MY THOUGHTS: Time for PR

This is the cover for the Retreat arc (issue 26-30 of Season 8). Hard to see who's who, but my guess is Giles, Oz, Kennedy, Buffy, Satsu, Faith and Xander. And Twilight turning away in the background(pissed off at what Buffy's about to do?)

Buffy has her hands up, and she's walking forward, like she's surrendering. Or maybe showing that she's no threat?

I've thought since issue 21, when Harmony outed vampires to the public, that Buffy needs to do some damage control before people start grabbing pitchforks and torches. We don't want people grabbing any girl who might or might not be a slayer and burn them on stakes, witch-hunting style(which reminds me of a story from the Tales of the slayers, where a slayer gets burned by the people she just saved).

I'm not saying everyone believes that vampires exist because some blonde bimbo says so on TV, fangs or no fangs(people might just think that's a special effect). But the Tales of the vampires one shot that was released this year and a few other lines from Season 8 implies that enough people believe that vampires exist and that slayers are bad, which means that Buffy needs to get her story out there.

Tell them about The Council(not too much, then people might get scared of their power to manipulate society, like they showed they could do in Checkpoint, where they threatened to deport Giles) and how they've been killing vampires for centuries, saving people, and tell them to go check corpses in the morgues.

Does anyone bodies have weird neck-wounds? Any police reports about stranger crazy people trying to bite people who walk home late at night?

Some PR from Buffy's side would be good. Of course, the public is unpredictable. Maybe they like Harmony too much. Maybe the WW2 is still too fresh in people's memories, and people are afraid to judge vampires just because they're different, so they're willing to sympathize with these "poor misunderstood creatures" and dislike this "racist" organization that's out for dust.

EDIT- Better version of the cover