Boom! Studios returns to the world of Firefly in a brand new limited series, Firefly: Brand New Verse, and a fresh preview spotlights new characters.

The Ring of Fire arc has turned multiple friends into foes. Anya, the former Watcher, continues her secret plot against the Watcher Council. Meanwhile, Xander’s a vampire hell-bent on trapping Willow with him. Now, through the magic of a mysterious gift from issue #20, Willow has been taken over by an eerie sort of doppelganger.

Dark Willow was one of the biggest twists in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Willow spent seasons of the original series learning about magic and perfecting spell-crafting in her own right. But by Season 6, her ambitions and appetite for magic had grown to a dangerous level.

I want to be honest here. Although I do enjoy Boom! Studios Buffy-verse which has excelled with titles such as Angel & Spike. Willow and even the recent Faith revival, the titular book continues to fall short of what it tries to offer us.

This first issue takes place at multiple points of Faith’s life. Mostly based around a movie theatre, we see different parts of her story told in sequence. From her admittance into a children’s home, through to early training and modern-day, Faith Lehane is trying it piece together her life, practically chiseled into becoming a slayer. Multiple vampires are slain and unknown mysteries of her history begin to unravel.

I can’t mention the Buffy series without talking about the ability of the artists. Spanning several different books across the studio line, each entry manages to deliver the characters consistently. Faith is drawn with the same look and appeal as when she was introduced in Buffy a few issues back.

It sometimes feels that there are too many reasons to count why the show means so much to me even though it’s so removed from my own coming of age. For those who watched ‘Buffy’ while it was airing in the late ’90s and early ’00s or came to it later but had lived though that time, there tends to be a great sense of nostalgia, especially for folks who were growing up alongside the characters. While I’m a generation removed from the original viewers of the show, it still resonates with me deeply (and with friends who I’ve converted into fans). It is my belief that you either love ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ or you haven’t watched it yet. For faithful fans and for the uninitiated, here are five reasons ‘Buffy’ still matters today and will for years to come.

What I realized after watching the movie though was most of my memories of the show itself had been replaced by ones from the movie. On the show, River is a mystery and a bit of an annoyance, save for one or two moments. In the movie, she’s not just the star, she’s an unstoppable force – the badass she was surely planned to be all along, which is how I remembered her. The Reavers; the main villains of the film, are only mentioned in the show a few times and seen once, which clashes with my strong memory of them. And that hat Jayne wears, the one you are guaranteed to see at any comic book convention, is only in the TV show for a few scenes, and even less in the movie. If it never became a “thing” in fandom, you probably wouldn’t even remember it.

The Slayer Cycle has been a constant in all versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One young woman is granted the power of the Slayer until she dies — at which point it passes on to the next one. But the new Slayerverse just revealed there are ways around that, and that a quietly vital Slayer used one such loophole.

Firefly #24 is set in a nebulous point in time, where the crew is still together (and alive), yet the Alliance seems to be out of the way, or at least not as strong as they have previously been. Unfortunately, that left a void that Blue Sun Corporation stepped into. There’s a new big bad here, and they’re just as bad if not worse.