Joss Whedon is all set to return to high school, and he is bringing Buffy’s old watcher Giles along.
Whedon is to co-write a new, four-issue Buffy the Vampire Season 11 spinoff titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles. He will be teaming up with Erika Alexander, Jon Lam and Dan Jackson.
The series will have Giles enrolling in an inner city public high school to investigate mysterious of disappearances the school’s teachers. This will be the return to Buffy’s roots as a show set in high school, but Giles will find the new school 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 had not follow the series past the transition from television to comics, the reason that Giles can 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.
While Giles’ mind remains as is when he died, his body became a ten-year-old self. In Season 11, he has reached his second teenage years and would not be out of place among the original Scoobies.
While Whedon continues to oversee Dark Horse Comics’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer series in “executive producer” capacity, this may be the time he writes for them after the first and second issues.
