Review: Serenity – Leaves On the Wind

What Firefly fans want most is not a second season that picks up ten years after the last episode. They don’t want a Serenity Two that meets up with our favorite characters a decade later. What fans want most is a second season that picks up exactly where season one left off; same characters, same ship, everybody the exact same age where we last saw them.

As this is physically impossible without time-travel, Dark Horse is attempting the next best thing: Leaves on the Wind, a brand new Firefly book that takes place less than a year after Serenity.

Based on the first issue, I’m very optimistic about the series.

Penciler Georges Jeanty, known for his work on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, seems to have hit the balance that’s so hard to achieve in comic book adaptations of movies or television.

On the one hand, some artists try to capture the actors’ likenesses too much. It ends up looking stiff and traced; more like an advertisement than a comic book.

Other artists veer to the other side, and draw depictions of the characters that, while pleasant to look at, don’t resemble the actors we’ve come to love.

Jeanty takes the middle ground. The characters are recognizable, but for the most part they’re stylized enough to look natural. Every once in a while you’ll see a little too much effort in the lines of someone’s face (Simon looks slightly odd in his first close-up) but these are the exceptions. Now that the characters’ appearances are established for the readers, I’m hoping future issues will look even more relaxed.

And just for the record: drawing real people in a comic-book environment is incredibly difficult. Every artist has a different approach, and everyone is hyper-critical of the results. Jeanty’s shown that he can capture the essence of everyone’s appearance, without trying to do a real-life portrait of everyone in every panel.

In addition to the main characters, the rest of the artwork is very impressive. The beginning of the issue is a slight homage to The Dark Knight Returns, where panelists on TV screens argue about what the Alliance may or may not have done on Miranda. It’s an efficient way of delivering exposition, and it doesn’t hurt that the pages showing TV screens in huge cities, all with a crowded, colorful, Asian atmosphere, are beautifully drawn. Laura Martin’s colors are also gorgeous, especially in the crowded city scenes.

As for the story, I can’t tell you too much about it. My preview copy came with a giant NO SPOILERS warning, so I have to be pretty vague about the plot.

Zack Whedon (yes, brother to that Whedon. And that one too. This one is known for his amazing work on Deadwood, Fringe, and, along with the other Whedons, Doctor  Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) has written a clever, interesting first “episode.” In short: the known universe is on the lookout for Malcolm Reynolds and his crew. The Alliance wants to arrest them for their part in starting a new revolution, and the new revolution wants to find them because they need a leader. And they think Mal needs to be that leader, whether he wants to or not.

Other than that, I can’t say anything. I don’t want to spoil one or two very neat developments that made me very happy.

Until the day comes when we can stuff Joss Whedon and the whole cast into a DeLorean and send them back to show the execs at FOX exactly how much money they’re passing up, this comic is what I’m putting my hopes into.

Unless someone wants to film an episode about the cast of Serenity being stuffed into a DeLorean. I’d watch that too.