Interview With Buffy Motion Comic Director Jeff Shuter!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Joss Whedon and crew’s official comic book continuation of the Buffy TV series, ends this month with issue #40. Buffy and the gang have faced old enemies, revisited old friends, trained an army of Slayerettes while public anti-Slayer sentiment grew, and now it can all be seen in the new motion comic directed by Jeff Shuter.

Available now on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 Motion Comic collects the first 19 issues. Nearly every issue focuses on a ‘future’ theme, culminating in an actual trip to the future where Buffy meets Melaka Fray, a Slayer of the 23^rd Century, and together they must take down one of Buffy’s oldest friends.

Jeff Shuter discussed the motion comic with me during New York Comic Con.

AFC: Why turn Buffy Season 8 into a motion comic?

Shuter: This was such an emerging format and it’s changing shape and it’s consistently being altered and adjusted. The creator did something that has moved across so many different formats: movie, TV show, comic, maybe something else again. It’s gonna keep changing. In the process, there are so many different fans that have gravitated to different aspects. Now there are fights about formats and controversy – to me, it seemed like the perfect story – and I don’t shy away from that stuff. I like to get right in it.

Shuter: There’s a lot of talk about whether this version is canon or that version is canon, and a whole sensibility of what Buffy is that is constantly changing. I saw an opportunity to take this and play with it and invent, that would let me make an interpretation because that road has been paved in so many different ways.  It was a great experience. It was a lot of invention. It was a lot of exploration. And it was kind of artsy, but at the same token linking to the show.

AFC: As the comic book series goes on, with its publication continuing from the Season 8 comic into Season 9, will the motion comic go on as well?

Shuter: I hope so. These books are fantastic and keep getting better and better, too. They really do. It’s almost as. I came into this as a first time reader, so to speak. I experienced these books while we were exploring how to put them together. When our production started to find a singular voice, I also felt that the books themselves started to find a singular voice too. I took my cues from where the books were going.

AFC: Has Joss Whedon kind of been involved with the motion comic?

Shuter: Joss saw the pilot. The word was that he liked it and it was good work and God speed. Obviously, I’m a little star struck by him. He’s pretty happy that this universe continues to thrive, and I think he’s excited, I would imagine he would be really tickled by new interpretations and enjoy them when he has time to watch them.

AFC: Regarding the voice acting, did any of the original actors come back to do their voices or is it brand new?

Shuter: We broke away from the series. We wanted to find people that had similarities in their tonality to the show, more than their physical voice. We wanted to make a departure because, look, the show was the show. We’re exploring, we’re revamping the material and making interpretations on it. So I wanted to stay away from that. I felt like that was a trap to go into that. So I made a very clear decision in the very beginning that we’re going to make a departure. We’re gonna find people that embody what we’re finding in the material. I know a lot of people are so used to the way those characters speak and they’ve lived with them for so long. They’re watching this, it might be, you might be “Whoa…what?” I see us as getting past that, kind of letting that go and kind of being okay with that. You look at this for the start of a new process, you know? And the characters change. Buffy changed substantially in Season 8.

AFC: The motion comic has been on the Internet. It’s coming out on DVD. How do you think the fans are going to react?

Shuter: I think it’s gonna be really special. I think the fans of the book especially are gonna really love it. I think the fans of the show are going to be curious and want to take a look at it. And I think we might even bring some new people in that have no concept of what this is, that are just like “ Well, this is cool. This is really cool, what is this?” and suddenly fall into the story.