iZombie

I'm not au fait with every permutation of postmodern horror out there, but Buffy does hang heavily over this little comic. The series even copies the Xander-Buffy-Angel triangle, although Ellie differs somewhat from Willow. I got a familiar comforting vibe reading the first volume. It balances the camp and melancholy pretty well, which is exactly the kind of flavour I favour. What's extra impressive is the goofy stylistic tricks Michael Allred deploys: particularly the "dream sequence" in which Gwen observes Amon jump into the panels of different genre comics, a slab of exposition enlivened by the arch way it is presented. Another cute slice of fooling around is the encounter Gwen has with her prospective love interest: she swings out of the door and out of the panel, while he swings into the next panel and into her. That moment is followed by another splash montage bit where we pull out and they fall in love. Normally I would hate this device, since it's often a lazy fudge to avoid actually accounting for the way the couple connect. But Chris Roberson really does try to detail what the conversation was about, and how the process of crushing gets going. And when you have a limited number of pages to tell your tale, that kind of compression is justified. Very well put together, in short. The sort of thing Buffy Season 9 is probably trying and failing to do.