Taking Buffy back to its origin point in the ‘90s, Buffy ‘97 remixes the source material yet keeps in stride with the spirit of the show. This is a great little read that will definitely entertain your inner mallrat.
Buffy ‘97 (TPB)
Amber Benson/Christopher Golden (Writing); Heather Breckel (Colors); Ed Dukeshire (Letters); Jenny Frison (Cover); Casey Gilly (Writing); Mattia Iacono (Colors); Marianna Ignazzi (Art); Danny Lore (Writing); HiFi Design (Colors and Letters); Jeremy Lambert (Writing); Michelle Madsen (Letters); Terry Moore with Eric Powell (Art); Ted Naifeh (Art); Claire Roe (Art); David Stewart (Colors); Lilah Sturges (Writing); Roman Titov (Colors); Bayleigh Underwood (Art); Dan Mora, David López, Gleb Melnikov, Eleonora Carlini, Marianna Ignazzi, Andrés Genolet, Hayden Sherman, Ornella Savarese, Valentina Pinti, Natacha Bustos, Ramon Bachs, Daniel Bayliss, Claudia Balboni, Cliff Richards, & Georges Jeanty (Yearbook Drawing); Raúl Angulo, Roman Titov, Cris Peter, Mattia Iacono, Eleonora Bruni, Patricio Delpeche, Gabriel Cassata, Jeromy Cox, & Dave Stewart (Yearbook Art)
Boom! Studios
November 22, 2022
Lace up your Air Jordans and head to your local Blockbuster — Buffy Summers is going back to the ‘90s. Buffy ‘97 gives readers a nicely illustrated and uniquely crafted set of stories. While none of them affect the main body of the Buffyverse, they nonetheless provide plausible side-stories and adventures the characters might have taken between episodes. The result is a warm, fun, and quirky series that has just enough Buffy-typical action to keep things hopping.
There’s a large variety of stories to be had, and they range from tender and romantic to hilarious and suspenseful. In the titular Buffy ’97 story (Lamber/Iacono/Ignazzi/Dukeshire), for instance, Willow and Buffy have to travel into a teen mag to rescue Southern California from the voraciousness of an evil sorceress. Madame Want preys on her victims’ enviousness to trap them forever between the pages of her magazines, making her a truly formidable villain. Buffy and Willow have to be clever to break the enchantments Want’s wreaked upon Sunnydale and free those trapped to sell goods within her pages.
Meanwhile, Spike and Xander both run into trouble in odd places. Xander encounters a demon who tries to trick him into harming Willow and Buffy by expressing negative suppressed thoughts after his car stalls out on a desert road. Back in the 1970s in New York City, Spike meets a glittery disco queen who takes him by surprise. The latter is a great story and one of the volume’s main highlights thanks to its playful art style and an even better script. Fan-favorite vampire Druscilla also gets a trenchant character portrait which is both blood-soaked and saddening.
Spuffy and Willara shippers in particular will be well-fed by this series; Buffy ’97 features an interlude in a bowling alley for the former and an emotional date between the latter, with the last story written by Tara herself, Amber Benson. Benson also contributes a tale of Wiccan-based horror that is the volume’s most gruesome story, featuring snapped spines, girls turned into nutrient sources for evil shrubbery, and a misuse of magic that must be put right again by Willow and Tara. Both stories are good, but the first gives a real insight into the doomed romance between everyone’s favorite witches.
The art in this volume combines a lot of styles, and Underwood’s work on Druscilla’s tale stands out in particular as it manages to make the shadowy underworld reflect both the squalor of London and Druscilla’s bruised beauty. Ignazzi captures the actors’ likenesses while adding angular ’90s looks that feel like they escaped from your local shopping mall. Underwood’s other story in the issue – Spike’s collision with the disco goddess — is a jaw-dropper that impresses with its beautiful, crisp lines and playful recapitulations of bleary hedonism. There are weaker moments in the work – for instance HiFi Design’s flat, lifeless colors ruin the glory of Benson’s’ writing and Moore’s iconic artwork in “Willow and Tara: Wannablessedbe.”
Smack dab in the middle of Buffy ‘97 is a mock yearbook for Sunnydale High, featuring some pithy, knowing (sometimes too knowing, Fred’s quote is “Stay away from weird sarcophagi; trust me”) quotes and glimpses at life in the Sunnydale High. This treads water and wastes space in the book unless you like in-jokes. In short – if you like Buffy in general, you’re going to like this collection, even though you have to surf through some mediocre channels to get there.
