NEW SCHOOL NIGHTMARE

Iconic vamp-stamper Buffy gets a middle school makeover.

Reimagined as a preteen middle schooler, Buffy Summers and her newly divorced mother move from sunny California to cold and dreary Cleveland. Her new school, she quickly learns, is quite unusual. In this Buffy-verse, Cleveland is located on a Heckmouth (a tempered nod to the original Hellmouth) and is plagued with thirsty but not-too-bright vampires. School librarian Miss Sparks stuns Buffy when she divulges that she is a Watcher and that Buffy is a Slayer. Aided by new BFFs Alvaro and Sarafina, Buffy sets out to fight the mysterious and powerful Primum Dominum vampire before he makes snacks out of her classmates during a solar eclipse. With a light touch and a fast pace, this mix of fizzy journal entries, playful comics panels, and OMG-laden text messages is sure to please fans of both epistolary novels and vampire fare. Although Buffy stakes many vampires, the violence is nearly nonexistent, as the undead benignly evaporate into clouds of bats. Buffy’s problems are solidly of the middle-class suburban ilk: mean girls with designer handbags, oodles of preteen angst, and predictable classroom and cafeteria mishaps. With its illustrations rendered in grayscale, Buffy appears to be white, and her two best friends present with darker-toned skin, although their races are not overtly specified.

This breezy re-envisioning will prime the younger set for the real thing