A Nice Visit With Old Friends

Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale hardcover
Dark Horse
Joss and Zack Whedon, writers
Chris Samnee, artist

I was a fan of "Firefly," the short-lived sci-fi series created by Joss Whedon that aired on Fox during the 2002-03 season, and the follow-up movie, "Serenity." I've also enjoyed two previous minis featuring the same characters in comic format from Dark Horse. So I was excited to learn that one of the characters from the series -- Shepherd Book, played by actor Ron Glass -- was finally going to get his back story revealed in a Dark Horse comic one-shot a few years ago.

When the book was first released in 2010, it was a hardcover. I decided to wait for the (likely cheaper) softcover and have waited patiently for three years, but one has never been solicited. Finally I found an online site, In Stock Trades, offering the hardcover at a cheaper softcover price and snatched it up.

This book was worth the wait. Coming from Joss and Zack Whedon, these characters read like the familiar friends they should be for someone who has watched and read all of their adventures. And Chris Samnee does a nice job capturing the likenesses of most of the actors who played these roles before. The art certainly isn't photo-realistic like some artists strive for, but Samnee captures the characters quite nicely in his own style.

Shepherd Book was kind of an enigma on the show. He was not one of the original crew members of the Serenity, but rather one of a handful of passengers who bought a seat on the spaceship to its next port of call. In the series, Shepherd is the title of a preacher, and that was mostly what we knew of Book's character -- he was a man of God, full of wisdom and quick to lend a listening ear for someone else's troubles. But through the course of the series, Book also proved he knew his way around a gun battle and was not to be underestimated as a hand-to-hand combatant. There was a history to the man that had very little to do with religion.

This book nicely fills in that back story, the details of which I won't reveal here. Buy the book; it's worth it.

In an interesting twist, Book's tale is revealed in reverse, like peeling away the layers of an onion. The book opens just moments before the attack that would lead to Book's death in the film "Serenity." From there, a number of jumps backward reveals the man's steps along life's path all the way back to his childhood. It is an interesting way to reveal the middle of a story when the end is already known. This is a good read and a satisfying answer to the mysteries of this character. Check it out!