Scott Allie on Spike and the Tweet Heard Round the World

Willow, tired and weary after too much Buffy S.8 speculation and Twitter frustration

As most of you already know, Scott Allie tweeted a picture the other night that had a really intriguing image pertaining to future issues of Buffy Season 8, but as quickly as the picture went up, it came down. We're not going to re-post it here, but being the internet and all, that didn't stop the image from making its way around the block a few times. Mostly, people have been speculating on the appearance of Spike in an upcoming issue. I caught up with Scott recently and he addressed the elusive tweet by saying:

"I saw a Tweet about it being the thirteenth anniversary of the Buffy TV show, and I was delirious from too many hours at work. I had all this Buffy and Serenity stuff—in addition to Hellboy—spread out on my desk, the same desk I've been at since 1997. And it just blew my mind that that show started so long ago, on a night when I may well have been sitting at the very same desk, too late at night. And now all these years later, the desk is covered with pages we never could have imagined back then, not to mention that cover for Serenity, another show that would come and go in those years. Did you listen to Patton's new record? It's the funniest thing in the world, man, amazing. I listened to it over and over driving down the coast on that Exurbia book tour when I saw you in LA. Pat does this thing about going back in time to talk to the 1999 Patton, and telling him about the future, blowing his mind that among other things there's a black president. Seriously imagine going back ten years and telling young Michelle that she'd be voting for a black guy, who'd actually win. Anyway, I've often had thoughts like that, about going back to high school and blowing my teenage mind with talk about working with Frank Miller and John Severin and having frequent conversations with Alan Moore. So that was the sort of thoughts going through my mind, thinking about being a young editor doing a licensed comic, back when no one respected licensed comics, before anyone was working with the creators of the original properties. That's what I was thinking, looking at that Serenity cover with Patton and Joss's names right on it. So I carefully moved things around, to cover just a couple little spoilery things—worse than that Spike cameo, which fans have correctly ID'ed as a kind of flashback—and snapped the picture and tweeted it. A little while later I hopped in the car and drove home, and on the way I got a text from my PR department, freaking out, saying it spoiled some exclusive preview stuff they were setting up. So I pulled it down, but you can't unring a bell, especially on the interwebs."

And there you have it!