun character, and because Espenson captures his mixture of dangerous psychoses and "Leave it to Beaver" charm, it's easily overlooked, and I was having a lot of fun with it by the end. Ditto the Initiative having a run-in with Willow and Oz, raising questions as to why Willow wouldn't have put the pieces of the puzzle together faster during season four. Because it was a neat little idea, and gave rise to a terrific "Oz moment" (I miss those), it didn't bother me overmuch.
I'm not really in a position to judge the accessibility of the story. I've seen each episode of Buffy, most of them more than once, and I know the show's continuity and characters pretty well. I'd guess that a casual reader who didn't know the Mayor, Faith and the Initiative, and what they've meant to the show, might not get the same enjoyment out of the book, and the ending would probably lack the sense of foreboding that most viewers of the show will get out of it. However, it's hard to imagine someone picking this up if they weren't already a fan of the show, so that's a minor concern at best.
In terms of artwork, Cliff Richards does a serviceable job, occasionally crossing into impressive territory. His work on the characters, though it rarely captures the specific appearances of the actors, gives them each a fairly distinctive look, and he's aided by different hair colors, hair styles and clothing choices in this story such that it's easy to tell them all apart. And his action sequences, an important aspect of any good Buffy story, are very solid. There are some scenes which require a camera quick cut away in television, and Richards manages to simulate those very well, such as the realization that Oz is changing forms or the shifting form of Angel/the vampire Mayor in Buffy's dreams.
Haunted is, in many ways, episode zero of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The season's parallel with growing up and being a teenager was the shift of relationships from high school to college, and that usually starts as much in the summer as it does in the beginnings of the college semester or the post-college travels. Haunted fills in a gap that wasn't necessarily missing, but which had room to explore, and there's room for more of this kind of thing. If Espenson were to return for another go, I'd certainly be interested in reading it.
