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What I realized after watching the movie though was most of my memories of the show itself had been replaced by ones from the movie.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.

The plot also raises some reasonable questions about ethics, Mal’s character (and method of getting things done), and the concept of following the letter of the law (as opposed to the intent). These are all good debates to bring up, and could arguably result in some interesting conversations among fans.

Firefly: Watch How I Soar is a little bit of everything. It’s heartwarming, it,s heartbreaking. It is the past, and the future. Any fan of Wash will likely enjoy this collection, for the past it portrays, and the future that could have been

The game does an excellent job of slotting straight into the series, though with its 10 to 12 hour length it would likely be more of a three episode arc than a standalone episode. Joss Whedon provided support for the game’s writing process and it shows, the witty dialogue from the show is present which makes it really feel like a proper part of the Buffyverse.