Buffy Season Eight #13

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

This is a repost from the Old Scans Daily, so not my scans, obviously. I don't know who exactly to credit, but thank you, whoever you are.

Anyway - for seasonal appropriateness and lulz, I give you:

Context: A gang of vampires has just raided the the headquarters of the Slayer army, and made off with Buffy's Scythe (you know, that thing that does not, in fact, resemble a scythe in any way?) The slayers and Buffy attempted to stop them, of course, but the vampires escaped by transforming themselves into fog, bats, etcetera. These abilities are not par for the course for Buffyverse vamps, so, as the slayers start planning their counteroffensive, they start by looking up the only vampire they know that is supposed to possess them. 



This series has had some brilliant cover art by the way. Okay, in the introductory pages that I just had to remove we see Dracula in his castle just before Xander and Renee arrive. He is unkempt and looks like an old man, suggesting that he hasn't been eating properly. (In Stoker's novel, Dracula aged normally but could restore his youth by drinking blood.) His servant, a tiny purple elf-looking guy named Butterfield, is trying to talk him out of a months-long bender, but he's having none of it until he sees Xander's helicopter approaching. He cleans himself up in record time off-panel, and -





There was then a brief interlude in which Andrew was giving one of his lectures to the new Slayers, in which he expounds about Dracula's various abilities, and his previous relationship with Xander.











Hee.

For fun, try to identify the various bits of memorabilia he has around his mansion.

Comments

Mod Post

[angelophile.insanejournal.com]

Unfortunately simply reposting a post from the old Scans_Daily creates an issue of going over the rules for page count. Back then we used to accept half an issue now it's a third of an issue. As such, you've posted 11 pages and the current rule allows 7.

Please remove 4 scans for legality.

Re: Mod Post

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

. . . Crap.

Okay, I'll fix that, hang on.

Re: Mod Post

[angelophile.insanejournal.com]

Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

Memorabilia eh? Well for starters I think I can see a Wolf/Ram/(and)Hart bust hanging on his wall. Maybe Dracula was a client of theirs.

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

You know, I'd missed that one. Good catch, but it wasn't what I was thinking of.

[cainofdreaming.insanejournal.com]

He was, actually. In Spike vs Dracula he came to the offices to discuss the insurance of some of his property that had existed in Sunnydale prior to Buffy finale.

[damar148.insanejournal.com]

So does Dracula and the Slayers have a 'understanding', given how the king of all vampires would be a natural high priority target for a vampire-slaying organisation.

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

I don't know if it was ever explained fully in canon, but here's my theory - Buffyverse Dracula isn't really the kind of the vampires, he's more like the Elvis of vampires. And compared to the various Big Bad's they've fought, he isn't a huge threat to the world - he's not opening Hellmouths or trying to wake up Earth-swallowing demon rocks. But he's still way stronger than the average vampire or demon, and it would take a reasonable amount of effort to kill him, especially on his own turf. If the issue ever came up, they probably decided they had more important things to use their resources on. Especially since they started being attacked by people actively seeking the destruction of all slayers.

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Simply put, Dracula isn't their king. As Spike pointed out in the Buffy episode he's actually pissed off most vampires by getting involved in the writing of the Bram Stoker novel, which did more to tell the public of a vampires weaknesses than anything else had managed before.

There's a fun Peter David "Spike and Dracula" miniseries which explains their particulat emnity, and includes a brilliant sequence where Spike and Dru go to see Bela Lugosi in a stage performance of "Dracula" and Spike is vastly more impressed by Lugosi than he ever was by Dracula.

[stig.insanejournal.com]

Odd that this penciller uses a similar style to Leonard Kirk, the last person in Marvel to have drawn Dracula...

[johnlemon.insanejournal.com]

hahaha. Nobody steals from Dracula.

[mykie1234.insanejournal.com]

I see the mantle/gargoyle thing that was on all the movie posters for the Bram Stokers Dracula movie. From the same film there is Vlads muscly red suit of armour. And there's the classic painting of Vlad and a Roman suit if armour for some reason.

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

Yup, the stuff from the Coppola film is what I was thinking of. I bet he'd have a laundry list of complaints about how he was portrayed in that (or any) movie, if you ever asked him about it, but he's still got stuff from it on display around his house.

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

It's small and blurry, but I'm pretty sure the painting next to the portrait of Vlad is that old woodcut of him eating dinner in a field of staked bodies.

Also, I'm kind of curious about that thing that is hanging over the doorway in the second to last page. The giant nagamaki/butterknife thing? It looks very out of place among a lot of mostly-recognizable medieval weapons. I have a hunch it's a prop from a movie, but I've no idea which one.

[okkult3000.insanejournal.com]

Crazy Racist Dracula is the most entertaining thing to come out of the Season 8 comic.

[midnightvoyager.insanejournal.com]

Oh, Dracula. You're such an old queen.

[cmdr_zoom.insanejournal.com]

He is.
Queen of Vampires!

[(Anonymous)]

My favorite part is that Dracula casually remarks about how he's going to murder someone, and nobody cares.

If they're all so casual, they could have asked for him not to do it anymore. But, I guess they don't care about Albanians.

[(Anonymous)]

It's called dark humor. Black humor. Grotesque and morbid humor. Which of course, is nothing Buffy has ever, ever done before ever. Get over it.

[(Anonymous)]

Right, because an evil vampire would never murder someone. And therefore nobody would ever think that it might be serious.

And here I thought that the property existed in at least a mostly realistic world. What next, anvils dropping on people's heads?

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Mostly realistic in most aspects apart from death. Dead characters were almost never mourned or mentioned within minutes of their dying. How often did Jesse, Xander's best friend at the start of the series, get mentioned after the first two episodes?

In many cases just-killed humans simply disappear (the DVD commentaries mention how often dead bodies simply drop out of shot and vanish because they couldn't show a pile of corpses just lying there festering on the network)

It was almost a running gag that the Sunnydale death count put most dictatorships to shame, and yet there were almost never memorials to the deaths, and that despite everything, thanks to Buffy, her graduating class had the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale High history (and then many more got wiped out less than a week later at graduation)

It's what made the death of Joyce so powerful, since it was one of the few times that actual death of someone was a story, rather than an incidental sideline.

[(Anonymous)]

Gotcha. Nobody actually cares unless they're related to that person. Poor Albanian boy. Nobody cares but me.

[chthonicspirit.insanejournal.com]

Well, Xander does suggest Renee go rescue him, but I guess she's too busy protecting him from Dracula's feminine wiles.

[mxlm.insanejournal.com]

It irked me too, fwiw.

[nonners.insanejournal.com]

I thought it was more powerful because Joyce died of natural causes, something that not even the Slayer could protect her from.