Spotlight's five artists are generally up to the task of efficiently delivering the storytelling goods, though Pennington comes perilously close toward injecting his own visual personality into the proceedings. Perhaps the only minor character to not fare well in these tales is airhead vampiress Harmony, barely recognizable in her two small cameos. The most consistently expressive character renderings, to these eyes, come from Mike Norton's depiction of a tight-lipped Wesley.

The next volume in IDW's series of Angel trades, Auld Lang Syne, returns to the fuller graphic novel format and once more gives its title lead story prominence. The problem is the story - vampires Angel and Spike are visited and tormented by figures from their past - is one that we've already read in Old Friends. Why scripter Scott Tipton would choose to revisit this storyline so early in the comic series' history is a mystery. Perhaps the company already had his script on file?

We even get a replay of an Angel and Spike street fight, made mildly more interesting by shifting artists for the space of a chapter from the familiar Messina to a more calculatedly raw-lined artist named Elena Casagrande. The shift is smoothly managed, but it's the only surprising thing about this GN. If Auld Lang Syne had been published ahead of Old Friends (even the titles echo each other), things might've been different.

For most fans, I suspect, IDW's fourth graphic novel has mainly served as a mildly diverting placeholder until the Joss Whedon-engineered "sixth season" comic book mini-series commenced.