Alien Resurrection: Angel & Faith #16 Review

Editor’s Note: If I ever want to hear your spoilers Spike… come to think of it, I’ll never want to hear your spoilers.

Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming. I probably should have, given how similarly weighty events have recently played out in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but what the hell. We’ll get to that in a minute.

We’ve spent sixteen issues watching Angel and Faith off in England, trying to work out how to bring Giles back from the dead. And during that time we’ve met some interesting new characters and we’ve come across some old familiar ones, and some weird shit has gone down, but that first statement has been our core mission: Angel and Faith are trying to resurrect Giles. And that has made Angel and Faith, to me, more compelling than the core Buffy Season Nine title, because of what that mission entails: doing some dark shit, shit that the Buffy TV show, in Season Six, showed us was difficult on a good day, impossible on a bad one, and dangerous, ill-advised and rife with bad, bad unintended circumstances on every day. And this story has worked for me because if anyone knows the dangers behind raising the dead, it’s members of Buffy’s Scooby Gang, and yet they were doing it anyway. And the promise has been that we will eventually see them on the precipice of darkness, with Giles’s body and some magical McGuffins, and having to make the conscious decision as to whether to proceed or not, and face those consequences.

Well, that’s over now. While the conclusion of Angel & Faith #16 delivers one hell of a twist and teases a possible big bad for Faith and Angel that I didn’t really see coming and which could well wind up with an emotional and affecting climax. However, by taking that course, writer Christos Gage has let the air out of the story so far. He trades the weird, sick momentum of the story so far for a twist and an “oh shit!” moment. And while that moment has some promise, it doesn’t trade even in my ledger.

Angel & Faith #16 starts a new arc, Death And Consequences, with Angel and Faith storming a dungeon in Peru for a bitchin’ 80s Adidas headband that has the ability not only to make the wearer look like he’s ready to hit the roller rink to score some flake cocaine, but to restore any physical damage they have received, from coke-seared septums and skate-blisters to full-on post-mortum decay. The pair return to London to dig up Giles and finally Do The Deed, only to discover that (dun dun DUNNNNN!) his grave is empty. As the pair retreat to home base to try and figure out what the hell’s gone on, local slayer Nadira and her crew of slayers pound on the door, fling recriminations around and threaten Angel and Faith, saying that if they don’t use what they have learned to resurrect their fallen member, Marianne, Nadira and company will kill them both. As things are about to come to blows, one of Nadira’s crew announces that “Plan B” is a go. So they leave without bloodshed, and travel to Guildford (with a frozen dead girl in tow, because that was the fashion at the time) to meet with Plan B… a plan who likes tea, wears glasses, and shouldn’t eat any band candy.

Okay, so this is one hell of a twist. Spending more than a year steeping in the fairly dark idea that Angel and Faith are gonna travel the world, stacking up tools and methods to reanimate Giles’s corpse only to discover that it seems he was never dead in the first place carries a fairly sharp whallop. So as a reveal, it works like a sonoabitch, but as a story point, it has two edges. The most positive edge includes the implication that Giles might be working at cross-purposes to whatever Angel and Faith move to now that the main story motivation has been unceremoniously yanked out of the book. Giles as Big Bad could be awesome… but the problem is that that is pure speculation. All we know is that Giles isn’t dead. We might wind up seeing Angel and Faith bump into Giles at the tea shop, share a piece of kidney pie or eel cupcakes or whatever the fuck the English eat, and fly back to America in time for the Buffy Season Nine finale. It’s just too early to tell.

The negative edge is that the driving motivation for the story we have hung in with more more than a year has been, in just 22 pages, rendered utterly invalid. As previously stated: the idea that these two dark heroes who should know better are planning to bring someone back from the dead – an act that caused Spike in Season Six to sneer, “You came back wrong!” – was compelling. It was the tease of the act, and the consequences, that have made this book a favorite for me, far more than the core Buffy comic has been. It has been a simple engine driving the story along, and now it’s gone… and while it’s too early to tell, it feels like a cheap trade.

Frankly, it feels like a fucking copout. This is a “season” of Buffy that has, in recent months, given us a story in the core title where Buffy grapples with the idea of wanting or needing an abortion… only to back off the thing and say, “Surprise! Buffy’s actually a robot!” Which was justifiable, and a legitimate twist that moved the story in a new direction, but one that felt more like someone saying, “Yeah, that’s a little darker and more serious than we really want to address head-on,” and finding a nifty twist to get them out of it. It feels the same way here; whether intentional or not, my take is that Gage or someone else at Dark Horse or Mutant Enemy said, “Yeah, is it really a good idea to show Angel and Faith hauling the bloated, half-rotted carcass of a beloved character out of a hole in the ground?” Again, this is a legitimate choice, and one that can even be justified… but I was here to see that, and the consequences behind that, happen. So the sudden shift might turn out to be a great turn into a great story, but for right now, all we can know is that the plot that brought us in is gone. And that’s a bummer.

Rebekah Issacs’s art, as does anyone’s when they are working on a book based on a live-action property with characters resembling real actors and actresses, has to walk a line between making the characters look like their live-action counterparts, and being enslaved by the need for the resemblance. Issacs walks the line well; Faith, Angel and Giles look enough like the actors who play them so that you know who’s who, without her stuff seeming beholden to capture the resemblances over anything else. Her figures are realistic and her faces expressive, if a little angular and the odd detail line, particularly on Angel, which seem a little out of place. There isn’t a ton of action here, but what is here is well-choreographed, exciting, and taught me that I had a girl-with-a-flamethrower fetish I never knew I had. She moves the camera around to keep things interesting, particularly in the large reveal of Giles’s empty coffin. Overall, the art is a good match for this licensed comic.

There’s no denying that Angel & Faith #16 is a turning point for the series, with one hell of a twist ending that really does, unlike many, change everything. The problem is that it changes it in a way that I didn’t really want. The idea of Angel and Faith struggling against death itself to bring Giles back is one hell of a story… and one that now is rendered utterly moot. While it’s good to see the old Limey again, it rips the guts out of the story to date, and leaves things feeling somewhat at loose ends. After more than a year, there is a feeling that anything can happen… that is, anything but the thing that I wanted to see happen.

Look, your results may vary: if you like a good twist, this one really delivers. But if you’re like me, and you’ve been invested in seeing Faith and Angel grapple with dark magic and their own motivations, well, you’re probably gonna find yourself disappointed. It doesn’t mean the book’s gone off the rails, but it does mean that it’s switched tracks. And we’re just gonna have to see if it’s going in an equally interesting and satisfying direction as it had seemed to be going up until now.