You Can't Take the Sky From Me

Yesterday Dark Horse released the first Whedon-scripted Serenity comic of a three issue series. I have to say, I don't think the Firefly world translates into comics quite as well as the Buffyverse (Season 8 continues to be excellent, btw--the last issue was especially good). To some extent, there was always a cartoonish aspect of Buffy to begin with, and the comic is able to do a lot of things that would have been too expensive for the TV show. The Serenity comic doesn't really latch onto the increased freedom of the medium.

That said, it was still a fun read, and it was great to slip back into those characters and the Brown Coat dialog once again. This short series takes place sometime between when the TV series episodes left off and before the movie, so I guess one can think of it as a single TV episode. This means that Wash and Book are around, though neither character has much of a presence in this issue. The story is cool so far--ten pages in there was already a twist that I didn't see coming.

I think with a little tweaking, Serenity could turn into a great regular comic series, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Joss has explained in numerous places that as much as he likes writing comics, it's not going to get his kids through college. Yet since there's virtually no chance of Firefly hitting the small screen or big screen again (though I think a direct-to-DVD movie shouldn't be out of the question), these comics might be our last glimpse of the 'Verse.