Sad then that season five was “Angel”’s last. Creator Joss
Whedon was well aware his show was reaching its end, so the cliff
hanger-flavored finale that found the Angel crew facing demonically
insurmountable odds in a rainy alley was not really supposed to be resolved. At
least not on TV. Three years after the WB gave “Angel” the corporate boot to
make room for more episodes of “One Tree Hill” or whatever, it was back in
comic book form.
Instead of picking up right where the TV series left off, Angel: After the Fall pulled a classic
Whedon trick by not giving the readers what they think they want. We’ve
jumped ahead several months to find some of our old friends are ghosts, others
are vampires, and others were vampires and are now human. Our old friend Los
Angeles has been transformed into hell. There’s also a telekinetic fish.
Seriously.
As the comic series continues, we start returning to the
rainy alley in patches, and the story starts to make sense. Reading this story
in brief monthly installments must have been infuriating. Fortunately, now that
it’s all over, IDW has compiled the whole series into a four-volume slip cased
collection. Reading Angel: After the Fall
in one swoop as gathered in this edition is much less frustrating. Rather, the
tale is quite satisfying, and that’s coming from someone who didn’t feel
cheated by the TV series’ open-ended finale. The one major flaw of the comic
series is the inconsistency of its art. Whedon and writer Brian Lynch (who does
a boffo job) are aided and abetted by nine different illustrators. Much of the
artwork is really quite awful. There’s a likeness of Charisma Carpenter as
Cordelia in volume three in which she looks like one of the alien doctors in the
“Eye of the Beholder” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, and she isn’t even
supposed to be a monster. Some of the art is pretty good, but it rarely strikes
the right balance of photorealism and creative artistry necessary to make us forget
we’re not watching this thing on TV, which of course, is what we’d rather be
doing than reading comic books.