I'll hold out until after I've read up that far. We're in Italy now and my comics take a circuitous route to get here, so I'm not as far along as everyone else.

And I agree that the comics have really meandered. The problem is that we're so used to the show and it's pacing. I really think it would have been better if they'd done them as the graphic novels. After all, one arc is an episode. So they really should have released them as "episodes", rather than as individual scenes. A month is a pretty long commercial break.

And the fear of being Jossed is definitely something that's held me back. I came to fandom after Fool for Love and I have to say that reading Spike origin stories written before that is almost painful. Reading the comics makes me very conscious of how easy it is for your writing to become extreme AU without that necessarily being your intent. So that is really limiting and I can understand how that might be holding some other writers back as well.