Featuring...

Christopher Golden Author of Angel comics

Continued from previous page... Chris is quite excited about his new Spike & Dru novel because he believes it will be a real test case. He explains what encompasses the bulk of the story, “It’s literally filled with information. With the Council and the process of Slayers-in-waiting, but it’s all implied. I can’t spell anything out, I have to imply everything. Basically what I’ve done is taken what I believe to be the truth from the show and I have used that as the basis for the set up of the Council and all that sort of thing.” And when it gets into the hands of the Powers That Be’? “We’ll see when the book goes in through the process of review if I’ve done anything that they really object to. And I suspect it will be okay though because I really have been careful to leave all of that with implication. However, I think within that there is plenty of room for cool stories, I’ve got a lot of Watchers, I’ve got a lot of connections to the present day, there are several references. There’s a couple of interesting cameos in the book. "... I wanted to know why we couldn't use him. Because I'm a pain in the ass!" Three of the characters who recur who are supporting characters in the book. One is Quentin Travers’ (from the Watcher's Council in BtVS Season 3) grandfather and the other two are his parents.” Joss Whedon, has said that he’s really not concerned about the parameters where a lot of the fans are. The fans want to know more about the Watchers Council and what has happened to past Slayers, where as he’s mostly concerned with getting his ideals of Buffy and her close-knit family across. “Exactly,” Chris explains, “He doesn’t have much interest in pursuing or expanding the universe and answering the kinds of questions that I tend to ask. So as a fan of the show, I’m fortunate in that I’m able to get paid to push the envelope.” An example of this would be in Chris’ book from this past year, Sins of the Father where he wanted to bring Pike back into the storyline and Joss has first crack at what flies and what doesn't. Buffy's old flame Pike returns looking for the Slayer in Sunnydale “Exactly. Oh yeah, well he has to approve everything. I should say, his office has to approve everything, so sometimes he gets more involved than others in doing those approvals. And I suspect that in the case of Pike he was probably quite involved in deciding what to do with that because initially they said no and, of course, I wanted to know why we couldn’t use him." He slyly adds, "Because I’m a pain in the ass.” Not too much of a pain as Chris is glad to explain, “Initially what happened was I had suggested that subsequent to the events detailed in the Origin comic book, which is sort of a weird melange of the original movie script, the TV show continuity and other changes we had to make to match the TV show. I had suggested that after Buffy and Pike spent some time together hunting vampires as is implied at the end of both the movie and the Origin comic series, that Buffy left town with her mom and moved and they (Buffy and Pike) had a falling out. Pike went off and he was still, from time to time, was still hunting evil. The way it turned out is apparently, that was their complaint.” He continues, “They did not want Pike to be proactive in any way, and I got that and immediately adapted to their objection. So that Pike became what he should have been which is the beach bum slacker of all time. And once we made that adjustment they were more than happy to let the book go forward.” Having so many great ideas for these characters you can imagine that Chris and Joss walk the same path every now and again, and to be sure Chris affirms, “Oh yeah, all the time. I had pitched a while back an Oz and Willow one-shot in which a female werewolf in heat came to town and Oz couldn’t control himself as a werewolf and Willow had to deal with the fact that he really was two different creatures. And they said, ‘no you can’t do that because Joss is going to do something like that next season’. And of course it ended up being the episode where Oz leaves. So that kind of stuff happens.” Go to Next Page >> What's the plural of apocolypse?