Despite what this entry is going to make it look like, I’m really not a total fanboy. I would never have bought Christopher Golden and Daniel Brereton’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin or Finding Serenity, edited by Jane Espenson — but once Anne bought them and they were sitting around, well, there’s no reason not to read them, now is there?

The Origin is a comic book version of Whedon’s original script for the horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. I watched the movie a long time ago, so I don’t know how different the actual movie was from this script, but it doesn’t seem way out there; the biggest difference is just how it’s handled, with this treatment being a lot less campy and Valley Girly than the horrible horrible movie. I suspect that even if the movie had been done right, it still wouldn’t’ve been super-great (like the TV show was), but it clearly had room to be much better. All that aside, treating this as a pure comic book, it’s pretty mediocre. This seems to be a very literal adaptation of the screenplay, and thus seems oddly stiff as a comic.

Finding Serenity is a small-press book of essays about Firefly. The contents are pretty uneven, ranging from really tedious “omg i love that show so much!!!” essays to vaguely interesting essays focused on one element of the show (Michelle Sagara West’s contribution, about Zoe and Wash’s relationship, is the highlight of the book). Mostly, it reads like a particularly good bunch of blog posts or Usenet threads. Since I don’t read Firefly fan forums, I’m probably not the ideal audience for this book; if you do, you might be.

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