The Buffy Comic Project: "The Food Chain"

Buffy the Vampire Slayer # 16

Dark Horse (Volume 1, 1998-2003)

Creators: Christopher Golden (writer), Christian Zanier (penciller), Minor, Owens, & Arnold (inkers)

Setting: Season Three

T.V. Character Appearances: Buffy, Willow, Xander, Oz, Giles,

Major Original Characters: Brad Caulfield (student), Quafongg (demon)

Summary: Something is attacking and dismembering students in Sunnydale. A little investigation shows that the victims were members of the cult of Ylisandroth scattered by Buffy in Issue # 12. A search shows of the house where Ylisandroth was summoned before shows a new summoning circle in place, and some surveillance reveals that Brad Caulfield (one of the original cult members) has been turned into a massive two horned demon and is seeking revenge on his old cult buddies. Turns out Brad tried to summon a new entity, Quafongg, but as usually happens in these sorts of things, got the bad end of the deal. Quafonng itself materializes as a fiery demon, but Buffy and crew manage to banish him by reversing the spell. Brad lives to see another day, and hopefully won't mess with demon summoning again, unless he goes with the "third time's gotta be the charm" idea.

Review: A break from the on-going Selke subplot, and an interesting choice of an issue to write a sequel to. Most of the elements are pretty basic: discover deaths, discover demon, destroy demon, deploy wisecracks, da' end. Golden writes dialogue fairly well and has fun with the larger-than-life combat scenes, so it's hard to complain. It's not Shakespeare, Whedon, or even Espenson, but it fits the four Buffy food groups. Solid artwork to boot.

Notes

* In one scene, Willow explains to Buffy that she wanted to buy a little habitrail for rat Amy but her mother said no.

* The epilogue reveals that Brad "turned himself in" and will "spend some serious time in jail" for the murders he committed while he was turned into a demon. I guess it's Sunnydale, so the cops won't wonder how he ripped his victims' arms out of their sockets?

* On the letters page, a reader requests adaptations of episodes. [Back when I first moved to Toronto and spend far too many evenings as a telemarketer (doing consumer research surveys), I used to idly daydream about writing episode adaptions and sending the scripts to Dark Horse as a way to break into comics and escape my ho-hum life, but I never got around to it before I found a better job] The editor responds to the letter that "nothing could interest me less than doing adaptations of the show and history shows that the audience feels the same way I do." Now of course, IDW, which has the rights to Angel, has been publishing episode adaptations of that series and as far as I know they've been selling pretty well . . .

* There's a fun little scene where Giles drives to the beach to find the Scoobies playing volleyball. As this picture indicates, Buffy should turn pro--looks at those ups!

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