Will Shetterly wrote this for Green Man Review.
If you see the Serenity comics, admire the covers. If someone gives the comics to you, put them in mylar bags and hang them on a wall, or give them to people who can’t read English and don’t plan to learn. Do not open these comics.
Yes, Joss Whedon shares the story credit. Everyone fails sometimes.
The problem isn’t that the creators did bad work. They did something worse: they did the wrong good work. The art’s pleasant. The dialogue’s competent. The story. . . . Well, to explain the awfulness of these comics, I’ll break the cardinal (though too often broken) rule of reviewing and tell you what happens:
Issue #1: A generic heist goes wrong. For 20 pages, the Serenity crew run and shoot and say things rather like the things they say on Firefly. In the last two pages, the story cuts to a distant location, and the Hands of Blue kill someone and announce that they’re looking for Malcolm Reynolds.
Issue #2: The Hands of Blue, standing over the guy they killed in the last chapter, meet Agent Dobson, the generic cop/spy from the pilot episode who Mal shot in the head and threw off the ship. Now Dobson is cybernetic and after Mal for revenge. The Hands of Blue team up with Dobson. Meanwhile, the Serenity crew get a new job: there’s treasure on a deserted space ship. On the way, Shepherd Book gets mad at Mal, punches him, and decides to leave the ship when the mission is over.
Issue #3: Mal, Jayne, and Zoe search the deserted space ship. Meanwhile, the Hands of Blue board Serenity. River is too crazy to do anything but hide. One of the Hands of Blue grabs Kaylee. She tears his shirt, revealing that the blue material covers his whole body. Then Simon hits him with some barbells, Kaylee slams a door, and Wash uses Serenity’s exhaust to vaporize the Hands of Blue in their ship. On the other ship, Dobson and his thugs get the drop on Mal’s gang, but Zoe hits one of them, and Mal, Jayne, and Zoe shoot them all. Then Inarra is dropped off on her planet, Shepherd says he’ll be leaving, and The Operative, in an unknown location, gets his assignment, capturing River, thereby connecting the comic to the movie.
So, to clarify:
The first issue is gratuitous. If you really want to read this story, skip this chapter.
The second issue is misguided. We don’t care about Dobson; he was boring and dead and no match for our heroes in the first place, and he should’ve stayed that way. Both the Hands of Blue and Preacher Book make decisions that seem out of character. If you really want to read this story, skip this chapter, too.
The third issue is confused. There’s more focus on Dobson than on the Hands of Blue. The fight with the Hands of Blue is sketchy, and what were prviously shown as the scariest antagonists in the ‘verse are easily defeated by the crew’s least experienced fighters with a technique that suggests they recently re-watched Aliens. At the end, two pages are wasted on a gratuitous appearance of the Operative. If you must read this story, read this chapter. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Sometimes writers should do the obvious thing. In this case, Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews should’ve plotted a story in which the Serenity crew work together to defeat the two Hands of Blue. If I’d been in the room, I would’ve asked for the focus to be on Shepherd Book. At the end, Book could use knowledge from his past to defeat the Hands of Blue, only to be so uncomfortable with what he’s done that he would leave the ship to seek serenity elsewhere.
That’s not the only solution, of course. We could’ve learned more about Wash, or Inarra, or any of the characters who’re slighted in the movie. What I wanted was a story that affected the characters. What I got was a story in which people either did what Firefly had already told us they would do or did things that were irrelevant to Serenity.
Some fans will file these comics between the Firefly boxed set and the Serenity DVD. This fan is filing them at Goodwill. Here’s hoping Firefly/Serenity has a long life as movies or TV, and someday Whedon returns to the Hands of Blue, and maybe to Dobson, too, and tells new stories about them. And if anyone says, “But they were killed in the comics!” the proper response is “Comics? What comics?
(Dark Horse, 2005)
Comments