Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight Motion Comic DVD Review

Today we’re going to take a look at the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Motion Comic. Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: the voices are off. The actress voicing Buffy doesn’t really understand inflections, the actor who voices Xander actually sounds like Xander, but he needs to work on his pacing. The actress who voices Faith is probably the best out of the group. I do understand that it would have been impossible to get the cast back to voice the characters – but for the Buffy video games they managed to get back everyone except for SMG – so it kind of hurts that they didn’t get ANYONE. Forget the new characters or the core 4 (Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn) are you honestly telling me that they couldn’t get: Felicia Day (Vi), Indigo (Rona), Adam Busch (Warren), Iyari Limon (Kennedy), Tom Lenk (Andrew), Anthony Stewart Head (Giles), Marc Blucas (Riley), Faith (Eliza Dushku), Elizabeth Anne Allen (Amy), Robin Sachs (Ethan), Rudolf Martin (Dracula), Harry Groener (Mayor Richard Wilkins) or D.B. Woodside (Robin) – really they couldn’t get a single one of them? Really?

As the episodes progress it gets increasingly harder to tell Willow’s voice apart from any of the other females. Giles – I don’t know if it’s the accent or the actors fault but it’s just so off. It was actually easier for me to accept Buffy, Xander and Andrew’s voices but if you think about it: Anthony, Michelle, David, Eliza and Alyson have all been in the public eye and consistently on tv ever since Buffy ended it’s run. The accents on the new characters could be better and part of me wishes that Satsu had an accent – don’t even get me started on the Asian vampires in the Wolves at the Gate episodes – the accents aren’t there, the only one with a consistent accent is Kimiko (a character I really wish stuck around.)

The episodes do give us many new characters like Leah, Rowena, Simone, Satsu, Rowena, General Voll, Aluwyn, Roden, Lady Genevieve Savidge and others plus it makes all of the characters from the Fray comic book now officially cannon (well they were before but now they’re directly tied into the Buffyverse in a way that can’t be discounted. It’s interesting now that I’ve watched the dvd I’m kind of getting the urge to do a wishful casting segment on characters that are strictly Buffy Season 8 characters… hmm… be sure to look for that, this is a post that might come sooner rather than later.

The way the issues break down is pretty simple with a few exceptions (The Chain, Anywhere But Here and A Beautiful Sunset) The Long Road Home, No Future For You, Wolves At The Gate and Time Of Your Life are all 4 ‘issues’ each that add up to roughly 44 minutes a story, which is what the original tv episodes ran. The single issue episodes are good – I don’t mind how short they are time wise because the stories are really strong enough to carry it without a lengthy build up. I’m not going to lie though, I do fear for some of the single issue stories in the second half of season eight if they do release the rest of the season as a motion comic.

Special Features:

Special features… okay where to start?  I’m not exactly sure that this counts as a special feature because it is a DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack that comes with not only a standard definition version of the episodes/issues but a high-definition version as well. The first ‘real’ feature really isn’t anything spectacular in and of itself – it’s just a cover gallery of the first nineteen issues. There’s no new information here but it sure is pretty.

There is a feature that allows you to make your own Buffy centric comic book thanks to Tooncast Studio. Now this actually makes me sad because I really wanted to try this out – I knew it would be cheesy as hell but it seemed fun and I wanted to try it. So of course that means when I pop it in my dvd-rom that my computer won’t even read the disc at all. I’m assuming that it’s my dvd-rom that’s the problem and not the disc itself so I can’t fault the dvd.

The next special feature is kind of random and honestly it’s a bit of a let down. The Buffy Trivia Experience is just what you’d expect it to be… trivia. Basically you turn it on and then watch the episodes/issues and it plays ala VH1’s popup videos where random trivia pops up. There’s nothing wrong with this particular feature but think about this… Buffy is popular, but it’s a limited market and it’s been off of TV for seven years so that takes away selling points, this is an animated motion comic adaptation of a comic book series (even though it’s officially Season 8) so it closes the gap even more in it’s marketability because it’s an animated vampire ‘movie’ based off of a comic book. What I’m trying to say here is it is doubtful many people will run into this and just decide to buy it if they have no prior knowledge of Buffy in general, and anyone who has this obviously is a huge fan of Buffy and a fan of the comic books. The pop up trivia while good isn’t delivering anything new here at all for die hard BtVS fans – I would much rather have had pop up bubbles explaining behind the scenes information as to why certain scenes are the way they are or notes from Joss or the writers. To me it would make more sense to have had that especially since there is no writer/director/actor commentary.

We get the ‘test pilot’ – which is done like any pilot, a brief version of what will be the start of the series/movie to show how it can go – and it’s nice but there’s nothing new. It seemed like there was a bit more music to this than the actual first episode. I don’t mean to be down on the special features but it would have been better if they gave us a little bit more – maybe an animated version of Buffy’s opening credits (but use the comic images and play it out like the TV credits) but then who would you include? Obviously Buffy, Willow, Xander and Dawn but would Faith, Leah, Satsu, Rowena, Giles, Faith, Andrew, Twilight, Vi, Kennedy, Renee, Amy or Warren have made the cut? Again this is something that’s for the diehard BtVS fans, they could have thrown in the original pilot, or even the BtVS: Animated Series pilot because that’s a bit part of issue #20 so it could have been positioned as a ‘things to come’ type of deal.

We get a smaller version of the first issue packed in with the dvd set which is nice and I’m glad that they did it for people who haven’t actually gotten the issue but for me it’s a little much. I’m a huge OCD personality when it comes to things and collecting the Buffy comics is one of them and I’m pretty sick of having to buy the first issue over and over. There’s the first print with the two covers, there’s a black and white pencil version of the cover (the only one I don’t own, mostly because it goes for over 350 dollars), the second print, third print, fourth print, fifth (and billed as) final print, The Long Road Home collection, the motion comic singles, the motion comic set and now the smaller print in the motion comic set. It passed going overboard about 5 prints ago.

The final special feature: Under Buffy’s Spell is watchable but some of it is pretty expected. Jane Espenson joking about how no one was shocked about Buffy and Satsu having sex; Jo Chen was there talking about working on the covers for Buffy, Buffy fans talking about how they had never read comics before but now they want to since Buffy is a comic book. It was nice but it kind of felt like someone just went around Comic Con and asked people questions about it. A proper sit-down interview would have been more entertaining and it could have possibly given us a bit more information.

At the end of the day this is a pretty solid dvd and it did make me want to check out other motion comics, which I guess is a good thing. There’s the OCD aspect of myself that needs to have a complete collection so I would rather they waited to release the entire season together, or at the very least some type of guarantee that they will be doing the second half of the season. That’s the one real concern I have – I’m afraid that they won’t release the rest of the season and that is a shame.

Rating: BUY
Special Features: SKIP
Overall Rating: A-

Charmed Season 9 Issue 2 'No Rest for the Wicca' Review

You know, honestly I wasn’t looking forward to the second issue of Zenescope’s Charmed Season 9. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Charmed, but after being blown away by the ‘Book of Shadows’ issue it would be an understatement to say I was underwhelmed by ‘Charmed Lives.’

Honestly I’m not familiar with how Zenescope formats the books because Charmed is the only thing I read from this particular publisher; so it’s taking me a little while to get used to it. I actually like the fact that there are no ads until the end of the issue, but the downside is it makes it seem like a quicker read than it actually is. “Charmed Lives” had 21 pages however “No Rest for the Wicca” only has 20; 21 if you count the recap as a page. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that out of the 20 pages four of them are full page spreads and two of them are two page spreads. It seems to me like they could find a better use for the story than what they’ve used these pages for so far.

Out of the three covers for this issue I ended up with the wraparound cover, and I’ve got to say for the second month in a row I’m disappointed. The covers are so phenomenal, next to all the Jo Chen covers for Buffy the Charmed covers are my favorite. The problem is though the art on the covers is so good that when you look at Dave Hoover’s art on the inside you almost feel cheated. Don’t get me wrong though he does well with Holly Marie Combs’ likeness and he did a great job capturing the essence of Rose McGowan, it doesn’t look exactly like Rose, but you can tell it’s how ‘Paige’ would look as a comic book character. Phoebe though, wow she is definitely drawn the worst out of all the sisters. Leo doesn’t come off much better, he doesn’t even look like how Leo looked in the first issue, at least Phoebe is still the same as issue one.

Thankfully the plot pays off a lot better than the art does. The little recap written by Paige is kind of campy, but it works. I’m not entirely sure which of the two plots is supposed to be the A plot or the B plot because they’re both used equally. Phoebe and Piper go to the funeral of an innocent they saved who died of ‘natural causes.’ What makes this significant isn’t just the fact that the writer decided to access the huge library that is Charmed’s mythology; he went back almost to the beginning, all the way back to episode TWO of SEASON ONE- Piper’s friend Brittnay who was a victim of the demon Javna. Phoebe touches Brittnay’s casket only to have a vision of Brittnay’s rapidly aged corpse. Piper freezes everyone and they open the casket confirming Phoebe’s vision.

The C plot involves Neena and Hogan in the Underworld using a handful of lower level demons to construct something. It appears that they summoned something and have made a deal with it, although exactly what is going on still remains unclear. We do learn one thing though, Hogan can’t blink. I don’t know if this is supposed to imply that he’s also a lower level demon, or if he’s a Warlock who maybe hasn’t fully accessed his powers yet.

Meanwhile Paige is off trying to mentor her newest charge a nineteen year old High School senior named Brent who is just coming into his powers. She stops him and his friends from giving a swirlie to another student. After trying to explain to him about his powers Paige is forced to tackle Brent and orb him out of school when he attempts to use his powers on a teacher. She explains to him about Magic School and how important the next forty-eight hours are to how the rest of his life will play out (this ties into yet another plot from Charmed, you really have to respect the fact that the writers are actively using the history of this show in a way that actually makes sense); Brent says he needs a little while to figure everything out so Paige instructs him to call her name when he’s ready and she orbs back to Halliwell Manor. Seconds later Brent runs into Hogan and Neena who try to tempt Brent into being evil.

Back at the Manor Paige arrives to see Phoebe and Piper frantically looking through the Book of Shadows when suddenly Phoebe has a vision of many people in danger, she explains to her sisters that the vision she just had involved every innocent they ever saved and every charge Paige ever had being in great danger. The issue ends with Brent’s bloody corpse (his neck had been snapped) laid out on display to the entrance to Magic School.

The plot is amazing if for nothing more than the fact that it was dripping with references from previous seasons. Coop wasn’t in this ‘episode’ at all, but that’s fine because he wouldn’t have really served a point, not that Leo did either, but he’s been a staple of Charmed for so long that he kind of has to be inserted into at least one scene. I’m a little concerned by the fact that we still haven’t seen Henry at all, but it took us two ‘episodes’ before we even saw his and Paige’s children.

I’m looking forward to the next episode/issue especially with how “No Rest for the Wicca” played out. The fact that we got another mention of Prue, Neena and Hogan going after the Charmed One’s previously saved innocents and Paige’s charges really gives me hope that Billie will make at least an appearance, the teaser image of issue 3’s cover looks like it has the demon of Fear on it, so I’m hoping we’ll get more Prue references, if not even a flashback or a ghostly visit like Patty and Grams do. Of course the image of the woman drowning in Phoebe’s vision makes me think even more that we might get Prue soon if it really is the demon of fear on the cover because he used Prue’s fear of water and drowning to magnify her fear of loosing a sister to torment her. And this issue alone proves that the writers have no problem bringing up things from the past. I mean they used Brittnay and Javna and they were stand alone characters.

Rating: A+
Still not a fan of the art but the use of history blew me out of the water