Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Tales of the Slayers: Broken Bottle of Djinn

Unlike the first generation of Buffy comics, written not by the writers of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or by its creator Joss Whedon and done without input by him, the stories in "Tales of the Slayers" are the product of Joss Whedon and the Buffy writers and display both a respect for the original material of the series as well as innovation and creativity that helped expand and extend the Buffyverse and the Whedonverse.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Broken Bottle of Djinn" was included in the "Tales of the Slayers" anthology. Written by longtime Buffy writers, Jane Espenson and Doug Petrie and published by Dark Horse Comics, "Broken Bottle of the Djinn" is the authentic interpretation of the Buffy from the "horse's mouth". The key feature of"Tales of the Slayers: Broken Bottle of Djinn" is the joining and contrast of two stories which are separated by time, attitude and art.

The first half of the story takes place in Sunnydale, California in the 1990's in what might be called its Buffy period.The artwork is deliberately cartoonish, full of garish primary colors, simplified lines and rounded out shapes ranging into the absurd. The sunny look of the artwork matches the sunny appearance and feel of the story that has Djinn breaking loose, only to be easily handled by Buffy and Willow and tossed out through a portal into another time.

The Buffy portion of the story takes place in daytime and in daylight. Willow uses her magic in public. Buffy fearlessly confronts the Djinn. Principal Snyder, ratty and meanspirited on the television series, is a comic figure devoid of his darker sides, who flees panicked as the Djinn escapes his bottle placed in an old locker, while Principal Snyder vows to sue the moving company for releasing the Djinn. Unlike the television world of Buffy, this is Buffy rendered as an animated series might have done, girlish and carefree, without a worry in the world even when she's fighting terrible monsters.

This highlights the extreme contrast with the second half of "Broken Bottle of Djinn" which departs not only decades back in time to the 1930's, but to an entirely different way of life in which an apparently blind girl is selling pencils on the street hoping to earn a few nickels . The art too has completely left behind the bright colors and vague shapes and simple penciled lines of the first portion, turning to a darker rendering of noir tones, blacks and blues and even when brighter colors appear they are now muted tones, rich sometimes, but never gaudy or garish. The people are rendered with some complexity now and the world shown to us is grim and grounded in the rigid reality of the artwork.

The "simple" world Buffy lives in has been left behind in favor of a darker more muted world, where things are no longer simple and life is harder and the choices made come with a terrible cost and seem wrong either way. In other worlds this is the world of Buffy. The world of the slayer. By initially depicting a simplistic carefree existence for Buffy, "Tales of the Slayers: Broken Bottle of Djinn" heightens the contrast that makes the second half of its story, the life of Rachel O'Connor that much darker and grimmer.

Taking place between the Great Depression and the entry of the United States into World War II, it gives us a look at a slayer of the period, Rachel O'Connor, who when we first meet her appears to be reluctantly accepting a passing stranger's proposition to use her body in exchange for money. The stranger, unsurprisingly in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, turns out to be a vampire. But his potential victim, Rachel, turns out to be a slayer and puts the wooden pencils she has been selling to good use by staking him through the heart.

Moments later though Rachel has been forcibly recruiter by the OSS, the Office of Strategtic Services, America's foreign inteligence service preceding the CIA. (In reality the OSS only came into being in 1942 in response to the Nazi threat and preceding attempts at intelligence services had often been quashed. However since Buffy the Vampire Slayer likely does not take place in our reality or dimension, it is actually a kind of alternate history in which the dates may differ. An alternative explanation might be a conspiracy theory claiming that the OSS had existed long before its official existence in an underground form and that this is the organization which recruited Rachel O'Connor.) The OSS is concerned about the plans of Nazi agents to pass along a weapon of some kind. In the Season Five episode of Angel, "Why We Fight", we had been similarly shown Angel being recruited by the US government to fight the Nazis, with the Nazis employing their own demonic agents. (This also raises the possibility that the Nazi demons in who appeared in the Season 1 Angel episode "Hero" who appeared to employ Nazi ideology transposed to a demonic perspective, German uniforms and vehicles and equipment were part of a Nazi - Demonic alliance along the lines of what we have read in Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics.)

Rachel is dressed up as an adult woman and sent to meet the incoming Nazi agent. But while Rachel is a slayer, she is not a secret agent. She is not a woman either, but like Buffy only a girl doing what she has to do, to survive. She defeats the Nazi agent by force and subdues the Djinn storing him away in a locker as a legacy which is passed on to Buffy when the locker is opened and the Djinn is released. Thus the ending becomes the beginning and the beginning the ending and the cycle goes on. And in a sense it is as if Rachel O'Connor, the slayer of the 1930's, has also passed on the hardships and bleakness of her life to Buffy's as well.