The history of the ghostbreaker changed on March 10, 1997 when Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired for the first time. (The movie doesn’t count.) Whedon’s popular character Angel split from the cast for his own show on October 5, 1999 to begin his own campaign against the darkness. And ever since then, most ghostbreakers have been supernatural beings.
Now, let’s be fair. Whedon wasn’t the first. Even Blade, created by Marv Wolfman, predates Angel. But Joss made them big business. The current “paranormal romance” trend starts with Buffy. By the end of the Buffy run they had dozens of slayers, two vampires, a werewolf, an ex-demon, a lounge-lizard demon, and a witch all pursuing evil. Despite this, the best characters (in my opinion) were Xander, Giles, Fred (pre-transformation), and Wesley. The humans. And perhaps Joss Whedon would nod his head and smile. Because that’s what he planned all along. The humans act as a mirror to his super-beings, whether they are ghostbusters or traveling around in space or fighting super-beings in the Marvel Universe. This is a Whedon thing. But it opened a door to another kind of Hell Mouth – the Monster That Fights Monsters. (It reminds me of that classic Gahan Wilson cartoon where a monster is running after another monster and the human observers says: “It one god-damned thing after another!”)
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