Spike #1. Review thing.

[elisi]

So, new Spike comic and what do you know? I have meta! :) It’s been a while, so let’s see how I do? *flexes Buffy meta muscles* Oh yeah, like writing a bike! I’m going to do this with lots of subheadings, so people can pick and choose what part they want to read. Although there is some s8 snark scattered throughout. Sorry. I have issues.

Why I like Lynch’s Spike
First of all, then yes, Lynch can be a jerk. Secondly - I don’t care. Lots of writers are jerks. Should he stay away from fandom? You betcha. But hey, that’s his funeral.

Anyway, I’m presuming that there are *other* reasons for people to dislike his Spike. I was thinking about this, and why I think he’s great. Partly it’s because I like Spike, full stop. Like my icon says, I like all the different Spikes - good, evil, loving Buffy or Angel, I adore him. As for Lynch’s specific Spike, then that taps into something that pre-dates the comics. I wrote a post (more a rant really, inspired by various things) a long time ago about Why didn’t Spike go to Buffy? (avrelia also has a brilliant, and much more measured, post here). My conclusion was that ‘He cares more about being a hero than getting Buffy.’ This is hugely simplified, of course (and made a lot of my fellow Spuffies very sad), but I was fed up of everyone thinking that he was staying away because he thought that Buffy didn’t love him (rather, than, say because he wanted to leave her free to do what she wanted). Although, looking at s8, I can now certainly see the justification of that mindset. s8!Spuffy is reminding me mostly of Martha/Doctor: You know, she likes him, is grateful that he saved the world and all that, trusts him and so on and on, but just doesn’t love him like *that*. (Don’t get me wrong, s8!Spike is lovely. But s8!Buffy is a million miles away from *my* Buffy, and with the glow thing on top I don't feel I have even the most tenuous grasp on her. The banter is spot-on though, and I can see why people enjoy it.)

Anyway, I like Lynch’s Spike because he’s his own man, secure in himself and who and what he is, someone not always trailing after others (Buffy, Angel) but striking out for himself and saving the day, just because he can. Also, he makes friends with people, and if there’s one thing I want Spike to have it’s friends who are all his.

I think Spike loves Buffy and vice versa. I think they’d be very happy together (when they’re not throwing furniture at each other). I also think that Spike loves Angel (and vice versa). I think (ultimately) he stayed with Angel because he knew Angel needed him more [than Buffy did]. They bicker endlessly, whilst always having each other’s back. This is how Lynch writes them, and it’s exactly how I write them too. So yeah, no problems.


Why I think that ‘evolution’ page is awesome
Apparently people don’t like it. It’s one of those cases where I find myself baffled, because it strikes me as so obvious that it’s hard to find the right words to use. So, I figured I’d let the picture itself do the talking, just with a couple of captions added:



We’ve seen this conflict/difference between them since the beginning - the ‘artist’ versus the one who thought it was all just a party. Now they’re all souled up, the dynamic stays - Angel (so often morally compromised by circumstance) is the one who thinks carefully about how and why. See him talking to Jasmine about world peace vs. free will. Angel is the one who had a soul, and then a destiny, forced on him - the one who doesn’t have choice, and because of that thinks about things a lot more carefully - and chooses to fight. Spike OTOH is the one bending the rules, the wild card, the Bad Boy of champions. Notice how he describes Angel - dull, coma-inducing, boring... It’s tearing Angel down even as he builds him up, equating nobility with someone overly politically correct who takes everything (himself included) way too seriously. Spike puts himself in contrast to this - he’s cool, laid-back, easygoing - big damn hero, yes, but not one for the big speeches or over-thinking things.

Let me borrow an example from C.S.Lewis’s ‘The Horse and His Boy’. (Background story: A king has twin sons. One is kidnapped as an infant. After many adventures the day is saved, and the one who was kidnapped - Cor - discovers that because he is the eldest, he - not his brother Corin - will one day become king):

“Oh dear,” said Cor. “I don’t want to at all. And Corin - I am most dreadfully sorry. I never dreamed my turning up was going to chisel you out of your kingdom.”
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” said Corin. “I shan’t have to be King. I shan’t have to be King. I’ll always be a prince. It’s princes have all the fun.”
“And it’s truer than thy brother knows, Cor,” said King Lune. “For this is what it means to be a king: to be the first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.”

Spike is more than happy to let Angel be King. ‘Cause he is smart enough to know that the princes have all the fun.

(Plus there’s a hundred-plus years of issues between them, with Angel as father-figure, brother, destroyer etc. etc. But I’m not bothering going down that avenue now.)

Thoughts on the issue itself
I’ve heard that there are people who think this issue... slow? Time wasting? Well allow me to disagree:

- We get all of Spike’s story, from siring and right up to the present day.

- We are introduced to the plot (Vegas is full of badness!), and it’s revealed who’s pulling the strings (at least some of them, I’m sure there’s a twist).

- We are introduced to canon characters and see how Spike gets on with them, and meet his new friends (complete with enough background story to fill in anyone unfamiliar with previous instalments).

- We see Spike arrive in Vegas and tackle his first problem, introducing him to the Big Bad.

- Plus, we get a couple of pages worth of Twilight-mockage. (Mocking Twilight is always a good thing in my world!)

Not bad for a first issue. Beginnings are delicate things, and I appreciate that all the background has been filled in. I know where Spike (and everyone else) is at, and that’s pretty helpful when I’m reading a story about him!

Anyway, onto more specific things...

Vegas thing looks fun (and horrible, of course). I wonder how it’ll all end up with a [pan dimensional] steam punk ship.

Background story is brilliantly done. And 'Alone together now' is making me green with writerly envy. Plus, Angelus in the background of Spike’s siring? Oh yeah.

(I’ll deal with the Twilight thing separately.)

Spike/Angel snarky banter! *profound love* And Illyria!!! This exchange made me laugh out loud in delight:

Angel: Illyria, watch the civilians.
Illyria: I am. They’re weeping. It’s repulsive.

Then, the getting-the-band-back-together. OK, so the fact that Beck is now dressed as a girl in a comic book is less than yay worthy, but hey - she *is* a girl in a comic book, and Lynch & Urru make no claims about being feminist in any way. What I *do* like is Spike’s 'I’m on a mission, love. The dark forces are stepping up and I want someone who will have my back. Beck can handle herself in a fight and she takes direction. There’s no romantic intentions here.' Beck’s in the story because she’s a good fighter, and a good friend, and I sincerely doubt she’ll ever be shown as a love interest. *crosses fingers* (She hero-worships Spike rather, but I think she got over that in Shadow Puppets. So I’m optimistic.) Plus, she’s just adorably excited to be in Vegas. ♥

And Betta George! \o/ Everything’s better with him around. Plus, he brings up Connor. LOOK PEOPLE HE EXISTS! (Calling him ‘Teen Angel’ made me smile.) Damn I hope this comic gets the blessing of the PTB and becomes ‘canon’ since that means Angel’s greatest love hasn’t been consigned to the ret-con dustbin.

’Everyone else sees the flying Elvises, er... Elvisii? Elvees?’ *cheers for language joke* (’Is this a Cirque thing?’ Heh.) Also, Spike is smart and figures out what to do immediately. Which leads to the wonderful end panel of him deciding to just lie down for a minute (hey, his shoulder’s out of socket, I’m not blaming him!) - but still trying to maintain his cool. :)

Dru, of course, is a wonderful surprise (and mmmmm, those pages are just luscious!), although who is her beau? He reminds me of the werewolf from Asylum, but that could be coincidence. And why does Spike have his soul? Anyway, I can’t wait to see what happens when Spike and Dru meet again!

All in all - good set-up, nice mystery, and my boy Spike set for lots of heroics! I’m on board and eagerly awaiting next month.


The Twilight Thing
So, here’s the part where I am ALWAYS up for a Twilight joke. It might be stupid, but never as stupid the books themselves. And I rather love the idea of them being written by Spider, rewriting her somewhat one-sided (and problematic) thing with Spike into a Twu Wuv yarn (It's called TWINKLE! This keeps making me chuckle. Told you I was easy...) Plus 'Now there’s a teen wolf thrown into the mix for no apparent reason' is so RIDICULOUSLY accurate that it’s almost painful. (Although if Dru's lover IS a werewolf, then it's v. nice foreshadowing.) To jump sideways then I find s8’s ‘Twilight’ cover with Spike as Jacob far more insulting - because Jacob really is pointless. He’s the guy who has NO CHANCE IN HELL, and is only thrown into the mix to create artificial tension. Thanks Joss, we didn’t need that. (Going further, then does that mean that Spike is destined to fall in love with and marry Queen Twilight?)

Anyway, if we go with the ‘canon’ thing, then both the Twinkle craze and the movie about Angel (and girl!Spike) in Hell-A go much further than anything in s8 to show why vampires have become so popular. Imagine for a minute that the Twi-hards found out that their darling Eddykins was real... they’d totally fight tooth and nail for him and his kind. Plus, with hero!Angel saving LA from the hordes of hell (based on a true story!), the public has plenty of positive role models to project their feelings onto. I’m sure Twilight (the organisation) happily exploited this. (Thank you Mr Lynch for filling in some plot holes - feel like explaining why Buffy lost her mind and started robbing banks? Can't be done? Ah well, it was worth a try.)

Nostalgia and bitterness. s8 lovers should probably stay away - I don’t want to harsh your squee
Reading this issue was actually a bittersweet experience. Because for a few pages I had my show back - it was Illyria and Angel and Spike, fighting and bickering and being so completely themselves that it made me miss my show more than I have for a long, long time. And I remember that they cancelled it, that we could have had more, that we’ll never ever get them back, and it’s painful. My beautiful, beautiful show.

And the thing is - s8 doesn’t inspire those kinds of feelings. At all. Everyone is OOC and badly drawn and the story makes no sense and they destroyed my Angel. Seeing him here - rigidly moral, a little petty, and just... Angel - it suddenly brought home again the *immense* damage done to him in s8. It’s so vast that I can’t really grasp it. And I don’t think I can ever forgive Joss.

So yes, I’m bitter. I didn’t think I had it in me to have any feelings about s8 anymore (my feelings went from bemusement through frustration to disgust and then ended up in mocking indifference) - but apparently I can still be bitter. I wrote Buffy & co. off as a lost cause years ago, but I had hoped that Angel and Spike could stay unsullied. How wrong I was. Spike is still himself (miraculously), but I want him to do his thing and then run far far away from the train wreck again as fast as his undead legs can carry him.

So yeah, I’m clinging to this comic, partly because it's set BEFORE everything goes to hell Twilight. I didn't want to end on such a downer, but... *deep sigh* I think I'll watch some Angel tonight. Maybe 'Damage'. And I'll raise my glass to both my souled vampire Champions.


Oh! I forgot to talk about the 'aerial sex' joke. As people have noted it comes out of nowhere, doesn't fit with anything and is pretty pointless. Much like the aerial sex itself then.

Also RL is actually pretty busy at the moment, plus it's my birthday tomorrow, so I might be a little slow in replying to comments. But I always get there in the end.

Comments

[angearia.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd include a link to the most recent meta I wrote about Angel. If you're interested in reading, it'll help clarify how I see his character.

He's a character who has a mission for good, but who is prone to get lost in his despair and compromise his means in the hopes of achieving good ends. Doing evil to bring about good. Yet Angel's redemption is about saving souls, so when he makes it about murdering the enemy, we know he's lost his way. And considering how often Angel does lose his way, there's tragedy in that story, but that doesn't make him a noble man.

Noble men are often labeled as fools. A noble man would've let the Circle murder both Drogyn and himself. Angel is a man willing to do evil in the name of good, to embrace necessary evil to save the world. And there's an uncomfortable philosophical tension there--can one do good through murder? Through refusing to believe in the good in humanity? I've always felt that Angel murdering Lindsey was him renouncing his mission to save souls, the mission he began when he first came to LA. He'd finally given up hope for humanity and was going to go down, kamikaze-style, taking as many of the evildoers with him. In the end, he damns the entire city (as the comics show). Innocent souls damned to suffer through hell, some even die horribly, some survive to live as abused and tortured slaves, and when they freed because Angel sacrifices himself (knowing it will force W&H to undo this world and that he won't be allowed to really die), they are returned to life but must forever carry the memory of their hellish experiences.

There's a lot that is indeed noble about Angel, there's a lot to love about Angel, but he is also a character who gets very, very lost and does horrifying things. To call him noble is to ignore all the times he violates the very notion of nobility, faith and compassion. And Spike has witnessed Angel's ignoble acts firsthand, the times Angel does horrifying things even with a soul. I think Spike is too perceptive to deceive himself that Angel is the noblest of the noble. And if Spike were to think that, then I'd be very worried about Spike since Angel is not the best role model for moral virtue considering he's prone to despair and so often loses his way (that's why he's lost without Cordelia to guide him).

[elisi]

Hmm. I can see where you come from, but I see it from a different angle? (Not sure what the best phrasing is.) ETA: Sorry about the waffling and all the repetition. You're getting half an essay here, it's just very jumbled.

V. briefly: Angel's worst enemy is himself. He is always fighting against what he was, what he's capable of, and yet without that he'd not be anyone. It's a beautiful paradox (like pretty much everything to do with Angel). Spike is always himself. Angel is forever conflicted. I'll get back to this.

Angel [the show] is about family. And it all comes together in Connor - he is the centre around which everything pivots. (This is why I'm so furious that he's been dismissed from s8 - without Connor, Angel is hollow, rootless, and his story has no focal point.) Connor is, in so many ways, his redemption. And he ends up selling his soul - and those of all his friends - for the sake of his son. Gunn says that of course he knew that signing up with W&H (and his later deal with the doctor) would come with sacrifices, he just didn't think it'd be one of them. Angel, although he never says it, knows that of course it'll be them. (See 'Why We Fight' - it's the most exquisite piece foreshadowing/meta about the season.) Or, just look to Conviction:

ANGEL: We're gonna change things. We came to Wolfram and Hart because it's a powerful weapon, and we'll figure out how to wield it.
WESLEY: Or kill ourselves with it.

Over the course of S5 Angel comes to understand that the only way to wield that weapon will kill them. But it's either that, or stay a part of the machine. He can choose *one* battle, or none, but he can't go back to who he was. (Really Anna says it all SO MUCH BETTER here.)

I don't think Angel gives up on humanity. Re. Lindsey, then let me quote Anna (in her NFA post):

And it's a stark reminder that cometh the hour Angel isn't the hero he once wanted to be, the hero who can put the whole world to rights. Why doesn’t Lindsey get a chance? We know that he should, that Angel of all people should know that, but as I said last episode, this is about making the choices you have to make. And it's not so much about whether those choices are right or wrong, as it is about shouldering responsibility. Choosing because not to choose would be the worst choice you could make.

Two things stand out for me re. Angel in NFA: One, he sends Connor away, to the last protecting his son, and the redemption and humanity tied up in him. Two, the way he kills Hamilton, Angel and Angelus finally as one. (Told you I'd get back to it.)

Angel fights, because it's all he has left. It's that or sit outside waiting for the sunrise. Like Buffy once told him: 'Strong is fighting! It's hard, and it's painful, and it's every day. It's what we have to do. And we can do it together.'

Angel saves his son, and because of that can no longer be the hero he wants to be. That's his story. I don't have a problem with Spike seeing that as noble.