Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer #18
[Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers]
Writer: Jeremy Lambert and Jordie Bellaire
Art: Ramon Bachs
Colors:Â Raul Angulo
Letters:Â Ed Dukeshire
Reviewer:Â Tony Farina
Summary
The conflict brewing between Buffy and Kendra has finally come to a head! With multiple allies injured, the two Slayers feel they can no longer compromise-which is the perfect opportunity for the new Big Bad to make his move…
Positives
Buffy the Vampire Slayer #18 proves the point I have been making for the last year and a half, Jordie Bellaire must really be from Sunnydale. She manages to capture all the funny parts perfectly. She conducts this symphony like the maestro she is. This month, she has a recently returned Willow say,
“Sure, aside from the constant near-death experiences we’re all sure to encounter over the next few months…it’ll just be all us kids, living, loving, growing.”
That is so on the nose, that it shouldn’t be funny, but because it is a Buffy comic, it lands perfectly.
Bellaire also makes sure that everyone gets some page time while not giving us whiplash moving from story to story. She knows to make sure we have some team up time and some alone time. She really just makes this series feel cinematic. Of course, she has help from Bachs and Angulo who really make the characters feel like humans. There are a lot of people who look like people in this series. I appreciate that.
Negatives
Buffy the Vampire Slayer #18 for all of it’s charms, suffers from being pretty predictable. I suppose that if someone had never seen the show, read the comic or read this series, there would be a big surprise at the end. However, for people who know the dynamic and were thinking this was going to happen, we are not shocked at all. That is not to say that having something be predictable is terrible, because sometimes there is comfort in what we expect.
Verdict
Buffy the Vampire Slayer #18 is a lot of fun. This is a nice change of pace after all of the crazy that has been happening. The fact that there is no action is actually OK. The tension is real. The stakes are high (there are no actual stakes in this issue though) and we are all worried about what is coming next. While it was not much of a surprise, that last panel is pretty great.
