By: Joe McCabe
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been clamoring for the character?s return since the cult classic TV show?s seventh and final season ended in May of 2003. Well, this week, their prayer?s have been finally been answered: everyone?s favorite Slayer is returning for an eighth season under the guiding hand of her creator Joss Whedon?in monthly comic book form.

Season Eight?arriving in Buffy?s Tenth Anniversary month?follows the events depicted in the show?s last episode (which saw the Slayer close the Hellmouth, from which so many of her deadliest enemies sprang). Dark Horse Comics? Scott Allie, who?s editing the book, tells FEARnet the project began when he was looking to take the Buffy comics line in a new direction after the show wrapped.

?We were already having a hard time figuring out the direction of the comic,? says Allie, ?because we were dancing around what was going on with the show. And with the show gone, I talked to Joss and said, ?Look, what I?d like to do is stop and then start again with you kind of giving me a direction. If you?d just give me an outline or if you?d help me pick the writers, you?d help us give the book the direction it needs after the end of the TV series.? He said, ?Yeah, that?s definitely the way to do it.? But he was busy doing other stuff, so I didn?t really push for a while. We would talk about it whenever we saw each other or by email and stuff. We would catch up, but nothing was happening. Until one day I got an email from Joss. I thought it was going to be an outline for a new Serenity series, but instead it was the issue 1 script of Buffy. And we had never even discussed the possibility of him writing the Buffy series for me. I just never thought it was on the table. He never offered. One day he just decided to write the script and sent it in, and said, ?Okay, this is what we?re going to do.? And here we are.?

Allie claims Season 8 grew dramatically from its inception.

?Originally,? he says, ?the idea was to mirror a season of TV by doing twenty-two issues. But pretty quickly, we were like, ?Well, around twenty-two.? Then we started talking about what the stories would actually be and pretty quickly, I was like, ?Well, that?s more than twenty-two, that?s more than twenty-four?that?s at least thirty.? And, with what I know right now, it feels like it?s gotta be well over thirty. So, it?s not a limited series. Some people have thought that and have written in asking about that. They thought it was a series of miniseries the way we?re doing Hellboy and things like that. But it?s not. It?s a monthly series with story arcs in it by different writers and different artists. It?s going to be a rotating creative team. There will be ?skip? months, which makes it feel like a miniseries, maybe; but right now, the only skip month that I have scheduled is between 4 and 5. Basically, it?s a monthly series, where you?ll get 10 or 11 issues a year.?

Though Whedon won?t script every issue, Season 8?s other writers will prove familiar to fans of both Buffy and comics.

?Joss is writing the first five [which will be illustrated by Georges Jeanty, with covers by Jo Chen], Brian K. Vaughn is writing the next four. We might have another one-issue in there, but then Drew Goddard, who?s one of the writers from the show, he?ll be writing the next major arc. Joss will probably write the arc after that. From the very beginning, Joss said he was going to write the first, middle, and final arc of the thing. But with it getting bigger, now I know there?s at least four arcs he?s going to write. But I don?t know how many arcs there will be ultimately, and I don?t know if he?ll do more than that or what. It?s just so subject to change because we know where and how it ends, but we don?t know what year we?ll be telling that story. The final arc might be issues 41 to 44 or it might be issues 81 to 84. We just don?t know right now.?

Of course Season 8 is not only a step forward for Dark Horse?s Buffy comics, but for the publisher?s ongoing line of horror and dark fantasy titles.

?In 2003,? says Allie, ?I launched a line of horror comics. It doesn?t have a name like Vertigo or something, but it?s a line of books. It?s a pretty focused line of books. I started doing these hardcover anthologies with incredible creative teams like Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, Kurt Busiek; really, really great people in these horror anthologies. We launched that really strong in 2003. The fourth one?Book of Monsters, which came out late last year?was the last one of those. But in 2007, actually December 2006, we began another major launch for the horror line, which has included the launch of Rex Mundi (which we brought over from Image) and miniseries like The Secret, this horror book that we?re doing right now with an artist named Jason Alexander. We really stepped up our Hellboy stuff because there?s been a lot of stories for a long time that Mignola?s wanted to do, and now we?re pairing him up with the artists to do it. So, we?ve got the new Hellboy series written by Mike but drawn by Duncan Fegredo. We?ve got new B.P.R.D. coming. We?ve got a Lobster Johnson series, an Abe Sapien series?all of that kind of fleshes out the Mignola world. Eric Powell?s coming back this year with Satan?s Sodomy Baby, which is going to freak people out, and a much more serious Goon graphic novel coming out at the end of the year. And there?s a lot of other books that we?ve got launching right now and throughout the year. If you look at the horror line for Dark Horse, month in and month out, there?s usually three or four books a month that we?ve been putting out.?

If there?s one element shared by all of Dark Horse?s horror comics, including Buffy, it?s a macabre sense of humor.

?That?s the thing,? laughs Allie. ?For me, for Mignola, for Eric Powell, and Steve Niles, it?s good to have a little bit of humor in your horror. There?s a fair amount of humor in Buffy, Hellboy, Criminal Macabre, and The Goon. And I think it?s also appropriate to have really over-the-top humor like [Bob Fingerman?s graphic novel] Recess Pieces, which is vile and crazy but, still, it?s about zombies. It?s about kids fighting zombies. So, it?s a horror story. It?s not so much meant to scare you as make you laugh and make you throw up.?