Angel #7 // Review
Why do readers enjoy comics starring characters licensed from TV and films? Presumably, it would seem to be to revisit favorite characters and concepts from those other media, unshackled from the confines of television budgets or aging actors. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot from Boom! Studios seemed to understand this from the start. Its sister series, Angel, took a few issues to get to that point, but it seems to have found its groove.
This issue finds Fred Burkle in the clutches of classic Angel adversary, Lilah Morgan of Wolfram & Hart. With Angel absent in the pages of the Hellmouth miniseries, Lilith tasks Gunn and Spike with retrieving her, which requires them to meet with another classic Angel character—Lorne, the singing demon.
Writer Bryan Edward Hill has taken the opportunity of the reboot to remix the characters and situations from the show, creating a new world that raises new questions. This new continuity has Angel meeting and assembling his team (or having them assembled for him) without the benefit of his years of ordeals in Buffy’s orbit, and presumably earlier in these characters’ lives than in the original TV show. Spike, for example, likely doesn’t have a soul—how will that change his behaviors with Team Angel? Will TV mainstays Cordelia and Wesley ever wind up joining the series, without the history of Angel’s time in Sunnydale? Of course, the idea that these are the big questions that come to mind—rather than the big suspenseful questions of whether or not Team Angel will save Fred—is a sign that Hill is failing to build real suspense.
The art by Gleb Melnikov continues to be solidly executed. Melnikov does good work creating expressive, dynamic characters that come close enough to resembling the original actors without resorting to stiff photorealism. There’s nothing especially stunning in Melnikov’s work, but it’s good meat-and-potatoes storytelling. The coloring by Roman Titov and lettering by Ed Dukeshire are similar—professional without being flashy.
Angel #7 is a solid comic. It tells its story clearly and does its best to raise some stakes for the characters despite the challenges of being a licensed book and the baggage that any reader will have from the original material. It doesn’t, unfortunately, transcend the source material, but perhaps that’s asking too much.
