“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is going back to high school

Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have, of course, missed the show since it went off the air in 2003. Thankfully, Dark Horse comics and creator/storytelling mastermind/nerd hero Joss Whedon kept the Scooby Gang’s story going in the form of comics, starting with Season 8 and continuing onward (Season 10 is wrapping up now and 11 is already in the works).

While the Season 8 (and 9 and 10) comics are great, Dark Horse’s latest Buffy series will really speak to fans of the original series in an oh-so-nostaglic kind of way. Buffy: The High School Years, continues with its second issue (the first, titled “Freaks & Geeks,” was released in June), “Glutton for Punishment,” in November. But, since we’re at San Diego Comic-Con, geeking out on your behalf, we have some early scoop about the issue.

Penned by longtime BtVS fan Kel McDonald (who says she started watching Buffy during its second season, when she was 10 years old, which is about as OG fandom as you get), “Glutton for Punishment” is a standalone story (as are all of the High School Years books) set wayyyyyyy back in the day, when Buffy was still new to Sunnydale (and Sunnydale was still more town-shaped and less crater-shaped). The story takes place firmly between two episodes of the original series, and while McDonald couldn’t say which two specifically (spoilers and all), she did give us a major hint: Principal Flutie is still around. For fans of the original series, that’s a big hint at just how far back in time McDonald went to tell this story (Season 1 — that’s how far).

Fans should also look out for Easter Eggs in the comic — like characters who might not have been around officially during the time when the story takes place, but who would have been hanging out at Sunnydale High nonetheless.

“Jonathan’s not in Season 1, but he would in theory be in the background because he went to school with them,” McDonald teased, sending Danny Strong (yes, of Gilmore Girls in addition to Buffy) fans into a miniature tizzy.

And McDonald’s approach to writing high school era Buffy is pitch perfect. “When coming up with pitch ideas, I kind of made [a list] of whatever standard high school conflicts and then tried to make the supernatural conflict reflect the high school conflict.” That’s a textbook approach to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which gives us major hope for this series in the fan satisfaction department.

We’ll just be waiting very, very impatiently until November 1, when “Glutton for Punishment” is officially released to the world.

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