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Date Posted: 12:10:28 01/18/10 Mon
Author: Masquerade
Subject: Angel: After the Fall issue #1 (with potential spoilers up to Issue #5)

As a rule, I don't do "reviews" of things, as other people's opinions of stuff often prove irrelevant to me, so why shouldn't mine prove just as irrelevant to them? So this is just my attempt to recap the first issue of this Angel Season 6 Joss-plotted comic in attempt to find out if I have the basic story right. Feel free to chime in with additions, corrections, opinions, etc, if you've got 'em.

Please note I have only read up to Issue #5 so far, so no spoilers past those issues.

If I get truly, truly insane motivated, I might edit these and post them on good ol' ATPo.

Also, thanks to Shadowkat for sending me her comic books. I feel like an actual for-real geek now, reading them.

Issue #1 begins with a short recap of how season 5 ended--Fred's death woke Angel up to the reality of his situation vis-a-vis Wolfram and Hart. He took a stand against them, and Angel, Spike, Illyria, and Gunn faced down the armies of the Senior Partners in the alley.

Two minutes into the fight, the dragon Angel was determined to kill switched sides and joined Angel, and they began to get the upper hand. Then, suddenly, the Partners plunged the entirety of the L.A. area into hell (I'm thinking the whole of L.A. county, based on what cities they still have access to).

Angel now lives in this hellish L.A., where he is still beholden to Wolfram and Hart in some way that isn't entirely clear. He has to "follow their rules," or face dire consequences even he's not entirely sure about. Nevertheless, he spends his time searching the streets of L.A. for human survivors and funneling them off to a safe area in Santa Monica. Once L.A. was sent to hell, demons of various kinds were able to enter the city. They prey on the humans in various ways. Angel feels responsible for all of them because, well, he remains our guilt-ridden Angel, and the hellish circumstances these people have found themselves in are a consequence of his own actions, even if they aren't the consequences he intended.

The L.A. area is now divided up into "fiefdoms" of sorts, with different demon lords controlling the various cities and neighborhoods. We catch up with Angel after he has a run-in with the demon lord of downtown L.A., Burge, and his demon son. The demons who control the L.A. area have been told by the Senior Partners that they can't kill Angel, which frustrates them, because of course he is always messing up their plans with the humans they prey on. Angel's home-base is the Wolfram and Hart building, again, I believe because the Senior Partners require that of him. Angel returns there after this fight and encounters a spectral Wesley. Wesley died while in the employ of Wolfram and Hart, and so is still under contract with them, much like Lilah and Holland were. Except he is much less corporeal than they were after death.

Ghost!Wesley is a bit of a mystery because he is obviously on Angel's side, wanting Angel to do good and help people, but he is also still beholden to the Senior Partners himself, and so Angel is never sure if anything Wesley says has been coerced by the Partners somehow.

Angel is told by Burge to stay inside the Wolfram and Hart building, or Burge might be tempted to kill him anyway.

The scene shifts to the humans Angel saved earlier in the issue, arriving at the "safe house" in Santa Monica. They enter and are given a brief "test" to ensure they are human, which includes a sniff-down by Nina. Apparently, in hell, the sun and the moon are both out all the time, which puts werewolves into a state where they never change into wolf-form, but have heightened wolf-senses and instincts in human form. As a result, Nina can sense their heartbeats and other indications they are human.

When I was reading this issue earlier, that is as far as I got and I bookmarked it for later. Then, yesterday, I re-read the entire issue from the beginning, and realized if I'd just turned the page...

Squee!

I would see my boy.

After the Fall Connor is rather different than my own post-NFA The Destroyer Connor. My Connor was an extrapolation of Season 5 Connor, who seemed intent on having a normal life. My goal in that fic was to help him find his inner Champion in the ordinary world, with its temptations of normalcy. So at first, I was a little skeptical of this Connor, who seems to be embracing a hero role without taking issue with it. Then I realized that if my Connor had been suddenly thrust into hell, he'd probably act much the same way as this Connor. After all, he spent the first 16-17 years of his life in hell, and his instincts are honed for it. After the Fall Connor considers the people he saves to be his "family," which is entirely in character. His heroism is centered on personal emotional connections. It was always about protecting his family (Holtz, then the Reillys, and later Angel), so inversely, if he were to save strangers and then house them, he'd start to think of them as family.

The scene switches to Angel getting a wound cured by some kind of weird bug-thing, a point that will have significance later. Angel is in a dilemma because any move he makes against the demon status quo will only create a power vacuum for potentially worse demons to step into. Angel wants to "save L.A.," but he might, in the process, only make things worse. Not only that, but anything he does might piss off the Partners and cause them to make things worse.

The scene switches to the court of the Lord of Westwood, who is entertaining himself by forcing humans to fight each other gladiator-style. He also has a telepathic fish as a pet, which I guess is a character from an earlier non-canonical Angel comic which got adopted into this comic (I think it's a very lame character, but that's me). The arena he holds court in is suddenly attacked by what turns out to be a posse lead by Gunn. "Team Gunn" slaughter the demon and his demon henchmen and steal a glowing stone from him.

Back at the ex-L.A. headquarters of Wolfram and Hart, Angel sees Burge's son out on the street, attacking some humans. He protects the humans without leaving the building, and ends up killing Burge's son. As far as Burge is concerned, this means Angel has declared war on his little fiefdom.

Back in Westwood, we see the human slaves of the dead lord of Westwood, now slaughtered as well--their throats torn open. And we see that Gunn has become a vampire.

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