Electric TIki announced they are producing staues based on tooned up versions of some of the popular Buffy characters. Head over to their website to check out the production sketches which are vauguely similar to the Buffy Animated Series production art.
From the Toronto Star:
Buffy slayed her first vampire 10 years ago Saturday. The series ended after seven seasons. The WB, which originally aired Joss Whedon’s show, ended last year. Why should we still care about a blonde in high heels killing creatures of the night… Read More.
From Icv2.com
Dark Horse will release four major art books over the summer and fall. First up is the Art of Bone, a full color hardcover scheduled for June. It will include previously unpublished and rarely seen Jeff Smith promotional art, holiday cards, and other artwork, outlines, and full stories from the early self-published days until the property’s current status as a mainstay of the graphic novel world.
In August, Dark Horse will release the Art of Grendel, which will similarly track the 25 year history of Matt Wagner’s anti-hero in a full color hardcover presentation.
Conan: The Phenomenon, a hardcover written by Paul Sammon, will be released in September. The cover will be a classic piece of Frazetta Conan artwork. The book will cover the history of the character from its 1932 origin to the present, including the great Frazetta covers for the novels, the history of the comics, the Shwarzenegger film, and the recent revival of the comics.
In October, Dark Horse will release Buffy: Panel to Panel, modeled after its Star Wars: Panel to Panel release. This deluxe trade paperback will collect the best of the paintings and line art from the Dark Horse comics, which have run over 100 issues to date.
Dark Horse is also planning a number of comic collections in the coming months, with omnibus editions for Aliens (June), Buffy (July), and Star Wars Tale of the Jedi (October) among them. In June, the company plans to release its first collection of Harvey Comics Classics: Casper the Friendly Ghost, in an omnibus format. Edited by Leslie Cabarga and Jerry Beck, the volume will collect 100 original comic stories from 1949 to 1965.
This article is from the LA Times:
‘Buffy’ creator Joss Whedon has the heroine returning for a comics-style Season 8.
By Kate Aurthur, LA TIMESWHEN audiences last saw the cast of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in May 2003, Buffy and her friends had won a nearly apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Their hometown of Sunnydale, Calif. — also known as the Hellmouth — was a gargantuan pit as a result. After peering into the crater, Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, walked away with a smile, and the television series came to a close after seven seasons.
On March 14, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” will return in comic book form. Joss Whedon, “Buffy’s” creator, has written the first five issues and will oversee — or “executive produce,” he says — the whole arc as if it were a television show. Whedon has enlisted former “Buffy” staff writers, along with a few writers from the comic book world, to join him in continuing the story, which is scheduled to run for at least 30 issues to be released monthly. Whedon, the show’s fans and the series’ publisher, Dark Horse Comics, have deemed it “Buffy Season Eight.”
“When you create a universe, you don’t stop living in that universe — I know a lot of the fans didn’t,” Whedon said. “But I was surprised to find myself back in it so firmly as well.”
It’s yet another reinvention for “Buffy,” which Whedon turned into a TV series after being disappointed with the results of the frothy 1992 movie, starring Kristy Swanson, that he had written. So, in summary: “Buffy Season Eight” is a comic book run like the television series from which it came, which itself evolved out of a feature film — a classic evolving specimen for this era of ever-shifting media platforms.
The common element is Whedon, 42, the movie-TV-comics auteur behind “Buffy,” “Angel,” an “X-Men” comic series, the screenplay of “Toy Story,” and the flop television show “Firefly” as well as its movie resurrection, “Serenity.” In recent years, he has expressed frustration with both the television and movie businesses, but the less pressure-filled world of comics has been a constant.
Scott Allie, senior managing editor at Dark Horse Comics, knows his company is benefiting from Whedon’s urge to create more “Buffy” stories. Excitedly and without hesitation, Allie said, “Oh, it’s gonna be huge.”
A moderate ratings success on the WB and for its final two seasons on UPN, “Buffy” nevertheless inspired as worshipful a cult as you can find in the pop landscape. It told the sneakily dark coming-of-age story of a young woman who was special, in that she was chosen to save the world from vampire-led evil, but yearned to fit in. Buffy was surrounded by loving friends and family, bad boyfriends, and demons. Her high school was literally hell, she died a couple of times during the series, and as her tombstone once read, “she saved the world — a lot.”
Since the show ended, “Buffy” fans have made do with what was left to them. Across the Internet, the show continues to be parsed: its feminism, its use of language, its influence on current shows such as “Lost,” “Heroes” and “Veronica Mars.”
More concretely, a public sing-along of the show’s musical episode, “Once More With Feeling,” has grown so popular that its inventor, a film programmer from Brooklyn, is planning a “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-like national tour. Penguin recently published “The Physics of the Buffyverse,” a book in which science writer Jennifer Ouellette explains the principles of physics using examples from “Buffy” and its spinoff, “Angel,” which ran from 1999 to 2004.
“It really was like being home again,” Whedon said wistfully about returning to “Buffy.” ” ‘Oh, here are my old friends. They’re so funny!’ You can hear their voices so specifically. It was a comic spoken in the voices of actors you worked with for seven or eight years.”
Whedon, interviewed over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, looks like a ruffled college student. A third-generation television writer, he has a deadpan delivery but affects voices as he talks to illustrate or emphasize important points. “Buffy” was known for its characters’ tone and banter, and hearing him is like listening to the show — making its translation into comics reliant on, or at least greatly enhanced by, a reader’s familiarity with the original.
Or, as Jane Espenson, a former writer and co-executive producer of “Buffy” who has signed up for comic book duty, put it: “The voices of those characters are in my head forever and ever. The reason characters talked like that on ‘Buffy’ is they talked a bit like Joss — and we all ended up talking like Joss.”
Season 8 begins
DARK Horse’s Allie said that the voices come through in the comic’s dialogue, and the visuals will reward fans. “You don’t have cute Sarah Michelle Gellar running around, but you’ve got good-looking characters and much better-looking monsters.”
Oregon-based Dark Horse, one of the country’s largest comic book producers, has published works by Frank Miller and Mike Mignola and also many tie-ins with Hollywood, such as “Star Wars,” “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Mask.” Dark Horse published the ancillary “Buffy” comics that came out during the show’s run, which Whedon had little to do with. There were “Angel” comics too. Later, Whedon co-wrote a series that bridged the gap between “Firefly,” his canceled Fox show, and “Serenity,” the movie rebirth of it in September 2005.
All the while, Allie was interested in a “Buffy” comic that “replaces the TV show in a way we never could do before.” A year ago, he opened an e-mail from Whedon, and it unexpectedly contained the script for the first issue of “Buffy.” Allie remembered thinking, happily, “Oh, OK, so you’re going to write this?”
Until then, Whedon had been hopeful that a series of TV movies based on “Buffy’s” costars would be produced by 20th Century Fox Television, the studio behind the television show. The movie spinoffs would be able to get around the inconvenient truth that Gellar no longer wanted to play Buffy by sending fan-favorite characters like Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Spike (James Marsters) on their own adventures.
“It was a pipe dream ultimately, because I think the studio thought they could do this for no money — that everybody would show up because we’re all buddies,” Whedon said. “But I don’t think they noticed that everybody seems to have careers. It was an unrealistic business model. And once I realized that, I just decided, ‘I can find a man to draw them instead!’ ” (20th Century Fox Television declined to comment.)
In the year since Whedon wrote the first issue, he and Dark Horse worked on finding the right artists and assembling a team of writers. From the “Buffy” world, Espenson, Drew Goddard, Drew Greenberg, Doug Petrie and Steven DeKnight have said they will contribute; from the comics side, Jeph Loeb and Brad Meltzer joined the project; and Brian K. Vaughan will write the four-arc series after Whedon’s first five issues.
Vaughan’s series will focus on Faith, a recalcitrant slayer who was Buffy’s friend, then her nemesis and finally her ally. “When I sat down with Brian to talk about his arc, that was the closest I’d been to a writers’ room since I left television,” Whedon said. “You know what? It felt so great.”
Espenson said she’d like to write “comedic stand-alone” issues throughout “Buffy Season Eight.” She said: ” ‘Buffy’ was a show that Joss ran from top to bottom. I liked working for Joss as a show runner, and I hope he’s really, really running this.” She paused, and laughed: ” ‘Tell me what to do, Joss, and I’ll do it!’ “
Some work situations run more smoothly than others.
As Whedon was getting “Buffy Season Eight” up and running, he was supposed to be writing and then directing a high-profile comic adaptation: the movie version of “Wonder Woman” with Warner Bros. After having been associated with the long-gestating project since March 2005, Whedon announced he was quitting last month on the fan site Whedonesque.com, writing, “We just saw different pictures.”
When asked to elaborate, he didn’t really. “I don’t want to go into it too much, because they still own that script,” he said. And then: “I cannot tell you what they wanted. Because they never told me what they wanted. When I asked them, ‘Well, what is it that you want?’ They said, ‘We cannot tell you.’ I can tell you what they didn’t want: Me!” And then: “And they treated me extremely well; I’m not trying to slam.” (Warner Bros. declined to comment.)
Many roads ahead
BUT Whedon is clearly unhappy about the experience and the time wasted: “You know, when you get into a giant thing like ‘Wonder Woman,’ to add up to nothing — it’s going to be four years between projects. I don’t have that many four years.”
He said he will now focus on “Goners,” an original screenplay he wrote and is developing to direct for Universal that he called “a ghastly tale of female empowerment — something new for me!”
He would also like to return to television, after telling Variety in 2004, “I have a bitter taste in my mouth with where TV has gone in the past five years.” Whedon said the experience he had with “Firefly,” which was canceled after 11 episodes, taught him what guarantees he would need to go back. “I don’t want another ‘Firefly.’ I can’t do that. It hurts too much,” he said. “I’ll learn to golf or something instead. And that, by the way, is not going to help the golf world.
“But because of the new media, because of DVDs, because of the Internet, there are so many new avenues that basically I feel like I can go back to TV when I have the power to set up a paradigm wherein I know I can complete a story.”
For now, he has more “Buffy” stories to tell. Espenson said that, knowing Whedon, she was not surprised he came back to “Buffy.”
“It’s about youth. It’s about feminism,” she said. “Strength and learning who you are. It’s hard to imagine a franchise that captures as much of Joss’ soul as this one does.”
But in reflecting on it himself, Whedon wonders. “I was like, ‘Am I really an artist of integrity, or am I just grieving for my mom? What’s going on here?’ I have so many questions about why I do that — why I go back to that well when I could be moving forward.” He hesitated, then said: “But the fact of the matter is when you work with people you love, you want to work with them more. Same goes with characters.”
WizardUniverse.com has interview with the three honchos behind Buffy Season 8:
Joss Whedon
WHAT’S YOUR STORY ABOUT? My story kind of gets us up to speed in terms of what happens to the world when thousands of girls from around the world are all suddenly empowered [with Slayer abilities], [and] what happens to Buffy and how her life has changed after [the destruction of her hometown,] Sunnydale. Not where everybody is, because we’re still keeping some secrets, but where some of our key members are and how they’re doing and how people are reacting to this sudden surge of strangely powerful women who seem to gather together. It’s bigger than the show in its scope, but it’s the same kind of intimacy. The biggest fun is always just the gang getting together and yakking. My arc serves as more bringing people into this new world, because it is a new world, both for old fans, for new readers and for Buffy herself.
FAVORITE BUFFY STORY I’m kicking it old school with the arrival of [Angel’s evil persona] Angelus [in Season 2’s two-part “Surprise” and “Innocent”]. That never got old for me. That was where it all came together.
LEAST FAVORITE BUFFY STORY I mean, I had some bad experiences. You always do. But I’m here not to rag on people. So I’m gonna say that when I think about mythic storytelling, I think the fact that [Principal] Robin Wood in Season 7 revealed he was the son of a Slayer over dinner was probably the least mythic idea I ever had, and I still kinda cringe when I think of that. I still look at that and go “Now that is just bad storytelling, bro. There’s so many better ways to reveal that.”
FAVORITE BIG BAD I’m gonna give it up to the Mayor [from Season 3]. I just loved that character. I loved writing him and the dichotomy between his “Father Knows Best” sweetness and his complete evil, and [actor] Harry Groener was just such a prince.
LEAST FAVORITE BIG BAD You know, I look back at what we did with Adam [Season 4’s patchwork Frankenstein-like monster], and I think we had all the elements, and we never put it together. Why did we light Adam like that? Why didn’t we light him differently? I don’t know why I was thinking about it. It’s an interesting creature. What made him and what he was and what he wanted were fascinating to me. And that fault was sadly mine.
MOST UNDERDEVELOPED CHARACTER I think [Buffy’s sister] Dawn. Everybody knows Dawn complains. I kept having her be sad because her reality was so crushingly horrible. She kept losing parental figures over and over and over. I’ve got her in the comic book, and she and Buffy are bickering. But for a different reason. A very good reason.
IF I HAD TO WRITE THE FINAL BUFFY STORY, I WOULD… Spend years agonizing over it and ultimately disappoint probably 50 percent of the people who read it. A lot of guys would go out disappointing 70 percent, but I’m gonna make half the people really happy. The other half are gonna be pissed. ’Cause Buffy clearly is gonna end up with… [Simulating static] I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. [Simulating static]
Brian K. Vaughn
WHAT’S YOUR STORY ABOUT? [Fellow Slayer] Faith is going to be the star of my four-issue arc, which is totally thrilling to me, because I love her. I’m going to be writing issues #6-#9. I believe that turnabout is fair play; since Joss is following me on [Marvel’s] Runaways, I owed it to him to jump in after he took off.
FAVORITE BUFFY STORY It’s sort of a downer, but I’d have to say “The Body” [the Season 5 episode that dealt with the unexpected death of Buffy’s mom]; it’s not just my favorite episode of the series, but maybe my favorite hour of television anywhere. I’d never really seen anything like that. That episode just haunts me with how good it is.
FAVORITE SEASON That’s f—ing tough. [Pause] Season 2. The show really hit its stride then, perfectly blending humor, action, horror and drama. The Buffy/Angel relationship was fascinating, and I always liked [Buffy’s teacher] Jenny Calendar. Some of the best cliffhangers in the history of TV, too.
FAVORITE BIG BAD Gotta go with Angelus [from Season 2]. That’s a pretty great moment following Buffy sleeping with Angel the first time [in the two-part “Surprise” and “Innocent”] because that resonates so well with the real world of that fear of a girl sleeping with a guy and he becomes somebody else—and that literally happened on the show. It’s just so brilliant.
LEAST FAVORITE BIG BAD I never warmed up to Adam, but I recently did one of those dumb online polls that tell you what Buffy character you most resemble, and I’m Adam apparently. And it turns out the only guy I didn’t completely love in the Buffy Universe is me. [Laughs]
BEST LAUGH-OUT-LOUD ‘BUFFY’ MOMENT There was just one silent shot of [Buffy’s mentor] Giles wearing a wizard’s costume [in Season 5’s “No Place Like Home”] that they held on for an uncomfortably long time, and there’s no dialogue. That was cripplingly funny.
WHAT’S THE ONE THING YOU WOULD NOT DO FOR JOSS WHEDON? I’ve done everything for him! F—ing ask him, man! [Laughs] I’m writing 19 comics books, two movie screenplays and I’m full time on a TV show [“Lost”], and he asked if I would write this comic book and I was like, “In a heartbeat.” Hell, if he wants, he can have my first born.
IF I HAD TO WRITE THE FINAL BUFFY STORY, I WOULD…
I’m f—ing ready to write it tomorrow, are you kidding? I always thought it would be kind of poignant to just have Buffy and [her friend] Xander be the last two people left, and have them reminisce about high school. The point being that, while you’re going through high school, it seems like hell, but once you’re old you begin looking at high school like it used to be paradise. So maybe that’s a Buffy reveal: When Xander asks Buffy what heaven was like, she says, “Like high school, just with you and my friends.” That’s lovely, right? Like all of my stories, it’s two old people talking. [Laughs]
Jeph Loeb
WHAT’S YOUR STORY ABOUT? It’s way too early [to say]. I spent almost two years of my life trying to get the “Buffy” animated series off the ground, so I spent a lot of time with the show and the writers—the best thing that came out of that is my friendship with Joss [Whedon]. He called and asked me to do [this comic] and I said yes.
FAVORITE BUFFY STORY You gotta go with the easy one: the end of Season 2 and Angel’s death [in the two-part “Becoming” episode]. There’s nothing like a little “Romeo & Juliet” to really make your afternoon.
LEAST FAVORITE BUFFY STORY When they were still trying to find their way, the praying mantis teacher and Xander getting wrapped up in a cocoon [in Season 1’s episode “Teacher’s Pet”] is one of my favorite highlights of stupidity.
FAVORITE SEASON I’m a big fan of the first two—not to say I didn’t love the rest, but when it was new and fresh, there were just so many surprises. By the time the show went on and you fell in love with the characters, it was really a different show.
LEAST FAVORITE SEASON Joss knows I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Initiative [in Season 4]. Season 6 when Buffy came back to life—boy, that was depressing for a long time. [Laughs] It’s only depressing because you care, though.
FAVORITE BIG BAD I’ll always go to [vampires] Spike and Darla and the gang. I guess that really just means Angelus.
BEST LAUGH-OUT-LOUD ‘BUFFY’ MOMENT During “Hush” [in Season 4] when [Buffy’s friend] Willow came out and wrote on the blackboard around her neck, “Hi Giles!” That was the most brilliant thing I’d ever seen in my life. [Laughs]
CHARACTER YOU’D LIKE TO DATE It will surprise you—Joss always used to look at me like, “Huh?”—but [actress] Julie Benz as Darla was just the hottest thing to hit the Earth, anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
YOUR TAKE ON “ANGEL” AS A SPINOFF SHOW There were times I enjoyed “Angel” more than I enjoyed “Buffy.” That may just be a male thing; sometimes Joss’ feminist manifesto would get to me, whereas “Angel” was just a big rollicking detective show with great characters.
AS A GUY WHO’S WORKED IN TELEVISION AND MOVIES FOR A LONG TIME, WERE YOU EVER SURPRISED THAT A FAILED MOVIE TURNED OUT TO BE SUCH A HIT ON TV? Are you kidding me? It’s one of the biggest jokes in the world! The only one which is even more surprising is the failed television show that went on to become a movie with “Firefly” and “Serenity”—Joss is all about breaking the rules. But boy is that [original “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”] movie bad. I love that Joss said, “No, it’s not a failed concept, just a poorly executed one.”
From DarkHorse.com, Scott Allie updates us on what is happening behind the scenes.
Season Eight #1 is off to the printer, on sale in a matter of weeks, and we’re doing everything we can to get the word out there beyond the comics market, to bring in all the Buffy fans who were left wanting more at the end of Season Seven. I’m writing this quick update from a New York City hotel room the weekend before the big New York convention, where we’re going to be doing one last-ditch effort to get the word out before the book hits the street.
Meanwhile, though, Joss and the team are working way ahead. He’s already turned in the first five issues’ worth of scripts, which puts him off the hook until his next arc–which we’ll be announcing in a few months–and that story should make hardcore Joss fans lose their minds. Georges has his hands full, wrapping up some final corrections on issue #3, working on the variant covers for #2 and #3, and starting up issue #4 with Joss now.
We’ve just committed Paul Lee to draw issue #5, giving Georges an issue off before his arc with Brian K. Vaughan. Paul’s throwing pages back and forth via email with Joss, working out some subtleties in this stand-alone issue, which Joss says is very personally important to him. Paul’s also working on a variant cover for that, while Jo Chen just this minute showed me pencils for her #5 cover, which she’ll be wrapping up around the convention this weekend. Last I heard from Brian Vaughan, he was deep into his first issue (that’d be #6, for those without a scorecard), and pushing up against the page count of twenty-two–this Faith story he’s working on promises to be packed tight. Working with Joss on Buffy is pretty damn exciting, but getting to work with Brian for the first time smells like napalm in the morning. Like victory.
After Brian’s four-issue arc, we’re gearing up to bring in one of the most popular show writers, Drew Goddard. His story involves one of the most popular villains from the TV show, with a focus on Xander, and … wait for it … him and the other Scoobies stomping around Tokyo! Dawn should feel right at home.
We’ve got a letters column in Buffy, so make damn sure to write in to let us know what you think when, in just a couple weeks, you get your greedy little hands on Buffy: The Long Way Home Part 1.
Darkhorse.com reports that Episode 1 has been pushed back to March 14th.
Booo.
Here is a new page preview (Credit to DreadCentral.com)
PublishersWeekly.com posted this on their website.
The upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics, written by Joss Whedon, is poised to be a huge seller. Initial orders for the first issue are 80,000, and sales should easily go above the 100,000 mark. The series is being promoted on MySpace with a contest where fans get a chance to be an extra in the series. Dark Horse is also planning another Serenity series by Whedon.
Buffy Season 8 will continue with an arc by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Georges Jeanty. The story focuses on Faith and Giles.
Faith and Giles, intriguing. One wonders if her and Robin Wood (The Principal of former Sunnydale High) are still an item.
Dark Horse releases info on upcoming 2007 projects at New york Comic Con.
DARK HORSE COMICS IN 2007
Editor Scott Allie joins a table of faces to talk Star Wars, Buffy and Serenity at Dark Horse Comics in ‘07By Brian Warmoth
Some of the best stories in comics come from unexpected scenarios. Dark Horse Comics’ resident horror guru, editor Scott Allie, set the tone for the Dark Horse Q&A Panel at New York Comic Con Sunday with his anecdote recalling the genesis of Joss Whedon’s first script for his upcoming Buffy: Season 8 comic-book run that begins this year.
“When the show ended we also decided to end the monthly series,” Allie explained. In the wake of the show’s conclusion, however, he also discussed picking up on the Buffy saga in a new series. The only problem was putting together a plan and creative team that would be faithful to the original material. Allie said that he worked closely with Joss at that point and told him, “If we’re going to continue within this universe, I need you tell me where to go.”
“We kept talking about who we might get to write it,” said the editor. Choices were difficult, and the project stalled while Whedon focused on his other projects, including his Serenity comics at Dark Horse. Allie was waiting on a Serenity script from Whedon when the writer surprised him with an email attachment indicating who the series’ writer would be.
Whedon wanted to do it. “Now it’s probably spread out to about 30 [issues],” Allie said. “Along the way we’re going to drop in other writers.” Fill-ins will include the show’s former writer Drew Goddard, who will take the slayer tales to Japan, and Brian K. Vaughan, who will come in for the series’ second story arc.
Also from Whedon, Allie promised a new Serenity series hitting in the fall written by Whedon and Brett Matthews, which will take place before the movie.
Read more at Wizard.com
