A review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #9 By Neil Shyminsky (neil) December 11, 2007 Rating: 3.6 / 10

Writer: Brian K. Vaughn
Penciler: Georges Jeanty

"No Future For You: Part 4"

I had fun with the first arc - especially the swerve at the end where we learn that the big bads aren't familiar and aren't magical, but are actually normal human beings - but count me among the people for whom this thing is becoming just 'meh'.

The art, first - there's something about Jeanty that bugs me. Multiple something, even. First: either try to approximate the actors' faces or don't. Sometimes Faith looks like Dushku, sometimes she doesn't, and the inconsistency is annoying in a way that it wouldn't be if he just decided to go with his own design. More significantly, I find it near impossible to follow his storytelling. I can't map out the spaces in which characters fight or make sense of direction - when Genevieve attacks Faith with the axe, the statue in which she lodges it couldn't be behind Faith unless Faith leaps forward between panels, they magically rotated 90 degrees, or they both lept outside (again, between panels). And when Genevieve is impaled on that same axe, we're meant to forget that it had been lodged at waist height, since it's suddenly only a foot or two from the ground. I remember these things because, naturally, they seem important - Chekov says you don't put a nail in the wall in Act 3 unless someone's hanging from it in Act 5 - and it irks me when the artist cheats like this.

I read all of 'No Future For You' in one sitting, so I'll make some general comments, which seems fair since this last issue should tie it all together. Mostly, I don't really get why 'No Future For You' necessitated 4 issues when it seems like, at most, a two-parter. The Pygmalion/My Fair Lady Bit was so painfully cliché that I would've stabbed myself in the arm to avoid reading it. I mean, really - a salad fork lesson? Are you kidding me? I've made a point of learning which fork was the salad fork precisely so I could avoid looking silly if I was ever in a bad movie. And the 'bitchy girl is clearly the real deal and doesn't need to get her credentials checked' schtick? Even worse. I mean, at least I've seen people confuse the salad and dinner forks; I've never seen the bitchy thing work.

My biggest problem, though, is that the entire story's a retread: Faith has yet another crisis of 'faith' in Buffy and her own self-worth, which was already done to death in the TV shows and doesn't do much of anything new for us in this context. Her new status quo with Giles seems somewhat interesting (though I don't totally get the necessity of operating out of Buffy's reach), but I could have just as easily done without the story that led to it. Yes, I realize that it fits into the big bad's plan - we needed Faith and Giles to kill the slayer and warlock in order to show that his plot to get magic-types to destroy one another works and doesn't require his direct involvement - but it seems to me that the story should still manage to stand on its own. And it only does so with excruciating effort.

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