“Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires,demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.”
These are the words that open the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer television series created from Joss Whedon. Throughout it, you kinda get the feeling that a WOMAN is going to be The Slayer. In the show, any time you see slayers of the past and future, they are always women. Well, in season 9, which continues the show on in comic form, we are getting our first MALE slayer! How in the Whedonverse is this possible you ask? I honestly don’t know, but my first thought was that the guy had to be gay…this turned out to be true.
His name is Billy and he doesn’t have any slayer powers. He just knows how to kick ass and slay vamps. Charlie Jane Anders of I09 sat down with the comic and long-time Buffy TV writers, Jane Epenson and Drew Z. Greenburg to find out just what is going on. Here are some excerpts from the interview.
– Epenson says. “he is a hero, Batman-style, who has taken up this mantle on his own. What we hope people see is that the forces that acted on Buffy in high school aren’t specific to females.”
– Greenberg, “Billy is a young man who decides to step up and do the right thing in dire circumstances, and he doesn’t really care much about gender roles when he does it. He’s doing what needs to be done.”
– Greenberg, ” The beauty of the world Joss created is that it is constantly evolving: the characters grow and change, and so does the world in which they live. That means the metaphors must grow and change, too. So in the era of Season 9, with all magic gone from the world, with a new kind of vampire on the rise, and with Slayers basically out of commission, Billy has a perspective on vampires that other characters in the past might not have had. Once people read the story, my hope is they’ll see the world in which Billy lives and understand his reaction to zompires taking over his town and coming after him in that context.”
As huge of a Buffy fan as I am, I really haven’t read much of the comics. I have them, they’re sitting on the shelf right now waiting for me to reunite with the Scoobies again, and I will. I miss them. So, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in that world, but gay or straight, as long as vampires are getting killed, that’s all I care about. Except when it comes to Spike. I love that guy.
~Chaz
