DARK HORSE PRESENTS ANNUAL 2000: GIRLS RULE!

Set during season four, Take Back the Night is a simplistic tale of some strange killings on the USC. All the victims are female, all look as though something has hatched out of them and when Buffy sees a giant bug-thing beside one of the victims, it's not hard to work out what's going on.

As shown in DHP 150, Cliff Richards' artwork is well suited to black-and-white, but it's the script that lets things down.  Maybe concentrating on Buffy was a mistake because the story is little more than a quick runabout in the format of the Dark Horse one part stories - after we learn what's going on, Buffy discovers what's really happening, has a chat with the Scoobies and then beats up the giant bug-thing.  All pretty obvious stuff really, and it might have been better to base stories of this length around just one or two characters, preferably the supporting ones for a change.

With the whole DHP Annual having just 64 pages in which to tell five separate stories, it's obviously unfair to expect too much from Take Back the Night but even so, it was just a little too obvious.

Of the other four stories, Star Wars: Aurra's Song and Xena Warrior Princess: Atlas Shrugged are probably the best.

In the former, scantily-clad dancing girl turned assassin Aurra outsmarts bounty hunter Torgo Tahn, while in the latter, Joxer eats a carrier pidgeon (shades of Blackadder Goes Forth) and he and Gabrielle discover why everyone in his grandmother's village has suddenly become super-strong.

It's a shame that Titan's Buffy magazine is unlikely to ever print Take Back the Night as one of its DH reprints because unless you're also into one or more of the other strips here, you're not missing too much by giving this one a miss.

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OVERALL RATING
6/10