Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles - Beyond the Pale

British "Buffy the Vampire Fan" fans as well as the rest of us too will never have the chance to see Joss Whedon's proposed Giles centered TV show "Ripper" which was to have run on the BBC as a miniseries or tv series. The one shot comic book "Giles: Beyond the Pale" may be the closest thing to seeing what such a TV series might have looked like.

As fans know him, Rupert Giles is Buffy's watcher but Buffy herself only appears in the pages of "Giles" near the beginning and at the end (portrayed unrecognizably in the usual tradition of Buffy comics). The story is all Ripper's and he performs much as Buffy might have herself, wielding a sword, pursuing demons and even diving into a demon's maw to save the day (a trick Buffy herself never used though she did come close to it in "Bad Eggs", but one that Tommy Lee Jones' character employed in the first Men in Black movie when faced with a similar situation).

The closest comparison to "Giles" is "Constantine" and there's little doubt that the issue is strongly tied stylistically and thematically to Constantine (and that Joss Whedon probably found his inspiration for Giles' backstory as a teenager dabbling with the forbidden arts at least partly from there). The artwork is all Constantine taking place in a British landscape of crowded and shadowy ancient buildings and run down estates and addled doughy faces. Artist Eric Powell has Giles navigating a world that is distinctly British, and one whose threatening nature is more ancient and unnerving than the more outrightly jarring California demons of Sunnydale and Los Angeles.

While Powell's artwork does not render Giles or Buffy as one might expect them to look on the TV show-- that is not necessarily a deficit. It would however have been less distracting if Dark Horse hasn't insisted on smearing Anthony Stewart Head's face on the cover and once again inside the cover-- unnecessary really because all it accomplishes is to make the issue feel less like a comic book and more like a cheap TV merchandising tie in.

What does count is the story-- which is hardly original, about a mysterious text and a tracing in the Watcher's Council library that threatens to unleash the Elder Gods on the Earth and bring on the apocalypse. Of course as longtime "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" viewers know quite well, the apocalypse is hardly an unusual event in the Buffyverse. In fact it seems to happen every other weekend. "Giles" is well aware of this and in its closing monologue treats it as an ongoing danger, a threat always lurking in the background waiting to strike out at humanity when it first gets the chance. To have that one "lucky day" against not merely the slayer alone, but against our entire species.

Taking place after Giles had been expelled as a Watcher, "Giles" has him returning to England for the funeral of his old friend who died under mysterious circumstances becoming infected by a library text, which mutates anyone in range of it into becoming a monstrous hideous creature that devours everything in sight until it is ready to use the 'key' to open a doorway for the Elder Gods to return home to earth.

In the Buffy and Giles relationship, Giles is forced into being the cautious voice counter-opposed to Buffy's youthful enthusiasm and fall into the role of the stuffy nervous librarian. But the greatest moments of the series for Giles involved him breaking loose and that he does in "Giles", defying the Watcher's Council and pursuing another Watcher who has become mutated into a fiendish abomination meant to serve as The Doorway to his hometown.Once there Giles finds that he has devoured the villagers with the exception of his mother who has entirely lost her mind and attempts to serve tea to the guests, even as a hideous pile of rotting flesh infested with jaws and tentacles which used to be her own son-- sprawls outside in her own backyard.

Writers Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegoski don't waste time imitating Whedonspeak or mimmicking the tone of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" but instead craft a new one for "Giles" that is at the same time classically old, working in a Lovecraftian mythos of unimaginably grotesque Elder Gods whose very sight inspires madness and forbidden knowledge lurking in ancient libraries which is certain to drive the man who beholds them mad-- if not worse. While "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the Buffyverse itself operates with a Lovecraftian background of expelled demonic gods-- except in the opening scenes with Buffy herself, "Giles" is all but devoid of the TV series' usual absurdist humor and contrasting lighthearted and comic to darkly overdramatic approach to fighting evil. Giles may occasionally banter, but it's the integral challenge and attack pattern of a soldier in a war rather than the quips of a precocious Valley Girl. Instead "Giles" is drab but never dreary-- a dark look at the London of the Buffyverse, rooted in the evils of human nature and the lurking threat of an unnatural world that surrounds us.

A decidedly worthwhile read.