Resurfacing after a few month missing in action, the Buffy series understandably has a little difficulty in getting its momentum back. While there’s a handsome apology for the delay contained in the letters page, the third part of a four-issue arc is an awkward time for a title to go on hiatus, and as a consequence, the lack of fresh plot in The Time of Your Life’s conclusion is keenly felt.

The bi-centennial Willow has pulled off quite a feat, managing to unite every faction in the twenty second century against its visitor. Buffy knows her friend too well, however, being able to spot the witch’s real intentions. Given that this is a conclusion, the writer spends much of his time on action sequences, showing the readership both the threatened full-on Buffy versus Fray battle and the slayer army rallying after the attack on their castle. In light of the focus on future events, it’s unsurprising that the latter conflict feels rather messy, joining the internal politics of Team Twilight in being shoehorned as interludes in the slayers’ one on one brawl. The arc’s main weakness is that it leaves Fray’s world largely unchanged, making the story feel slightly inconsequential. While Buffy’s last act in the future will undoubtedly stay with her for some time to come, Joss Whedon comprehensively undoes of the alterations that he had made to the future slayer’s world, leaving the scenario exactly as Summers found it. While the slight stumbles in this issue don’t damage the arc as a whole, the inequality of impact that the two time periods have on each other is a more serious gripe.

The issue’s main strength comes from an unusual trick Whedon pulls off, in the form of a moment that carries considerably more weight after the reader has time to reflect upon it. Buffy’s execution of Willow is initially brushed off as a possible future vision, but after putting the book down and musing on events, it becomes clear that this actually stands as the character’s in-canon fate. How her killer deals with her part in events will provide interesting material for the book’s future. It’s a reasonable issue, but to truly get the series back on track, we’ll need to see this quality maintained consistently for a few months. There’s a lot riding on next month’s contribution from guest writer Jeph Lo-

Ah.

This week: news and capsule reviews, including Amazing Spider-Man #574, Angel: After the Fall #13, Daredevil #112, Thunderbolts #125 and X-Factor #36.

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Now that Angel: After the Fall is finally upping its game substantially, the Buffyverse is finally firing on all cylinders again. The BtVS comic is currently paying an extended visit to the timeline of Fray, the future slayer Whedon cooked up some years back with guesting artist Karl Moline, and working to explain just how Fray’s single-slayer, magic-less timeline can be threaded to the present we’re experiencing in Buffy: Season 8. It’s the franchise’s first real foray into Time Travel, and as such, provides a wealth of new angles for Whedon to approach the story.

One interesting moment highlights, if ever there were any doubts, how Buffy has changed since Season 7 as a result of her role – not only is she out robbing to pay for the Slayer gear, she’s also content to let innocents die in pursuit of the larger evil. This is the kind of theme that was dealt with pointedly in Season 5 of Angel, but it’s worth bringing up again in the context of Buffy’s new Slayer Army. It’s this kind of ambiguous morality that leads Fray to get influenced by the apparently villainous Willow. Willow’s actions, so far, don’t actually appear to be evil despite her having the “Dark Willow” make-up on. I’d call it a safe bet that her actions in this arc are designed to prevent Fray’s timeline from ocurring, though with only one chapter to go, we’ll soon see.

While the issue features a lot of action, almost all of it is tempered by running conversations which point the way to Whedon’s next move. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see, at the moment, exactly where things are headed, but you can see the signposts all over this issue in particular, as characters figure out their situation. Only Xander and Dawn, now separated from the Slayer Army, feel like they’re treading water, through the introduction of the forest creatures makes for an amusing scene. Whedon’s trademark dialogue is on top form all issue, and that laone makes the comic worth buying.

While it’s a constant joy to keep reading the adventures of Buffy and co month after month, if there’s any bad thing you can say about the series, it’s that it’s not very friendly to anyone dipping into it. A lot of the series mythology is referenced at times, to the point where a new reader would be utterly lost. Even so, this is one of the few times a writer can get away with that – after all, Whedon is playing to his hardcore audience with this series, and bringing in new readers for the comic was never the plan. Perhaps, if this wasn’t Joss Whedon, I’d feel a bit less charitable but, y’know, we’re all a little biased somewhere.

Whedon’s second full arc continues with a look into what Fray was doing before Buffy arrived. I’m usually irritated when TV/Comics rewind time and lead up to the same cliffhanger (Lost, for instance, did this all the time through the maddening Season 3) so I’m glad to see that Whedon keeps the retreads to a bare minimum, continuing the story some degree beyond what we saw last issue. Xander and Dawn’s plot threads in the past get a minimal look in, though the one scene we do see is easily the funniest of the issue.

The continual teases of who the female antagonist in Fray’s future is seemed quite poorly lead – apparently the readers were supposed to think it was Drusilla, having survived long into the future, but I never suspected anyone other than Willow given the way the series has been header. It’ll be interesting to see how they explain her presence, given that Fray’s world was supposed to be utterly free of magic, though it might also tie in with Fray’s initial awakening as a slayer. There’s a lot of story worth telling about that and how it ties in to the past/present, so hopefully that’s what we’ll be seeing some of as the arc continues.

For this issue, presumably to help echo Buffy’s sense of disorientation, Whedon has ramped up the future-speak tenfold. It’s a little jarring at first if you’re familiar with the character being more readable, but the staccato and contracted dialogue is, on close inspection, still entirely incomprehensible, and that’s is always a plus for a comic. Seeing how Fray actually operates in the future is the most interesting element of the future timeline since the original series never really got past the origin story.

Moline’s artwork remains a nice change from Jeanty – for obvious reasons he’s got the look of Fray’s future nailed down tight, and this issue is all the better for taking place more substantially in the world he helped realise. Whedon seems to have tightened up his arc-writing after a fairly lacklustre opener and things feel a lot more structurally sound than his first multi-parter. Season 8 continues its remarkably high standard, setting a prime example to all licensed comics.

Despite the novelty value of seeing Brian K. Vaughan or Drew Goddard’s take on Buffy: Season 8, there’s nothing quite the same as seeing Joss Whedon in full command of his creations. This latest arc actually brings in an extra creation too – the future slayer, Fray, once seen in her own mini-series, and the first time Buffy comics went “canon.”

It wouldn’t be unfair to expect a throwaway, fanboy-pleasing crossover, but then Joss Whedon knows far better than that. While it’s not stated in the issue, Fray’s awakening as the Slayer followed a period where all magic and magical beings had been exiled from the planet – a goal Buffy’s current nemesis, Twilight, appears to be pursuing. The likelihood of Fray’s past and Buffy’s future tying themselves together definitively is not inconsiderable.

While most of the issue is given over the character interplay, it’s never anything less than entertaining. Whedon’s dialogue has always been strong, and watching his characters bounce off one another would be worth reading even if nothing actually happened to them. Luckily, things do happen though – the Scoobies travel to New York looking for some answers, Dawn’s size problems finally get dealt with (…sort of) and meanwhile, the villains of the series make a fairly definitive win against the Slayers. The one down side is that despite the events of the previous arc, Xander’s reactions are somewhat glossed over – admittedly, it’s hard to everything into an issue, but personally, I hoped for more.

Karl Moline returns on art to draw Fray, the character he co-created. His pencils offer a slightly more exaggerated and dynamic version of the main cast than Jeanty’s rather tight approach while largely retaining the visual style of the series. There’s no massive shift in tone, and Moline’s action scenes work particularly well, even if his looser approach means that certain expressions look a little too twisted.

The issue is a good opener, leaving a lot of questions to be answered by the next few issues, and catering well to those that aren’t already familiar with Fray’s world. Those of us who are will just find that much more to enjoy.

The final part of Wolves at the Gate cements it as perhaps the weakest story since the first arc, but even so, that’s only because the standard of the series is ridiculously high. Goddard wrote some great episodes of the TV series, and his enthusiasm for the characters has carried over into his comics story, which – for a change – features actual vampires as the villains.

More than the previous writers, Goddard’s arc feels a lot like a standard Buffy episode, even if it is set in Tokyo. The mystical threat is well-defined and the character subplots weave nicely throughout. If there’s anything wrong with the “episode” feels like it lacks any central theme or metaphor. This was often a problem with the later Buffy episodes where it occasionally strayed too far into soap-opera territory. The characters, plot and script are in order, but it doesn’t go that one level deeper that the best Buffyverse stuff does.

The plot comes to a satisfying end with victory (if a somewhat pyrrhic one) for the slayer crew and a belated attempt to justify Dracula’s presence with an enchanted sword showing up just at the right moment. The inclusion of a robo-Dawn was perhaps a little too much even if it leads to Andrew’s best moment this series, though I can’t help mentioning Cloverfield, in the context of the film’s scriptwriter now doing a Godzilla homage in the Buffy comic. It’s certainly not hard to see where his references are coming from.

Dracula, for all his hilarity and viciousness, has undergone a complete personality transplant since his original Buffyverse appearance in Season 5. It’s a little jarring, but completely forgiveable because it results in such a brilliant character. His friendship with Xander is harder to deal with, having been established in the now definitely-canon “Tales of the Vampires” graphic novel (in a short written by Drew Goddard, no less.)

The death of Renee and the exit of Satsu does, once again, leave Xander and Buffy the potential to get together, which is what everyone was expecting/hoping would happen at the start of the series. It does also give those people who are looking for extra support for their “Xander is Twilight” theories some credible material – after all, Xander has lost a LOT to magic in his life, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he’d want to end it all. For the first time, there’s no between-issue break before the next arc, so if Twilight doesn’t feature, we might be waiting some time to see where it’s all going…