Spike’s Embarrassing Poetry Is Sending the Scooby Gang to New Orleans, and We Have Questions

The great ongoing pleasure of the Buffy comics — and BOOM Studios has been delivering them with considerable consistency — is that they are willing to take the cosmology of the television series seriously while also understanding that some of the best material in that show was deeply, intentionally silly. Spike’s poetry is deeply, intentionally silly. Whoever decided it should be the inciting incident for a storyline involving the entire Scooby Gang traveling to New Orleans has understood something important.

For the uninitiated: William the Bloody, before he was Spike, before he was a vampire, was a bad poet. Not interestingly bad. Embarrassingly bad. “Effulgent” bad. The show introduced this as a joke and then, in “Fool for Love,” turned it into something genuinely moving: the poetry was terrible because William was earnest in a world that had no patience for earnestness, and the vampire he became was, in large part, a response to that humiliation.

The new arc appears to hinge on the discovery of some previously unknown William poems — exactly how they surface and exactly what they contain is something I am not going to spoil — and the trail leads to New Orleans. This is extremely good news. New Orleans is one of the few American cities with enough genuine Gothic weight to sustain a Buffyverse story, and the combination of that setting with the Scooby Gang’s particular brand of chaos is one I have been waiting for without knowing it.

There is also something pleasing about Spike’s most embarrassing characteristic being the thing that drives a major storyline. He spent most of the television series performing a very specific kind of hardness — the leather jacket, the attitude, the careful management of exactly how much anyone was allowed to see. The poetry was always the crack in that performance. It is fitting that it should be what brings everyone back together.

The BOOM Studios run has earned enough goodwill that I am going in with genuine optimism. New Orleans, the Scoobies, and Spike’s terrible verse. What could go wrong.

(Source: BOOM Studios solicitations, February 2023.)