Angel (season 1)
At the end of the third season of "Buffy", the 242-year-old, re-ensouled vampire Angel left Sunnydale to give teenage Slayer Buffy Summers the chance to live a normal life. Angel is now living in the big city of Los Angeles. With Buffy gone Angel is now completely cut off from society, every day getting closer and closer to giving in to his vampiric hunger. It's not until he befriends the half demon and fellow Irishman Doyle, who is sent visions of people in trouble by The Powers That Be, and fellow Sunnydale resident Cordelia Chase, who grounds Angel's life in the humanity around him, that he truly begins to take charge of his life and seek atonement for his past sins. He sets up his own detective agency, Angel Investigations and begins to "help the helpless".
Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
In Dark Horse's "Buffy" continuation, Angel initially appears to feature in Buffy's dream sequences (in the comic's third and twentieth issues, as well as in the "Dark Horse Presents" special "Season Eight" comic "Always Darkest"), but is later revealed to have been in the series from the beginning. He then features substantially in the remainder of the series. Angel features as the central character in IDW's "After the Fall", however, which has no crossover with the events of "Buffy". Whedon devised the storyline for "After the Fall" issues 1-17 with writer Brian Lynch, but did not write for the series himself as with "Buffy". Beginning with the eighteenth issue of the series, IDW chose to continue telling "Angel" stories in an ongoing comic book with rotating writers and artists, although these stories "did not come from Whedon himself". In the continued series without Whedon's involvement, Angel engages in episodic adventures, while the series also takes breaks to focus on other characters. Subsequent writers included Bill Willingham. When rights to "Angel" settings and characters reverted to Dark Horse, IDW promised to end their ongoing "Angel" series with its forty-fourth issue in 2011, and began negotiating with Dark Horse so that it would bridge continuity with "Season Eight" and the upcoming "Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine". Its final "Angel" story is the hardcover send-off "Angel Yearbook". During its tenure, IDW also published various miniseries depicting Angel and related characters, such as John Byrne's "Angel: Blood and Trenches" (2009), and several "Illyria" and "Spike" stories.