I’ve been on a Buffy kick lately. I finished reading the Dark Horse season eight run not too long ago, and that got me interested in picking up and reading season nine and a bunch of the other stuff that came out from Dark Horse along with that.

I’d picked up the first trade paperback of season eight way back in January 2008. I read through the first half of season eight in trade paperback form, though I’m not quite sure when. I donated those trades to a library sale or something like that back in 2015, so it was a while ago. I bought the second half of the series in digital form from Dark Horse in 2012, probably after I finished reading the trades. Then, I just never got around to reading the rest.

So, at some point last month, I was in a mood for Buffy and started reading those digital issues. The whole arc of season eight was pretty goofy, but it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I finally got around to finishing it. Then, of course, when I started looking into buying season nine, I realized that Dark Horse had lost the rights to Buffy, so none of their stuff was in print anymore. I have a little bit of season nine from an old Angel and Buffy Humble Bundle from 2016, so that gave me a starting point. But the back issues, trades, and hardcovers are all getting hard to find. I wish the current publisher, Boom!, would get this stuff back in print. I don’t know if they actually have the rights to the old stuff though. Maybe they just have the rights to print new comics. Either way, I managed to snag a full set of the Angel and Faith season nine TPBs from eBay for a reasonable price. And I managed to find all of the main Buffy season nine series, though maybe I shouldn’t mention how I got it.

So I’m reading season nine now. I’m hoping I can talk myself into stopping at the end of season nine, and maybe moving on to something else, or going back and reading some of the older stuff that was in that Humble Bundle. But I’m enjoying season nine so much that I may wind up hitting eBay again to find season ten, and maybe paying a little too much for it.

On a related subject, I started listening to the first episode of the Buffering podcast recently. It’s pretty good. I’ve been a fan of Jenny Owen Youngs for awhile, and heard about the podcast through her Twitter feed. It looks like they’re up to season five now, so I don’t think I’d really be able to catch up, but maybe I’ll listen to a few more episodes at random. Of course, that may lead to me actually wanting to re-watch Buffy, which would be even more of a time sink…