Editing Buffy Summers (section)

====Post-television "Season" continuations====

In 2007, Buffy's story continued on from season 7 when Joss Whedon revived ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' as a comic book, again published by Dark Horse. Whedon differentiated these comics from previous ''Buffy'' literature, stating "We could do something and for once we could make it canon.  We could make it officially what happened after the end of the show."<ref name=WhedonQ&A>[http://www.tvguide.com/News/buffy-vampire-slayer/061207-01 TVGuide.com Q&A with Joss Whedon about Season 8] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080823155123/http://www.tvguide.com/News/buffy-vampire-slayer/061207-01 |date=August 23, 2008 }}</ref> The continuation series emulates the structure of a television series, with five "seasons" published between 2007 and 2018 and Whedon overseeing multiple writers in the role of "executive producer".  
[[File:longwaycover01.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Buffy appears in literature such as the ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight'' comic book series and various spin-offs. Art by [[Jo Chen]].]]
In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight|Season Eight]]'' (2007–2011), it is quickly established that Buffy is not living with the Immortal in Rome as previously suggested in ''Angel''; this is simply a cover story to ensure her safety as she is now the leader of an army which recruits and trains Slayers to deal with demonic threats worldwide.  However, a mysterious group led by the masked villain Twilight believe the Slayers themselves pose a danger to mankind and the natural order.  In "[[Wolves at the Gate]]", a lonely Buffy shares a sexual encounter with a younger Slayer [[Satsu (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)|Satsu]]; the relationship ends soon after when Satsu accepts that Buffy does not return her romantic feelings.  The [[Time travel in fiction|time travel]] story "[[Time of Your Life (Buffy comic)|Time of Your Life]]" acts as a crossover with ''Buffy'' spin-off ''Fray''; Buffy is kidnapped two centuries into the future and meets her eventual successor [[Melaka Fray]] and Fray's vampire twin brother Harth.  These events have been orchestrated by a villainous future version of Willow, whom Buffy reluctantly kills to return home.  The tensions between Buffy and Twilight's respective armies eventually erupts into a full-scale war in [[Tibet]]; Twilight is unmasked as Angel being manipulated by enigmatic cosmic forces trying to destroy the universe and usher in a new dimension where Buffy and Angel will live together in paradise.  However, Buffy rejects Twilight's influence and saves her world by returning to the ruins of Sunnydale and smashing the Seed of Wonder, cutting Earth off from the source of all magic in the process.  During these events, Buffy reunites with Spike, Giles is killed by a Twilight-controlled Angel, and the Slayer army is dissolved; Buffy moves to San Francisco with her friends to grieve their losses.

In contrast to the global scale of ''Season Eight'', ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine|Season Nine]]'' (2011–2013) follows Buffy living a more grounded civilian life in San Francisco; she works in a local coffee shop and shares an apartment with roommates Anaheed and Tumble.  Buffy is now a pariah in the supernatural community due to her destruction of magic and must deal with "zompires", a feral new breed of vampires which have emerged since demons can no longer access Earth and fully possess human bodies.  After getting [[Blackout (drug-related amnesia)|blackout drunk]] at her housewarming party, Buffy has a [[Human pregnancy|pregnancy]] scare and turns to Spike for support when she decides to have an abortion; the pregnancy turns out to be a misunderstanding caused by Andrew, who switched Buffy's body with a robot as part of a misguided plan to keep her safe.  In "Guarded", Buffy explores new career opportunities by temporarily joining Kennedy's [[Security company|private security company]] Deepscan and shutting down TinCan, an interdimensional social media site run by long-term ''Angel'' villains [[List of Angel characters#Wolfram & Hart|Wolfram & Hart]]. With most of her existing relationships strained, Buffy makes new allies in [[San Francisco Police Department|SFPD]] homicide detective Dowling and teenage vampire hunter Billy, and joins a magical council alongside demons D’Hoffryn and Illyria to battle the evil Slayer Simone and magic-siphoning Severin.  When Dawn starts fading from existence due to the absence of magic, Buffy reunites with Willow and Xander in "The Core" to save her, [[Subterranean fiction|journeying deep within the Earth]] to create a new Seed of Wonder and battling Maloker, an Old One and progenitor of all vampires, in the process.  During ''Season Nine'', Buffy also makes minor appearances in the spin-off comics ''Spike: A Dark Place'', ''Willow: Wonderland'', and ''Angel & Faith''.

Having restored magic to the world, ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Ten|Season Ten]]'' (2014–2016) picks up with Buffy and her friends reluctantly responsible for creating the laws governing it; Buffy must guard the ancient [[grimoire]] ''Vampyr'' in which the new laws of magic are formalized when recorded in the book.  Some rules have already materialized without Buffy's input (zompires are extinct and vampires now possess heightened strength and shapeshifting powers) and new rules tend to have unforeseen ''[[The Monkey's Paw|Monkey's Paw]]''-style consequences.  Daunted and tempted by this new-found power, Buffy seeks the advice of D’Hoffryn and his magical council, as well as [[Lobbying|lobbyists]] from various mystical and demonic communities pursuing their own conflicting agendas. Meanwhile, Buffy and Spike's decision to pursue an official romantic relationship is complicated by the manipulations of the demon Archaeus and the subsequent assistance by Angel; in the one-shot issue "Triggers", Buffy expresses her repressed trauma over the sexual assault she experienced from soulless Spike back in the television episode "Seeing Red".  Following his resurrection in the spin-off series ''Angel & Faith'', Giles reunites with Buffy, and the paternal relationship they share is reaffirmed when Buffy's father Hank excludes her from his wedding.  D’Hoffryn eventually turns on Buffy and murders the rest of the council to seize the power of ''Vampyr'' for himself; finally accepting the responsibility she has been avoiding, Buffy outsmarts D’Hoffryn, commits to her relationship with Spike, and organizes her own council with whom to codify the laws of magic.

''Season Eleven'' (2016–17) opens in disaster when a huge [[Shenlong]] dragon attacks San Francisco, killing thousands.  In response to public outrage, the US President Malloy introduces the Supernatural Crisis Act, a set of new policies claiming to "legalize and normalise" the supernatural; this begins with a census and quickly leads to the relocation of magical individuals to the "Safe Zone", an [[Internment|internment camp]] in the [[Grand Canyon]].  Buffy rejects an opportunity to join a Slayer peacekeeping force alongside the antagonistic Jordan, and instead opts to join Willow and Spike at the Safe Zone, where she does her best to maintain peace and protect innocent or harmless inmates.  Buffy and Willow eventually agree to have their powers removed to leave the camp and further investigate the Pandora Project, a [[Conspiracy theory|government conspiracy]] to drain and abuse magical energy; they expose [[White House Press Secretary]] Joanna Wise for summoning the Shenlong in the first place to put her plans in motion.  Buffy briefly reabsorbs the power of all the Slayers in the world to battle the magic-infused Wise, but returns the power by the season's final issue, warning a repentant Jordan not to misuse it.

In 2018, it was announced that Dark Horse was losing the license to publish ''Buffy'' comics; Joss Whedon's intent for the final season was to "give the Dark Horse era some closure".<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://www.cbr.com/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-finale-joss-whedon-interview/ | title=INTERVIEW: Joss Whedon Teases Buffy's Surprising End & Dr. Horrible's Return| date=August 15, 2018}}</ref> The four-issue ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Twelve: The Reckoning]]'' (2018) picks up one year after ''Season Eleven'', with a thirty-year-old Buffy pondering her future; she is separated but on cordial terms with Spike, still working as a part-time police consultant, and a doting aunt to Dawn and Xander's baby daughter Joyce.  Tying up story elements first alluded to in 2001's ''Fray'', Buffy is warned about an apocalypse called "the Reckoning" led by time travelling vampire Harth, in which the Slayers are depowered and Buffy is banished to a hell dimension battling an army of demons.  With help from her friends, and those of Angel and Fray, Buffy proactively takes the fight to Harth in an attempt to change her fate; Illyria sacrifices herself to banish the demons in Buffy's place, altering history.  After the battle, Buffy becomes a fulltime member of the SFPD supernatural division alongside Faith, reconnects with Spike, and comforts a grieving Angel over Illyria.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Buffy, Fray returns to the 23rd century to discover her world has been [[Utopian and dystopian fiction|drastically improved]] by the continued presence of many Slayers.