In Buffy, The Vampire Slayer Season Nine #14 Jane Espenson and Drew Greenberg will introduce a new slayer. Billy is a new character who trains himself to fight like a slayer. As revealed in OUT Billy is openly gay.
Editor Scott Allie tells Comic Book Resources part of Billy’s introduction is tied to the wedding of Northstar in Astonishing X-Men and revelation of Alan Scott in Earth 2.
“It’s funny. When we started seeing what Marvel and DC was doing, we thought, ‘Damn. They’re racing to get these stories out one after the other, so it’ll look like we’re chasing them. But we’d had this story planned for quite a while,” Allie said. “But I think you can see this as a natural extension of stuff Joss has done all along. Getting a gay male character doesn’t seem unusual for ‘Buffy.’ And it wasn’t so much that we wanted to get a gay character out in the mainstream for whatever reason. It was more that this is a story that Jane Espenson and Drew Greenberg wanted to tell. When you read the story, you’ll see that it’s responding to things in the culture beyond just representing gay male characters. There’s a bit of a response to the whole ‘It Gets Better’ campaign in a way that’s more than subtext. For Jane and Drew in particular, with the kinds of stories they’re used to telling and what they care about, the Buffy mythos was an extremely appropriate place to empower this young guy who needed to find a way to stand up for himself.”
By Editor