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With other
supporting characters from the Buffy franchise getting their own
spin-off adventures, it was only going to be a matter of time before someone
got round to a solo outing for Giles.
The death
of an old friend causes Buffy's ex-Watcher to return to England for his
funeral, where he finds that the Watchers' Council haven't been too
successful at keeping some of their secrets under lock and key.
It's a pity
that they weren't a little more careful, because then we wouldn't have been
served up another rather average story.
There's
been a tendency in Buffy to present the Watchers' Council as more
concerned with protocol and regulations than with fighting the forces of
darkness. Giles takes this approach, with only a handful of
characters, including Giles himself and Michaela Tomasi (from The
Gatekeeper Trilogy) emerging unscathed. We all know that Quentin
Travers is a git, but if he was this concerned with doing things
"right", it's a wonder how he hasn't been killed yet.
Speaking of
Michaela, why do comic books always have to flag up continuity
references? If you haven't read The Gatekeeper Trilogy and Blood
of Carthage, then you'd either miss the references altogether or merely
think they referred to unseen adventures. Novels don't have footnotes
whenever there's a continuity reference and TV series don't (at least not
yet) have pop-up boxes to remind us, so why the need in this medium?
Oh well...
The story
itself is nothing special, with only the change of setting providing
something that we haven't seen in the spin-offs. In place of the usual
Sunnydale teen dabbling in the black arts we get someone from the Watchers'
Council, and Michaela's place could just as easily have been taken by
Willow.
I'm still
not keen on Eric Powell's art either. The infected characters look
suitably gross, but Giles doesn't really resemble Tony Head, and why on
Earth does he make half of the English characters look like gurning idiots?
Within the
confines of an ensemble television series, the character of Giles works
well. There's even some limited potential for solo adventures,
particularly if you're picking up on those things that will interest fans
rather than a more general audience. Unfortunately, Giles
doesn't really serve up anything new, so you're left wondering if the whole
enterprise wasn't a little pointless.
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