I just caught up on the Buffy comics and thus feel proper re-joining the madness in this thread! If anyone is interested, I have been getting back into comics the last few months and have been posting my thoughts:

Fables and Y: The Last Man
Ex Machina
Preacher

Just in time for the new issue today. Though it hasn't been generating anywhere near the discussion it did when it first started coming out.

The end of that last issue reminds me of Y, which is funny since BKV wrote the last arc, not this one.

Well, I'm more excited for the next Buffy mini-arc than I am for the current one. I picked up my comics today but haven't had a chance to look at them.

I've enjoyed this arc for the humor.

Now I'm all sad that I've fallen so far behind on Buffy. I may have to invite myself over to P-C's apartment sometime to inhale them all and catch up. (Then you can tell your family how you had a Married White Devil-Woman and her Pasty Demon Child over for a comics binge!)

Or possibly you could come over here and we can all cackle with glee over bootleg Avatars and eat a bunch of pizza or something. You know. We married white devils swing easy that way.

I may have to invite myself over to P-C's apartment sometime to inhale them all and catch up. (Then you can tell your family how you had a Married White Devil-Woman and her Pasty Demon Child over for a comics binge!)

Heh. Well, I have the first trade (and will buy the second trade soon enough), but I caught up through ahemming, so that might not work unless you don't mind sitting at my computer and scrolling. I have other comics you can binge on, though!

Or possibly you could come over here and we can all cackle with glee over bootleg Avatars and eat a bunch of pizza or something. You know. We married white devils swing easy that way.

I like that idea too.

I thought this issue was really well done. Andrew telling Dawn how to defeat mecha-Dawn made me laugh and laugh. "My giant-sized teammate is fighting a mechanized version of herself on the streets of downtown Tokyo...I've been preparing for this day my entire life!"

I thought Dracula was written really well. Which is cool, given that he was just a one-off (in the Buffyverse, that is), back in season 5. I loved him getting all badass and telling the vamp who killed Renee "I've killed more men than God's plagues combined. And that was *before* I started eating people for fun." And "The vampire's the least of your concerns. It's the old man you need to worry about." -- I assume that was meant to be a callback to Angel in "Amends," when he (Angel) said it isn't the demon in him that needed killing; it was the man. Plus -- Drac totally loves Xander! (That's not spoilery; I'm just saying it based on their interactions in the last issue and this one.)

Oh! And Drac saying to Willow, "To me, witch," is *totally* from X-Men, and you KNOW he got that from hanging with Xander, which I love love LOVE!

Oh, *Xander.* I really REALLY liked the art in the panels after Xander dusted the vamp who killed Renee, when the foreground art, with the most detail, is the other Slayers heading out to stop the remaining vamps, and the background, with hardly any detail, is Buffy walking to Xander and then hugging him. The fact that that part of the panels wasn't very detailed actually really worked for me.

Despite the fact that I was really annoyed in last month's issue about the conversation between Willow and Satsu where Willow was trying to get details from Satsu on sex with Buffy (ew!), I actually really liked the conversation between Willow and Buffy about "You're not my type." "Well, *you're* not even on *my* list!" It rang true to the characters, IMO, and the voices were spot-on.

And speaking of Willow, was the green snake/serpent woman/goddess/demon/whatever the same one that was in the issue where Buffy and Willow saw each other's dirty secrets from the recent past, like Buffy leading the Slayers to loot a bank vault?

And if so, WTF is going on there? (With Willow, I mean.) And that was a rhetorical question; I know we're not meant to know just yet. Oh! And plus there was the bit at the end, with Willow meditating/praying to/conjuring green snake woman -- more WTF?

All in all, I liked it a LOT.

"My...life!"

I thought that was amusing, but I couldn't get over the WTF of Mecha-Dawn in the first place. How long did it take them to build her? And they'd clearly studied Dawn in some way to imbue the 'bot with random personality traits and/or sayings, but...what?

And Drac saying to Willow...is *totally* from X-Men, and you KNOW he got that from hanging with Xander, which I love love LOVE!

It is? What is it from? I wasn't really sure what he meant. Also, I didn't even realize that was Dracula. I had trouble telling him apart from the other main vampire dude. I'm not really a huge fan of the art in this series.

The fact that that part of the panels wasn't very detailed actually really worked for me.

And that stuff is really irritating to me. Maybe because all the other comics I've been reading have had very detailed backgrounds.

And speaking of Willow, was the...

Yeah, that's what I thought of too, but in the "bad" scene...okay, I just double-checked, and that snake lady is greenish, just like the one in this issue. Might be the same one.

Oh, and I agree with what you said about Dracula.

is *totally* from X-Men, and you KNOW he got that from hanging with Xander, which I love love LOVE!

It is? What is it from? I wasn't really sure what he meant.

(I'm hoping an actual X-Men fan can elaborate on my explanation, because I've only read Astonishing X-Men.) Anyway, "To me, my X-Men!" is a classic Professor Xavier phrase, which was repeated by Cyclops in AXM #23, when they pulled off a kickass switcheroo on the bad guys.

And what he meant was pretty much what he told Willow, which was (paraphrased), "Get your ass over here!"

I agree with you on the utter WTF-ness of the very existence of mecha-Dawn, but I was so damned amused by Andrew and his apotheosis of geekiness that I was willing to go handwavey.

Also, I didn't even realize that was Dracula. I had trouble telling him apart from the other main vampire dude.

All the flowy dark hair, right? I had to look a couple of times to be sure who was who, but then I realized that they were wearing different colored shirts, and so I could differentiate them then.

The fact that that part of the panels wasn't very detailed actually really worked for me.

And that stuff is really irritating to me.

I normally dislike it a lot. But there was something about how the lack of detail made the moment understated, and the understatedness had more emotional impact -- for me -- than any technicolor large-font panel could have had.

Seriously, I normally hate that stuff. It slid under my radar, though.