What does Joss Whedon do when he wants to write about a vampire slayer who's not Buffy? He taps into the past, of course -- or looks into the future.

Fray, written by Whedon and illustrated by Karl Moline, leaps a couple of centuries down the road to a time where flying cars are commonplace and demons roam the Earth. It's a time when people no longer believe in vampires -- a 21st-century slayer, possibly Buffy, vanquished all demons and half-demons from our dimension, we're told -- but now the vampires, or "lurks," are back. And, with a few hundred years of peace in their wake, they find a world without a slayer, a world where the council of Watchers has fallen into disarray and madness, a world where no one is prepared to face or resist them.

At least, not until young thief Melaka Fray is suddenly flooded with power. And a demon, for reasons of his own, takes the place of a Watcher and begins her training.

Fray collects an eight-issue miniseries that is too short by far to tell the full story of Melaka's adventures. After all, Buffy had a feature film, seven seasons of television and a host of comic-book yarns to work with, and she still has storytelling potential to spare. But this book does a great job of introducing an exciting new character, defining her futuristic world (did I mention the flying cars?) and populating it with an interesting array of allies, sidekicks and adversaries. I hope there's more to come.

The past, too, is an untapped motherlode of possibilities, and Whedon explores the barest surface of its potential in Tales of the Slayers. Here, Whedon and several other writers and artists tell short stories about slayers who came before Buffy -- from the First, in a story written by Whedon and penciled by Leinil Francis Yu, up through Fray herself, in a bookend story by Whedon and artist Moline. Along the way we meet a rhyming slayer in the time of witches (by Whedon and Tim Sale), a duped slayer in the days of the French Revolution (by Amber Benson and Ted Naifeh), a slayer in disguise at a fancy dress ball (by Jane Espenson and P. Craig Russell), a girl in the Old West who plays a deadly game of Slayers and Indians (by David Fury and Steve Lieber), and, perhaps most startling of all, a slayer surrounded by evil in Nazi Germany (by Rebecca Rand Kirshner and Mira Friedmann). Doug Petrie and Gene Colan wrap it up with a pre-Buffy tale in 1970s Harlem.

It all adds up to a satisfying package that gives extra dimension to the slayer heritage.

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
17 March 2007