Creative Staff:
Scripts: Christos Gage and Nicholas Brendon
Art: Rebekah Isaacs
Colors: Dan Jackson
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
What They Say:
“New Rules Part Three”
After saving the world from Slayer-turned-supervampire Simone, and restoring magic and the life of her magically created sister Dawn, Buffy is in the best place she’s ever been. There is a little weirdness going on, with the Slayer handbook’s pages suddenly being blank…But she’s back together with Willow, Xander, and Spike, doing what she was meant to do as the chosen one: slay vampires.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Dracula’s an interesting character to put into a thing. He, as Giles says, is a selfish, narcissistic, megalomaniac, soulless monster and yet he fits right in with the gang. I think I said this before, but his introduction in season five of Buffy was frustrating to me because it was just a story. Dracula is a huge villain to introduce and you do nothing with him. I saw them lay the proverbial shotgun down, but it wasn’t even shown again until these comics. In the TV show, it’s unforgiveable. His introduction in the comics makes it a little more forgiving.
Now, Dracula really does consist of most of this issue. Last issue, Xander and Dawn were tasked with bringing him in to help with these nouveau vampires. They have the same powers Dracula has, so maybe he gambled his powers away to “Orientals” again, as he says. As one of those “Orientals,” I found the line hilarious and it was made only more hilarious by Dawn saying that he didn’t learn racism.
Also as they say, the new laws of magic, including those on the nouveau vampires, are being written into the Vampyr book as they come. But many pages are blank. No one really knows what to do, but do more research. They capture a nouveau vampire to dissect it (kind of inhumane, but they’re soulless monsters, as they say) but Dracula has a better idea: Use his mind control to get Xander to help him to steal the book and write their own laws of magic. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
In Summary:
There was a lot of good things going on here character-wise with Buffy and Willow as they went on their vampire hunt during the day. Despite being humans, they’re really creatures of the night since they’ve been hunting them for so long. There’s also some weird tension going on between Xander and Dawn, which lead to him being fully mind controlled again. All said, what’s about to go down is going to be very, very bad.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: A-
Released By: Dark Horse
Release Date: May 21st, 2014
