Buffy The Last Vampire Slayer - Book Review

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Buffy The Last Vampire Slayer is a comic book miniseries that was written by Casey Gilly, illustrated by Joe Jaro, and coloured by Joanna Lafuente. It was published by Boom! Studios and ran for 4 issues from December 2021 to March 2022. The collect paperback edition is 112-pages long and was published by Boom! Studios on 12 July 2022. It contains issues 1-4 and a variant cover galley at the back of the book.

Buffy the Last Vampire Slayer is a spin-off of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television and comic book series. It is set in an alternate universe where the Earth has been ravaged by climate change and the sun has nearly been blotted out. There is no sense of continuity between Buffy the Last Vampire Slayer and the original series. This is a stand-alone book that should be treated as a separate, original story, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. This book review will contain spoilers.



Buffy Summers, now in her 50s, has a lot of regrets. She never thought she would live this long. After a magical catastrophe wiped out the Slayer-line and killed her friends, Buffy has been reduced to the last of her kind, and forced into an endless guerrilla war fighting vampires in a climate-ravaged world where the sun has been nearly blotted out. Buffy is tired, battle weary, and weighed down with guilt and regret. Hope returns to her life when she meets a young girl calling herself Thessaly and claiming to be a Potential Slayer and the daughter of Willow and Tara. Together the two of them will try and use magic to return sunlight to the world and end the reign of vampires.

I really liked this book. It wasn't perfect. It had some plot holes and I felt like it could've been much longer. The thing I liked most about it was that it was an original idea and a spin-off and not just a reboot. I have never liked the idea of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. It feels like such a lazy idea. I don't want to see Buffy back in high school again. There are so many more original spinoff ideas that I feel could work. I have been critical of the Boom! Studios Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book reboot. I felt like the writers didn't understand the characters and what made them special. It didn't feel like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It would've been better if they'd written their own original story with new characters set in the Buffyverse.

Buffy the Last Vampire Slayer felt different to me. This time Boom! Studios got it right. The writing, the characters, the illustrations, and the tone all felt like Buffy the Vampire Slayer to me. I thought that Casey Gilly really nailed the characters of Buffy Summers and Spike. Buffy reminded me a lot of the battle-hardened and cold and friendless Slayer that we see in the season 3 episode "The Wish" and I thought that Spike acted a lot like he does in the second-half of season seven when he is his most loyal to Buffy. I do have some issues with the book and have some questions I want answered.

Where is Dawn? Does she exist in this timeline? Did Xander and Cordelia die in the attack that wiped out the Potential Slayers? If they did die in the attack, how come we don't see their ghosts later appear with the spirits of Joyce, Willow and Giles? The biggest disappointment of the book to me was how the characters of Tara and Willow were treated. I was so excited when their daughter, Thessaly, was first introduced and we learn that Willow and Tara got married and had a happy life together for a while. Why did they have to ruin things by killing them off halfway through the book and making their daughter an orphan? I really wish they didn't have to go the Bury Your Gays trope and ruin everything. Poor Thessaly. Her mothers deserved better and so did she.

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