For the whole interview, check out the audio HERE.
Heroes executive producer and comic writer Jeph Loeb, who had helped to develop Buffy the Animated Series, has returned to the Buffyverse by penning issue #20 of Season Eight, "After These Messages... We'll Be Right Back."
In this issue, which is a nod to both Pleasantville and The Wizard of Oz, Buffy gets to return to her freshman year in high school as she finds herself IN the universe of The Animated Series. The art is by Eric Wight, who did the original designs for the show. In this exclusive interview with Voices From Krypton, Loeb discusses both the issue of the comic and the proposed series itself. Note About Audio: Don't EVER conduct a phone interview with the air conditioner going and the TV on in the background. Not very conducive for great sound quality, but it seemed worth posting anyway.
In the interview, Loeb explains, “Joss had this great idea that he was going to do all the season eight stories as comic books. Dark Horse needed to have some names attached to this, because to be perfectly honest, a licensed book has never worked. There are 40, 60, 80 issues of Buffy that no one cares about. But Joss had this wacky idea that he was going to do a Buffy comic and someone’s going to care. And now it’s a Top Ten book; a monster hit book. It’s the biggest book Dark Horse has ever had. It’s consistently beating out everything that DC has and it squeezes itself into the Marvel world.”
Loeb saw this as an opportunity to bring Buffy The Animated Series, on which he was to be co-executive producer, to life for an issue of the comic. “I wanted to tell a story where something happens to Buffy in the present and she wakes up Pleasantville-style and she’s on the animated show. And the part that is incredibly exciting is the animated series took place in year one, so it’s always episode 7.5. Which means that she knew Angel, but she did not know that he was Angelus. It was just a simpler time. Her mom was still alive, the biggest surprise would be that Dawn would be there and she’d be 10 years old. It would feature Principal Snyder and Cordelia would still be alive, and, you know, Willow had not gone dark. All the things that happened as the years go by. They were still kids trying to figure out how to stake a vamp. And Buffy gets dropped in this world. There’s a line that it’s ‘a Season 8 brain, Season 1 Bod,’ and she’s having a ball. It’s like The Wizard of Oz, but at what point does she decide to go home?”