Joss Whedon to Write ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Spinoff About Giles

Joss Whedon is returning to high school, and he’s bringing Buffy’s old watcher Giles with him.

Joss Whedon will co-write a new, four-issue Buffy the Vampire Season 11 spinoff miniseries titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles. He’ll be teaming with writer Erika Alexander, artist Jon Lam, and colorist Dan Jackson.

The series finds Giles enrolling in an inner city public high school in order to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances of some of the school’s teachers. This will be a return to Buffy’s roots as a show set in a high school, but Giles will find his new school quite different from Sunnydale High.

“Sunnydale was, apart from being on a hellmouth, a pretty privileged place,” Whedon told the AV Club. “Giles has never really dealt with the public school system as it exists for most kids. He’s never been to the city. Giles has always had the advantage of being a part of the system that educated him. He was taught to be a watcher in a family of watchers. His education was, in the grand British public school tradition, both expansive and parochial. In-depth views of tiny portions of the world. Of course, he walked over the awkward hormonal coals of adolescence—but now he knows more, and expects better of himself. His once-more 15-year-old body, however, is oblivious to his wisdom/cynicism/impatience.”

For Buffy fans who didn’t follow the series past its transition from television to comics, the reason that Giles is able to enroll in a high school as a student is because he was killed at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 and resurrected at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9. However, while Giles’ mind remained as it was when he died, his body became that of his ten-year-old self. Now, as of Season 11, he’s reached his second teenage years and wouldn’t be out of place among the original Scoobies.

While Whedon has continued to oversee Dark Horse Comics’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer series in an “executive producer” capacity, this will be the time he’s written for them since the first and second issues of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles #1 will go on sale February 28, 2018.