Despite being a massive Whedon fan, I almost missed this one. Seems like the publicity for it has been going on so long, I almost forgot there was a comic at the end of it. Which, in retrospect, might’ve been a good thing. You can’t fault IDW for trying, but where Buffy Season 8 hits the spot, Angel: After the Fall largely fails to.

It’s not a criticism of the team, per se. The problem is two-fold. First, the age-old “licensed comics” conundrum. As much as people watch Star Trek for Picard, or The Simpsons for Homer, they’re also watching it for Patrick Stewart and Dan Castellaneta. It’s very difficult to remove that element of the dynamic and still end up with something that feels authentic. Secondly, something more specific to live-action licenses, there’s always, always a point where someone goes “now that we’re operating without a budget, we can do whatever we want!” and suddenly you find that Starbuck has to fight a cylon the size of a small house. This kind of thing violates the believability parameters established by the series it’s adapting, further removing you from the original property. It’s this area where Angel: After the Fall largely doesn’t work for me.

Following on from season 5 of Angel (and we’ll skip past the question of whether that was even necessary by simply saying that this was Whedon’s idea for the 6th Season, so what he says goes) Wolfram and Hart have sent the entire city of Los Angeles – and everyone in it – literally to hell. It’s overrun with demon warlords, and Angel rides a dragon around, saving humans and sending them back to a safehouse run by familiar, if unexpected, cast-members. LA itself is in ruins and overrun with demon activity and despite the decent attempts by artist Franco Urru at depicting this, I just find it too hard to resolve with the reality established in the TV series.

That’s not to say it’s all bad, or anything. Lynch’s dialogue is convincingly Whedonesque and he gets some good laughs in, as well as making the characters feel true to their own voices when they appear. The mysteries regarding Wolfram and Hart’s continued employment of Wesley are set up well, as is Gunn’s turn to vampirism. I’m still interested to see what’s become of Illyria, who isn’t mentioned in this issue.

There’s really no massive problems on a technical level, but for all the reasons above and more, I’m finding it very hard to get invested. It just doesn’t feel like the same group of people and it doesn’t feel like there’s any continuity with the show I loved. It’s also fairly hard to see much actual direction to the series because no actual goal has been established beyond the obvious “fix everything” which seems pretty insurmountable at this point. It’s a much shakier start than I was expecting – not enough to shake me right off the book yet, but I hope to see things improve in the next few issues.