ABSTRACT
I wish to begin this afterword with a cautionary tale. In 2001, Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies launched in the wake of an overwhelming number of submissions to an edited anthology about the series, Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 1 Slayage continued as a quarterly journal until 2012, at which point it officially shifted to a semi-annual schedule—as of this writing, the journal has published 37 issues, with more than 150 peer reviewed essays. Like most successful pieces of popular culture, Slayage has spawned spinoffs, including an undergraduate scholarly journal Watcher Junior in 2005, and a biannual academic conference starting in 2004 dedicated to the study of Buffy and other works produced by series creator Joss Whedon. In 2008, the scholars who founded Slayage officially incorporated a nonprofit organization called the Whedon Studies Association, changing Slayage’s subtitle to “The Official Journal of the Whedon Studies Association” in 2010. In Slayage’s online bookstore, the WSA lists more than 40 books of “Scholarship and Criticism” about Buffy and other “Whedonverses”.
