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According to the pre-release blurb, PART II of THE HEART OF THE SLAYER has Buffy discovering "why is being stalked by a nightmare creature from fourteenth-century France." Well, not quite. We do learn what the demon thingy from part one is, but exactly who sent it remains a mystery. Personally, I'd hope that it's part on some ongoing thread, but sadly that does seem rather unlikely. Minus marks to the blurbwriter also for the part about "the ultimate sacrifice" - let's face, it ain't gonna be Buffy, is it? Anyway, after PART I set things up, we get to learn just why the mysterious girl, Adja, is in Sunnydale, and what the demon thing is. And - quelle surprise - the "ultimate sacrifice" turns out not to be Buffy's. The story mostly concerns Buffy and Adja, with Giles getting to play with his books and the rest of the Scoobies virtually absent. This is no bad thing, given the space wasted on Willow and Xander in the Bronze last time out. However, since none of that has any real bearing on the plot, it could have been scrapped in the first place, so that either the whole story ran as a single parter, or we got some more background. The blurb implies that Adja is French, and Giles says she speaks some sort of "Gothic" language, which at least implies some sort of European origin, but we never really learn anything more. Who sent them? Did the portals bringing them to present day Sunnydale take them to eleventh-century Sunnydale first, and then through time (since we first meet them in 19th century Sunnydale) or not? Of course, there's no need to explain everything, but it's frustrating that these sorts of things don't get answered when we get Willow stuffing up some pointless spell instead. The blurb pretty much gives things away, which is rather annoying, although the final couple of panels do provide it with a suitable ending, even though two parters are always going to struggle getting the story balance right. And I'm still not convinced about the artwork though, especially Giles. BACK TO THE TOP |
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