maybe you're more hardcore if you don't like the comics, because you stay true to the original vision :)

Or maybe you're less, because you're rejecting Joss-approved works in the universe.

And the original vision may just be the movie.

this crawls right up my back and sinks its teeth in my spine. Why?

Well, considering that he was talking about how beloved, mythic characters can reach people... I have absolutely no idea.

the implication that if you don't get a charge from the comic, or have no interest in it, you weren't really a Buffy fan.

I sorta understand taking it that way when you just see one line out of context, but that wasn't remotely what he was saying.

There's a particular kind of warm contentment people get when old fictional friends return. Not the subversion of a postmodern project, where writers pull a kind of emotional detournement -- "you think you're glad to see the Crimson Goatgouger again, but actually he's been fucking dogs since 1973, and Everything You Know Is Wrong!" But the sort of smile I get when the bass rumble of the DOCTOR WHO theme music starts, and I see the Tardis spinning through the time-tunnel howlaround, and the BBC logo appears beneath it. And that smile means that, no matter what (and WHO has been lousy for the last few weeks), you're going to get some pleasure from seeing your old friends again.

I got a little of that from the first SUPERMAN RETURNS trailer, which hits the high points of the mythos in a sequence of painterly, carefully composed shots over an altered John Williams score. My appreciation of the Superman movies stops about halfway through the first one, but those high points have over the years accreted the strange magic of Judeo-Christian myth about them, and as a writer I can admire that.

Anyway: you know the hardcore Buffistas will get a charge from that first Season 8 comic. The first time they see Buffy on the page, with a smart artist who can capture Gellar's odd combination of big vulnerable eyes and set jaw, they'll welcome that old friend. It's a thing with some power to it.

I don't know what's infuriating about any of that.

It's calling all Buffy fans Buffistas, Strega. Sorry I wasn't clear about that. I was wondering why that immediately bugged me so much. It did, and I can't figure any rational reason for it at all.

OK, the context definitely negates what pinged me. I'm not sure when "buffista" became a universal term, but I know Ellis is hardly the first to use it that way.

Aw. Ellis is a big softie.

It's calling all Buffy fans Buffistas, Strega. Sorry I wasn't clear about that. I was wondering why that immediately bugged me so much. It did, and I can't figure any rational reason for it at all.

Well it immediately brought to mind that asshat at (I think it was) Whedonesque (I was wrong), who was saying "Buffistas" were never real Firefly fans (which is probably why I read Ellis' quote the way I did), and it was fairly obvious he meant "Buffy-verse fans".

No asshats at Whedonesque. Oh no. That particular asshat was at fireflyfans.net.

I'm not sure when "buffista" became a universal term, but I know Ellis is hardly the first to use it that way.

Really? I mean, aside from the guy at WhedonesqueFireflyfans?

I can't figure any rational reason for it at all.

Because it's our word for us, and he's using it to mean something else?

Maybe not strictly rational, but understandable.

aside from the guy

Well it struck me as odd when he used it that way, but it didn't strike me as unprecedented. I could be misremembering.