This is a comic that is purely aimed at those of us who loved Firefly and Serenity and always wanted to know what Shepherd Book’s back story was. It used to be available on Kindle, which i managed to get, but for some reason only the expensive hard back is now available.
While this comic goes through Book’s earlier life, it does so in such a way that is just totally messy and disjointed. I can’t understand how anyone could sit down and think that this was a good way to tell Book’s story. It starts at the end, where Book gets killed on Haven, and then keeps jumping back in time a few years at a time, but each jump is so harsh and disjointed it just leaves you having to go back over things several times to try and make some sense out of it.
To be fair, i would normally put a book this bad on “The Bookshelf of Infamy”, but as a total Firefly and Serenity fan looking at the only thing that tells of Shepherd Book’s past, albeit in a really badly presented way, i’m willing to spare it that utter shame and give it a hairline pass with 2 stars — but that’s an only just scraped into the bottom of 2 stars.
The annoying thing is that the Whedon’s obviously know how popular Shepherd Book was and how much everyone wanted to know more about his past. Shepherd Book fully deserved a full length novel. Even if the Whedon’s couldn’t be bothered to write it themselves, they could at least have just dumped all their notes onto a really good writer and let them have at it.
Shepherd’s back story deserved much better than this.
