Welcome to Buffyness and Nightlurkers Presents: Angel: After the Fall, Issue #3 – “After the Fall (Part 3)”! In the previous installment, things are slowly starting to come together. A lord is dead at Angel’s hands and now other lords are popping up everywhere. The Eye of Ramras gives the holder more power, and therefore more opportunities to lord it up. Gunn, now a vampire, holds the Eye of Ramras, but Angel thinks Spike has it. After showing up to confront Spike and try to rope him into his bullshit all over again, Blue Fred sneaks up behind Angel and threatens death upon him!

Did I get all that right? I hope to make sense of all this by the end of the storyline or else I’m going to be in deep shit trying to get through all this! It might not even be worth it! Ha!

Angel: After the Fall, Issue #3 [January, 2008]
Written by: Bryan Lynch / Joss Whedon
“After the Fall (Part 3)”

See, I could’ve just pointed to the cover art and been like “there’s your recap”.

“The thing about Hell. It’s kinda what you’d expect. Yes, it’s hot. More humid than hot, really…” Angel is schooling us on the ins and outs of Hell, because he’s been there and it was a real trip, man. The sun and the moon are out at the same time, which means the werewolves are stuck halfway and the vampires always feel on the cusp of bursting into flames.

Demons don’t seem to be affected. They’re the lucky ones.

Blue Fred is really kicking Angel’s ass. Just walloping him to kingdom come. It’s probably because she was in Hell for a bit and she didn’t like it, but Angel thinks it’s unlikely. Primordial demons aren’t affected by Hell! There must be something else to it, like she left her glasses down there or something.

Spike reassures his harem that everything is cool, just a demon fighting a vampire. As they do. Relax.

“We need to talk,” says Angel.

“If I separate your pieces and hurl them in different directions, you will not return,” responds Blue Fred.

“Granted–” Angel concedes. He tries stabbing her in the side with a big ol’ knife, right through the armor. Ron Popeil was right about the sharpness of his knives!

“Annoying!” Blue Fred pulls the knife out of her and prepares to pull out half a dozen of her own knives! There’s a security guard writhing on the floor, so Angel steals his gun and aims it at Blue Fred. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what you know about Westwood.”

Uh, yeah buddy, we all already knew that about Westwood.

More fighting. Angel wants answers and Blue Fred doesn’t want to give them up. She throws a few knives and pins him to the wall through his hands, lookin’ like Jesus. “I want you away,” she says plainly, readying a final knife.

“Is there a piece of Fred left?” Angel thinks to himself as Fred whines about Angel always being in the way.

Spike comes in the room now, finely robed as usual! He tells her to knock it out, shit’s getting old. Let him go. “If he’s gone,” she says, “we move forward.” Hard to argue with that logic! Moving forward is always a good thing. Time is an arrow after all.

Suddenly, an “AWUP AWUP” noise fills the air. Then a CRASH! Then a HONK HONK AWOOOGAH BEEP BEEP MOO! Angel’s dinosaur dragon whatever has smashed itself through the wall right near the three of them. Angel continues struggling to free himself from the wall while Blue Fred intends to take the giant beast out with her knife. “Don’t, lady.” Spike barely tries to stop her. “You’re in no condition.”

Doesn’t work. She’s all in on this one.

YOU WANNA HIT ME? GO ON. HIT ME. HIT ME. DO IT, FUCKER.

The dragon blasts her point-blank with a mouthful of intense fire and heat. She looks marginally inconvenienced. She hoists her smoldering ass up from the floor and stares the dragon dead in the eyes. “More.”

Uh huh. So while they’re going at it, Spike helps Angel off the wall and carries him back outside. “Who else knows we’re here?” Spike demands of him. Obviously, since Angel was able to find them it may become common knowledge in about, oh… *checks watch* seventeen nanoseconds.

“WHO ELSE KNOWS WE’RE HERE?” Spike repeats. The dragon keeps blowing holes into the house.

“Right about now, I’d say anyone in a twenty-block radius who happens to be looking up.”

Cute.

The dragon has picked up Blue Fred with its tongue and prepares to swallow that shit. She looks terrified as the dragon snaps its jaws down around her. Spike is slightly despondent. Angel really fucked everything up for him after all. Always fucking everything up. Go back to Humid Hell where you belong, you nutsack.

The dragon spits Blue Fred back out and she slams through Spike’s decorative fountain of blood, which makes him even more despondent, if you can believe it. Get your dragon and leave immediately, Angel. This comic is clearly a bottle episode and we’re just spinning all our wheels here. Every wheel we’ve got.

Don’t interrupt our flirting, babe.

Angel has had enough. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what you know about–”

“You don’t get it,” interrupts Spike. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”

He doesn’t know what he’s doing? You don’t know what you’re doing! NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING! Least of all me. Why am I doing this?

Angel points out that Blue Fred is acting strange, like she has emotions and shit. Connor steps into the scene, claiming that Spike and Blue Fred (“Illyria”, by the way) have nothing to do with anything. Spike’s a good guy now, remember? He’s got a soul [EDITOR’S NOTE: confirm this via Wikipedia or something before posting this and also don’t forget to edit this out of the post and also you owe me fifty bucks and a handjob] and he’s not afraid to use it!

Angel is quite confused. Spike’s on Connor’s side? On our side? Who what where why when? “If you had told me you were going to see Spike, I would have told you,” Connor claims, but he’s full of shit. “Spike goes on rounds. Half the people staying with me are sent from him.” He’s been saving so many people lately that Connor is starting to run out of room, so a lot of them are staying with Spike until Connor gets a bigger place. Only the sexy ones, of course!

OK, fine, whatever. Angel will see his ass out of here. He’s taking Blue Fred with him. “Do you need a ride?” he asks Connor, but Connor drove here. The dragon came on its own.

To recap, Angel killed the son of a lord and Spike is a cool guy now. Angel is like “buh” but it sounds like he’ll be able to wrap his head around it soon enough. Good lad. “At least Spike isn’t killing people. So much easier if Spike was killing people.”

Spike’s just placing his erect genitalia into refugees like a Good Boy.

Back in L.A. where Wes is haunting the Hyperion hotel. He thumbs through a shelf of books, settling on one with a big pentagram on the spine. Or, perhaps, a Star of David! Boning up on Jewish history, are we? Angel returns from whence he came and decides not to tell Wes that Fred wasn’t there to stigmata his hands like a shish kebab. Wes would just get sad and stuff.

“Somebody wanted me there, somebody wants me to play his or her or its game.” Angel removes a rather unwieldy two-handed sword from the wall.

“So what should we do now?” Wes asks.

“Change the game.”

I propose a game of Yahtzee, but I’m guessing Angel wasn’t being literal.

Elsewhere, a gathering of the lords has commenced! The Lord of Compton! The Lord of Century City! The Lord of Los Angeles (Burge!) The Lords of Four Other Cities, Too! Just a diverse group of lovely demons.

Burge whines about his dead son at Angel’s hands, but Angel is why the lords are all here being lords (I guess) and stop whining. Burge says NO! And he wants to kill Angel quite brutally, please. He proposes a game of Yahtzee.

“Wolfram & Hart warned you not to,” says the Lord of Weho, with respect to the brutal killing idea.

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT WOLFRAM & HART! I WANT ANGEL!”

Angel shows up to the room. “’Kay. Let’s go, then.”

He’s here to strike a deal with the Lordy Lords. Here it is: he’s going to take down Burge and become the NEW Lord of Los Angeles? How about them apples?

You can’t spell “slaughter” without “laughter”!

Burge shakes in his boots a little bit and decides to appoint a champion to fight in his stead. His best man for control of Los Angeles. Yes yes. Then it is settled! Except, you know, Angel wants to fight all the Lords right now. Yes yes. Then it is double-settled.

“One vamp in charge of the whole she-bang,” muses the Lord of Santa Monica.

“It doesn’t matter,” claims Burge, the Lord of His Own B-Hole. “All of our champions against Angel by his lonesome? It will be a slaughter!”

Wes in concerned. Burge makes a salient point here. Angel is like “uhhhhh we’ll think of something at the last minute ok don’t worry.”

Angel gets two days while the Lords gather their best men as champions. Which means, in comic terms, two issues. Two issues before Angel has to fight a group of mofos for Lordliness.

“Another thing about Hell. Doesn’t alter a vampire’s healing faculties, so a vamp can still mend quickly.”

Angel hobbles and grabs his side, wincing.

“Which, of course, would mean so much more if I were still a vampire.”

Final Thoughts

I almost wrote “vampire” as “campfire”, so at least this post wasn’t a terrible loss!

The rest of the storyline has been planned out, as you can see. Catch you on the flippity flop, dudemeisters.