In my review of the comic book, I forgot to mention how weird it was to get “thought bubbles” of text bubbling from Buffy’s head.

You virtually never had that in the TV show. Maybe one episode started with Buffy reading Jack London as a voice-over narration to events, but that was the exception. And you never had anything like Veronica Mars’ tough talking High School PI narrations (which I greatly miss, if anyone cares).

This is another way, in which, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1: The Long Way Home fails to really be “season eight” of the cancelled TV show.  Using thought bubbles is a sea change in how the story of the slayer gets told.  In the show there was dialog and there was the guess one could make from facial expressions in video.  And that was all.

Which brings me to One Thing Or Your Mother.  It is a genuinely entertaining story for any fan of the TV show, especially since it takes place back in Season Two and even adds a connection between the mayer and Principle Snyder.  I enjoyed it.

But my enjoyment was hampered by billions of paragraphs or successions of paragraphs which, yes I am not ashamed of puning,  painstakingly described every single detail of what the characters were thinking and feeling.  You never infer anything in the story.  It is almost a tract against empricism.  Or an ad absurdum argument that works in its favor.

I’m sure the author, Kirsten Beyer, is a talented writer. She demonstrated her skill in many ways.  No doubt she was writing according to her instructions.  But I found those constraints really irritating.