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"Why not just get them
both?" asks the editor of Titan's Buffy magazine,
referring to the fact that #27 is available in two different covers.
Given the quality, he's lucky fans buy it once, let alone twice...
Following that little gem,
and some ramblings about late-night horror films, we're straight into the
news section.
It might sound slightly
pedantic, but I found that something jarred in many of this month's
stories. The facts are there, but it doesn't read particularly
well. It's the little things that bothered me - the opening paragraph
of the Angel season 3 news also implies that it should
be read before the Buffy news, but yet it's placed
first. And not for the first time, I'm left thinking that sections
such as The Watcher would be better if it was
reformatted as a series of snippets in a sidebar, rather than as a single
piece.
This month's main features
can be summed up in one word - interviews, as some of the features that
Titan seemed to be developing into regulars are ditched in favour of chats
with Juliet Landau, Clare Kramer and Rudolf Martin.
However, the main problem is
that the content of all three is pretty thin as we get the usual format of
plenty of photos and white space and not a lot to actually read.
Of course, male readers are unlikely to complain about photos of Landau and
Kramer (even though the latter's character was poorly used in season five),
but if we're going to get a poster each month, couldn't we have had one of
these for a change? No-one expects anything along the lines of Clare
Kramer's photoshoot for FHM (available in our features
section), but surely suitable could have found? Obviously
not as the Buffy/Spike and Cordy/Angel covers are simply recycled for this
month's "free spine-chilling pin-up"
You also have to question the
amount of space devoted to the Martin interview - after all, he appeared in
a grand total of one episode, regardless of how
important his character could have been.
The second half of the
magazine is pretty much the usual suspects - pointless set visit, reprinted
comic strip, the reviews and the letters page (spoilers ahoy as usual).
Obviously, any review is a
matter of personal taste, but I still think it's disappointing that Titan
don't seem interested in making more of the reviews section. Okay, so
their reviewer seems a lot more positive about Buffy
novels than some of us, but what's worse is that Titan seem keener on
wasting space than actually reviewing anything. Do we really need
whopping great photos of novel covers, and why is half of the space of the Food
Chain review taken up by a huge shot of the cover
and a montage from the comics?
I'm also slightly cynical
about exactly what gets reviewed in the magazine. So their reviewer
likes Titan's graphic novels (of mostly reprints from the Dark Horse
comics), but would Titan include these even if he didn't? And did I
miss the review of the conclusion to the Unseen
trilogy, or did they simply not bother with it (perhaps because it
sucked)? I can't help thinking that in the case of Titan's own
products at least, the amount of space and prominence that the designers
give them is proportionate to how much their reviewer liked them...
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BUFFY
THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #27
NOVEMBER 2001
TITAN MAGAZINES
£2.75
RATING: 5/10
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