I have long been a Joss Whedon fan. I own the complete DVD sets to all three of his television shows and am excited to see Firefly making it to the big screen. This month Dark Horse has released the first of a three part comic story that will bridge events from the end of that show to the beginning of its movie adaptation. Both the movie and comic are called Serenity, the name of the spacecraft on Firefly.
Firefly was a favourite among Whedon’s fan base, but never found a large enough audience to last. Only eleven of its fourteen episodes were ever aired. I understand that Whedon originally hoped that a successful film would enable him to get Firefly back on the air, but has since been so put off by the state of network television that he now hopes to make it into a film trilogy.
The premise of the show was that 500 years in the future humans would have colonized many worlds. Eventually a war would break out over the issue of government centralization, with those favouring a strong central government – the Alliance – eventually winning. Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity’s captain, was on the losing side. He has never been able to get past the war, though, so he bought a cargo ship, assembled a crew, and now travels the fringes of Alliance space looking for jobs to make ends meet and maintain his own independence. The legality of a job is never really a question, as long as it doesn’t violate Mal’s integrity.
One thing that set this show a part from other SF shows was that it referenced the 19th century instead of the 20th. It really was a cowboy show set in space. Reynolds is a Confederate veteran making his way in the Wild West. It took me a while to warm up to this, they certainly laid the Western theme on a little think at times, but the show had a real appeal to it. It wasn’t without faults. The country theme song wasn’t just bad, it was really, really bad; and don’t get me started on its use (misuse, actually) of Chinese. But all in all, it brought an interesting new voice to the genre.
This comic starts a story written by Brett Matthews, but developed by Matthews and Whedon. It does assume that the reader will be familiar with the material, but that is probably a safe enough assumption. Matthews does a good job of capturing the personalities of the characters and their relationship. The story feels like something we might have seen on the show. Conrad does a good job of capturing not only the look of the show, with its frontier-meets-the-future look, but also of making the characters look like the actors who portrayed them. It also includes an Asian character who, while probably not important in the long run, at least gets a chance to come across as a real person.
But in the end the story is just okay. It is only on the last couple of pages, literally, that it really starts moving forward. All the events prior to them are just treading water. Of course, I have only read this issue, and this may well prove to vitally important information in it, but it doesn’t read that way. Instead, the issue gives us the story of a job that would have been an interesting few pages in the context of a larger story, but aren’t enough by themselves. I gave the issue a B largely to reflect how well the comic captures the show, but as much as I wanted to sing its praises I can’t help but feel it’s a two issue story spread over three.
Yes, there is plenty of time for me to be wrong, and I’ll be happy to be wrong, but judging this issue on its own merits felt me feeling that it was mostly filler.
