Buffy the Vampire Slayer: No Future for You

Season 8: Book 2
ISBN: 9781593079635

If Buffy, the petite pop-modern vampire slayer wasn’t enough for you this second volume from Joss Whedon’s “Season Eight” of Buffy brings tortured, anti-heroine slayer Faith back into play in a role even more suited to her than vampire and demon slaying.

Part of the draw of the Buffy-verse is the balance of darkness and good. Every character has had their dips into evil, from Xander’s flirtations with all manner of monsters to Willow’s grief-induced stint as the Big Bad. But some characters start out from deeper in the evil well. Giles and Faith are two of the darkest, Faith representing the out of control youth, caught in a cycle of violence from a young age and carrying on the chaos in her own life in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Giles’ history, merely glanced upon in the TV series feels more like a betrayal, when you come to love this patient, always-trying man only to discover he has a hard core of frightening ruthlessness.

Buffy, Xander and even Willow are the Superman and the Spidermans of the Buffy-verse, but Faith and Giles are the Punishers.

This analogy is proven hard and fast from the first few pages when Giles calls on Faith to do what the other Slayers can’t, walk into the house of a single mother who was turned into a vampire and slay the kids she turned. After this trying scene Giles meets back up with Faith at her apartment and asks her to handle a special case for him, one he doesn’t even want Buffy, Xander, Willow and the other Slayers to know about. It stands to reason that not all the Potentials who are now endowed with Slayer powers would turn out good, especially as other creatures of power find and foster them since Buffy’s operation is busy with the new threats from the mysterious “Twilight” and the good old U.S. Government.

Assassinating a Slayer, even if she is evil is not an easy task, as this volume proves.

Furthermore, “No Future for You” also proves that the switch to comics was an excellent move for Whedon and the Buffy-verse as the format allows a lot more playing, and a hyperfocus on characters otherwise glanced over in the series. Many plots dealt with Faith and her waffling between the forces of good and evil, but the glimpses we see of her past in these pages are heart breaking and enlightening at the same time.

One could easily argue, after this addition to Season Eight, that Faith might make a better lead, if the audience can handle a grittier, darker, less reliable narrator.

*Also, this volume features the cameo of my publisher’s wife, Robin, which I was very glad to finally get to read.