Looking critically at comic book adaptations of franchise series requires the reader to consider the work on two basic levels. First is an obvious one: does the comic capture all the elements of the TV series or movie that made the source an audience hit in the first place? The second level is more general: is the comic effective as a piece of graphic fiction?

Often, a series may work on one level without quite hitting the second. The figures in the panels may, for instance, resemble the actors who originally assayed the series' characters, but at no point in the work do they move like convincing comic book creations. Or they may look like believable comic art approximations of the characters we know and love - but behave or speak in ways that are thoroughly discordant with our fannish understanding of ‘em.

It's a tricky balancing act, one that I started thinking about after I recently received a pack of four IDW graphic novels - and the start of a fifth - devoted to Joss Whedon's Angel. I was a devoted viewer of the Buffy spin-off when it first ran on the WB, but I hadn't caught any of its reruns once the show's fifth season ended in 2004. So I've admittedly only retained a general memory of the series' open-ended finale (Los Angeles had gone to Hell; Angel and friends were about to do battle with a big dragon). Would I be able to pick up any of the Angel GNs, I wondered, without having to back-track to some Internet-hosted series summary?

With the first four trade collections, it turns out, no such research proved necessary. All four sets are outside the original series' storyline: the big exception is the fan-pleasing current series, Angel: After the Fall, which is plotted by series mastermind Whedon to take place after the show's final season concluded. Like his current run on Dark Horse Comics' Buffy, the Vampire Slayer comic, Fall is being hyped as a follow-up "season" to the original teleseries, which ups the ante on its connection to the source considerably.

Scripter Jeff Mariotte and artist David Messina don't have that level of pressure on their first IDW Angel tale, however. A solo adventure, it sets the vampire-with-a-soul in modern Romania, where our hero is looking to find and aid the tribe of gypsies responsible for the curse that has bedeviled him ever since the early seasons of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. To accomplish this, our hero must fight a Romanian warlord named Corneliu Brasov, who loathes "the rom" and rules over them with the support of a vicious vampire army.