Creative Staff:
Scripts: Christos Gage
Pencils: Rebekah Isaacs
Inks: Rebekah Isaacs
Colors: Dan Jackson
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
What They Say:
“What You Want, Not What You Need”
Angel’s plan to resurrect Rupert Giles is falling into place. With the help of Faith, that other vampire with a soul, former made Alasdair Coames, and Giles’s two youthful great-aunts, Angel will stop at nothing to bring Giles back…because they’ll need his help to defeat Whistler’s plan to overhaul life on Earth!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The theme of Angel TV was always redemption. But the path they’ve gone on in Angel & Faith is acceptance. No matter what you did, saving one person isn’t going to bring a different person back. Angel’s been trying to fix his past sins by doing just that and it ain’t working.
With Giles, he finally fixed one of his sins directly. He killed Giles. He brought Giles back. But he also made Pearl and Nash madder than they already were and that’s not doing the world any favors. With the lack of magic, everyone’s getting out of whack.
Watcher chief among them. He’s out of balance and he thinks killing 2 billion people to save the other 4 is worth the sacrifice. It isn’t. Not when you have the blitz going on again. Hell, they compared it to Hiroshima. London is going to hell and, elsewhere, Buffy’s fighting in the Deeper Well to save Dawn and Willow’s fighting to bring magic back to this world.
The world, as always, is screwed and it’s up to the Scoobies and Angel Investigations to save the day. They do in big fashion.
The fighty bits are less exciting in comic form, in my opinion. I always like seeing my action in motion, whether that be cartoon or live action, and a little is lost here on that part. But it’s still great and plays exactly to what the characters have been going through. Watcher tried to kill billions and, when he realized this, he redeemed himself in his own way. He took the concentrated magic orb into himself and made sure he was the only one hurt by it. The half Powers That Be being, half demon fell, but it wasn’t without reason. For all his sins, he saved many more here.
Angel’s been doing the same thing. He’s back to helping the helpless, as they say. He’s come to accept what he’s done and is just trying to bring good to this world instead of making up for what he’s done. Nothing can change that he did bad things. But he can choose whether he does bad or good things in the future. He chooses good.
Faith’s made her own choice as well. Helping Slayers was the only thing that gave her worth inherent of itself, and she wants to do more. Willow’s former girlfriend Kennedy has that Slayer team of bodyguards and they need a trainer. Faith’s just the girl for the job. She can move on from all those she hurt and start to help those that need it. These girls weren’t chosen, they were thrust into a world most of them aren’t ready for. The least Faith can do is help them survive.
Giles, back to life but now 12 years old, wants to see Buffy again. She was the closest thing he had to a daughter and, despite his new deposition, it’s what’s good in his life. London is where he made mistakes, America is where he tried to fix them. America is where he molded a young, naïve Slayer into the savior of the world, multiple times over. And now that he can be just a little selfish, he wants to go back.
In Summary:
These Angel comics focused a little too much on the action and plot than I remember Angel TV doing. It was something that I really enjoyed about Angel TV that Buffy sometimes failed with. Characters and their flaws were paramount, as they are here, but they seemed more in the background. Too much time was spent trying to give us explanations we didn’t necessarily need about Giles’s past or Pearl and Nash. They were nice bits of world building, but not necessary to the plot overall.
The plot, however, was as compelling as I’ve ever seen in Buffy or Angel. At the forefront was character, but they were so single-mindedly focused on the task at hand that characterization suffered a little for it. “Perfect Harmony,” of all issues, was the best in my mind because character was so much at the forefront in that story, which was all too important in Angel. It seems that, with this comic, we lost sight a bit of what was important, and that’s Angel’s characterization.
In the Buffy comics, Buffy’s growth was always at the forefront and seemingly driving the plot. Maybe I’m missing something, in that Angel WAS so single-mindedly focused on saving Giles, but it felt lacking. There was no Wesley, no Gunn, and no Illyria driving the story in different directions. I guess we needed some other aspect for me to really appreciate what Angel and Faith were going through, and we were missing that third party to ground us in the story being told.
Still, it was an extremely enjoyable comic.
Content Grade: A+
Art Grade: A-
Released By: Dark Horse
Release Dates:
Issue #21: April 24, 2013
Issue #22: May 29, 2013
Issue #23: June 26, 2013
Issue #24: July 31, 2013
Issue #25: August 28, 2013
