Buffy the Vampire Slayer #55
Dawn and Hoopy the Bear

Timeline

This story takes place before Buffy the Vampire Slayer's First Season and after Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Movie.

The Sitch

As long as stuffed animals have been made, children have had imaginary friends. If your sister happens to have recently become the slayer, it only takes a slight mix-up and you have a tea party straight from the hellmouth. Paul Lee pulls us up to the Buffy-free tablecloth in Buffy #55 with Dawn and Hoopy the Bear.

Set days after Buffy burns down her high school gym before moving to Sunnydale, issue 55 explores the first time Buffy ran away (she does that a lot), leaving the family and especially a young Dawny to wonder where she was. With Buffy's call to be the slayer in force, evil forces begin to plot against her. In this adventure, an over-eager writer with a D'Jinn-powered stuffed bear finds the slayer's home.

With a quick bit of mistaken identity from monsters on Super Monster Fighter 3: Extreme Carnage, Dawn is the recipient of the bear. The remainder of the story centers around Dawn's child-like desires that the D'Jinn plays out through Hoopy, who becomes a giant bear wearing a red t-shirt.

Thoughts

Sometimes when I read comic books, I am all about the one-shot. A single story, much like a Haiku, means the writer has limited space (around 22 pages in this case) to get the story told. When I first read this story, I was looking for something self-contained I could read in 15 minutes. Lee delivers a great short story that's a lot of fun.

Hoopy the Bear, which incidentally looks suspiciously like another gold bear with a red shirt and similar name, is a great device to dig into what Dawn was like as a child, both for interactions with her mother and father as well as her own personal world. Lee's interpretation of Dawn was spot-on based on the Dawn we came to know in seasons 5-7. In fact, we get a great look into Dawn's elementary playground experiences.

Hoopy makes five appearances in the book, each one a great vignette into a child's imagination come to life. Read this with The Cat in the Hat or Where the Wild Things Are, and you'll have a great time. My favorite moment was Dawn's reaction to Hoopy's "procurement" of a Funky Girlz doll. The denouement was classic as well. What do you do with a giant crazed bear? The biggest trip of the whole story is when you realize none of it really happened - imaginative monks there.

Now, I have to admin that artwork is something that I am still building an appreciation of, but I know what I like, and I like Lee's artwork. He uses a style that concentrates on the essential images without adding a lot of backgrounds. This minimalist artwork matches the world that Dawn would have inhabited at this time. It's a nice companion to Buffy's epiphany with Dawn in "Grave" in which she tells her that she wants to show Dawn the world and all the wonderful things in it.

This issue features two covers, a standard cover by Lee and a photo cover with Michelle Trachtenberg holding a Hoopy. The painted cover is just beautiful, especially with Hoopy hanging over a Dawn very proudly displaying a child-drawn photo of herself and Hoopy in a graveyard with bodies scattered around. The photo cover is quite nice as well, though I go for the artwork over the photo in almost all cases.

Rating: 3.5 of 5 (the .5 comes from the cameos of Mr Gordo, whom I discovered has a frightening online following - Google it). A very good contribution to the Buffy-verse.

What's My Line?

Sugar? YES.
COMBO SLASH!!
FUNKY GIRLZ!!!

Credits

Paul Lee (all of it!)