This is hard to review for me and was a 2.5 read but I rounded up mostly because a lot of my disappointment was in the idea of the reboot itself. I've been around the comic book world for fifty years now so I know the reboots are inevitable and often I'm left cold by them. This one almost made it.

I have a hard cover 20th anniversary volume from the library which is killing me because how is it so long already? And worse I'm pretty sure I have all these in individual comics around my place but never finished them because I just wasn't sure i liked the idea behind this reboot. Angel isn't pulled out of his angst and sent on his redemption arc by Buffy in this which I'm oddly okay with. We meet him already trying to redeem himself on his own.

What I didn't care for was there seems to be no Darla and she was important obviously. This Angel in the past seems to be almost poetic and very un-Angelus like. We do get several flash backs which have nothing to do with anything in this volume. They'll probably crop up later.

This Angel has friends. He's buddies with Lilith, yes that Lilith, Adam's first wife turned monster (though in this she seems to have existed before the world). Lilith is trying to guide him to his destiny which does include Fred, Gunn and Buffy. First up is Fred, insane but the key to stopping this arc's baddie: an internet demon.

There are things they're trying to say about GenZ and the Millennials with their social media obsessions and distorted self-image. But it's far too rushed. There could have been so much more they could have done with this before Angel stops it. And he stops it way too easily because this Angel uses magic... (I always did wonder why vampires never did use it. They have all the time in the world to get good at it).

The art is decent but there is something about this that just didn't click for me (that much I remembered from my original reading as I had all the Buffyverse titles removed from my pull list far later than I should have)